BEOWULF. a|state. Maskwitches. Cold City:Hot War. FiveEvil
The next chapter in BEOWULF: Age of Heroes is all about treasure. We divide treasure into non-magical and magical and encourage the Gamemaster to present non-magical treasure items in a variety of forms. Very little treasure is found in piles of easily divided coins.
Today, we’re discussing the time between adventures for BEOWULF: Age of Heroes. While it can be exciting to rush from one Monster to the next, having downtime can help break up adventures and give a better sense of pacing to your Player. It also gives them time for the Hero to think about and work on long-term goals.
In Spoons, In Knives is about to enter layout. After that we’ll be supporting The Silver Road with Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland, a semi-psychedelic imaginary Ice Age setting, placing your stories in Forgotten Doggerland – the land that lies drowned beneath the North Sea.
At the end of the last ice age, what we now call Doggerland was subject to an unimaginably vast tidal wave, and was lost forever. We know precious little about this place, and as such it makes a marvellous place to set weird tales of the now-forgotten witches.
Written by Jon Hodgson, this setting book will be again illustrated with the Midjourney AI. We have created hundreds of weird art pieces, and this supplement will double as an art book for the setting.
In The Silver Road each character has two things they’re good at and two things they are bad at. In Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland, these take the form of the masks the witches wear, and amulets they carry. Witches are able to trade and change their masks, making their characters’ identities extremely fluid.
There are several suggested modes of play offered, but the main one is that the players take the role of witches who respond to the problems of the hunter gatherer communities of Forgotten Doggerland. Problems which frequently manifest into strange and horrific creatures which much be defeated in ritualised magical warfare.
In addition to the imagined Ice Age setting, Maskwitches also presents a 1970s setting in the vein of the novels of Susan Cooper and Alan Garner to overlay the core setting, with Ice Age events taking place in flashback, and significant objects and entities connected across the ages.
Maskwitches will be presented in the same 21cm square format as The Silver Road, but is anticipated to be a considerably longer, and perfect bound softcover. We are currently looking at a limited edition of hardcover books. Anticipated release is August 2022.
Lead a kingdom to victory and prosperity in this major rules expansion for BEOWULF: Age of Heroes!
The Silver Road is our experimental, minimalist storytelling game. We’re delighted with the response to this book, and we have a slate of settings to share with you.
The first two releases are: In Knives, In Spoons – a 1930s heavy industrial setting inspired by the likes of Peaky Blinders, and Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland – a surreal and psychedelic take on a lost ice age land and the people who live there.
The foundries never stop pounding out knives to send all around the world. The finest tables are dressed with shining silverware from the dirtiest town on god’s good earth. The shipyards grow great hulks from iron skeletons like whales rotting backwards in an endless cacophony of rivets.
Great burning spark-breathed canyons of fire drawing our wire for the colonies and steel plates for the ships and needles for record players. Day after day spent in pouring and brazing and casting and smelting.
But at night the streets are alive with jazz music and young people fighting and dancing. Knives and heels flick in the moonlight. Lipstick and blood.
There are paydays and so there are bookies. There is duty owing on whisky and tobacco and cocaine and so there is smuggling. Betting on horses and dogs and cocks. Betting on which cockroach will climb the wall and which young man can batter the other the hardest.
The steam hammers and greed and lust and rage go round and round up and down without end.
In Spoons, In Knives takes us to an imagined 1930s, and the heart of Britain’s industrial centres – be they Birmingham, Sheffield, or Glasgow.
The Silver Road creates settings and stories through play, and everyone around the table has the power to shape the reality within the story. And so setting sourcebooks like In Spoons, In Knives present a grab bag of useful and inspiring setting “stuff”. We’ve organised these entries into groups of 6, so that any section can be used with dice rolls to randomly add detail and flavour to your story.
You’ll find ideas for characters, stories, details from within the turbulent world of 1930s industrial Britain. Will you play as a group of musicians, poets, orphans, foundry workers, nurses or a mix of unexpected companions thrown together by circumstance?
In Spoons, In Knives also contains an optional new “rule” (“rule” is a strange word for such a minimal game – “suggested procedure?”) for foreshadowing the next scene with the results of your dice rolls in the current scene. This allows the GM to do even less work during the game, and shares the organisational creative burden even wider.
This being a release for The Silver Road, this isn’t a dry history source book. All our Silver Road settings contain an element of surrealism, led by the curious artwork which we make with the Midjourney AI. Expect a feast of weird and wonderful imagery – the book will be the same 21cm square format as The Silver Road, and they will sit together beautifully on your shelf.
We anticipate In Spoons, In Knives in July 2022.
The Silver Road is an experimental, minimalist story-telling game for 3 to 5 players. This is version 1.
Hello you!Â
We’ve been fantastically busy getting a|state and The Trials of the Twin Seas through the print process. That’s all done and the presses are rolling. Which means we now have some time to catch you up on what’s coming up next at Handiwork Games. We sent this news out via our newsletter on Friday – if you missed that you also missed a web store discount voucher, so be sure to sign up here.
Late pledges for The Trials of the Twin Seas will open in July, and the PDF will launch soon too. Backers have the PDF already.
Trials of the Twin Seas is a collection of adventures for one GM and one Player in the epic early-medieval setting of BEOWULF Age of Heroes.
We shot some video of the a|state coins and compass arriving. Check it out:
and the next episode of the a|state podcast is coming soon:
We’re working on some amazing new titles for you.
First of all is a big one:
KING BEOWULF. In this high level supplement by Jacob Rodgers your Hero will be ruling whole kingdoms and controlling entire warbands as they face the challenges of the treasure-seat. This new hardcover will feature all the clever rules design and beautiful artwork you’ve come to expect from Handiwork Games!
We’re deep in the development process on this title, and will have plenty more info as we progress toward release. Check out the cover by Jon Hodgson:
In Spoons, In Knives. The first setting supplement for The Silver Road,
In Spoons, In Knives transports us to the 1930s, and the industrial heartland of the United Kingdom.
Filled with inspiration for 1930s gangland stories, struggles for community survival, or surreal supernatural stories against a backdrop of heavy industry and rising global tensions.
Featuring more mind-being and creepy Midjourney artwork, and the same 21cm (8 inches) square format, In Spoons will sit handsomely next to The Silver Road rulebook.
Beyond that we’re currently working on The Maskwitches of Doggerland, another setting for The Silver Road – this time a psychedelic take on the lost ice-age territory of Doggerland, which now lies under the North Sea.
This one is quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before, and we can’t wait to tell you more about it.
Right now we’re laying out Digital Pack Nine for BEOWULF Age of Heroes, which will be released soon.
We’ll be looking at these titles in more detail this week on our social media, so be sure to give us a follow:
Twitter: @gameshandiwork
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/handiworkgames
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/handiworkgames/
The adventure is over! The Monster is defeated, the people and the local ruler are grateful and there is much excitement. This is the next section of the BEOWULF rules, covering rest and rewards.
We have reached the final component of an adventure, the Monster. In BEOWULF: Age of Heroes, the capital-m Monster is special and has a fundamental part to play in the story of the adventure. It is likely that when the Monster is first met that it is undefeatable, the Hero can only do minimal damage to it.
It is now time to explore in BEOWULF: Age of Heroes!
Exploration can mean many things. In most adventures it means wandering into the wilderness, looking for signs of the Monster and trying to learn more about it. But it could also mean talking to the people of a settlement or perhaps just in a meadhall in order to discover more information. For some adventures it means meeting with ‘monsters’ or at least non-human intelligences.
If you recall from last week, we had just completed a voyage to reach the location of the adventure. This contained from one to three challenges, each requiring some sort of roll and providing a positive or negative consequence.
Now we have reached ‘Meadhall and Mystery’ – the Hero arrives and usually makes contact with the local leader(s) and may find a welcome place to stay in the meadhall. It is often here that they first find out substantive news of the Monster. (They have likely heard rumours before but now they might receive clarity now that they are talking to those directly affected.)
