BEOWULF. a|state. Maskwitches. Cold City:Hot War. FiveEvil
It’s Friday and that means it is time to dive into BEOWULF: Age of Heroes again. We’ve done the Portent and set the Inspiration Pool at the same time (as you generate the Portent, each step puts a token that the Monster, the Followers, or the Hero can use during the game). We’ve loaded the ship up with supplies and hired a Crew (these are different from Followers, more on that in a minute). We are ready for the Whale Road!
It’s Friday and time for a new BEOWULF blog. This time it’s all about adventure… not the adventure (that’s in the future) but a chapter where we set out the themes and process of making an adventure for the Age of Heroes.
We know that lots of folks enjoy running our adventures and strive to provide you with a variety of memorable adventures that can be enjoyed again and again. But we also know that the very best guide to what your Player would enjoy is you. So we wanted to make sure that we gave you the tools to make your own BEOWULF adventures.
Continue reading “Adventure Time”In packing the stock for UK Games Expo, I was reminded of something.
One of our very first games was Forest Dragon Bang & Twang. When played with the Riff Coins this is a really portable game. You hold a small hand of cards, there’s a draw deck and a discard pile, and action is all occurring around three coins. You can play it in a very limited space.
The game box itself slips into a pocket and the riff coins happily slide into the box.
It wasn’t designed specifically to be portable – it just is.
The Silver Road, our minimalist sorry-telling rpg and our newest release, is similarly portable. You need the eight inch square booklet while you learn the minimalist rules, and a six-sided dice. Having a dice for each player is ideal, but that’s no hardship. Your character fits easily on an index card or till receipt.
Like Bang and Twang, The Silver Road wasn’t specifically designed to be portable, but it really is. Clearly small games are something we like making!
If you happen to be in Birmingham at the beginning of June you can catch us at UK Games Expo. We’d love to see you, so swing by the booth for a chat!
You can now order the 24 page, full colour, softcover print book and get the PDF free, or just grab the pdf at DrivethruRPG.
We’ll also have some limited stock at UK Games Expo at the beginning of June.
The Silver Road is an experimental, minimalist story-telling game for 3 to 5 players. This is version 1.
The Silver Road is a minimalist story telling game. It’s setting-free, allowing you to bring your own, and is light enough to be incredibly versatile. The game was created under heavy influence of 1970s children’s books like Susan Cooper and Alan Garner, but it can happily work for any setting.
The Silver Road is an experimental game that thrives on player participation, group story telling, and creative narration to create stories together.
As a minimalist game there’s no tracking of numerical resources, and the rules are stripped down to the bare minimum of procedures.
The game uses one six-sided dice per player, and your character fits on an index card.
As written, The Silver Road is played with a GM but recent games without a GM work well with the right group.
The Silver Road was written by Jon Hodgson (Writer on The One Ring 1e, Adventures in Middle-earth, BEOWULF Age of Heroes and the Terminator RPG) and illustrated by Mike Franchina (illustrator for Magic the Gathering and Blizzard)
Grab your copy here or here at DrivethruRPG.
The Silver Road is an experimental, minimalist story telling rpg we’re releasing tomorrow, the 24th of May, in both PDF and print. Its a 24-page, full-colour booklet with amazing art by Mike Franchina.
Jon Hodgson: If you’re a games designer (and who isn’t these days?) you’ll know it can be both complicated and interesting to sift through your influences and inspirations.
When I think about where The Silver Road came from, there are a few intriguingly awkward things to talk about in the mix. It’s probably not politic to talk about negatives. But let’s do it.
There are things I see in games which I personally don’t enjoy or think are “not good”, but which have a use in inspiring me to create something different. And I don’t like a mechanic or process I call “advanced coin flips”.
“Advanced coin flips” are where a mechanic adds lots of work to create a very limited result. We’ve all seen it – complicated dice mechanics where maybe you’re throwing a ton of dice which you then have to sort through, and ¾ of them don’t mean anything. For me, sorting through a bunch of dice isn’t all that much fun. I have to do a lot of work to get a result.
Likewise, rolling two dice and subtracting one from another – which manages to remove the intuitive and fun qualities of dice rolls, (“yay a six! Go again!”) and severely limits the outcomes, despite it being a lot of work for players.
Now sometimes, he says hedging his bets, this kind of mechanic is fun – when placed in the right context, and of course different people like different things. When we design somethign we have to make harder decisions than perhaps we would when just enjoying a game.
Most often, my thinking is that if you’re better off flipping coins for what amounts to a fifty fifty result? Then flip coins. Flipping multiple coins could make the basis for a really good game. (Ahem)
This kind of thinking was a big part of what inspired the experimental game that is The Silver Road, and all this stuff was floating around my brain while The Silver Road coalesced.
I was looking to remove as much “procedure” as possible, and explore how that changed the focus of play. I should qualify that with the idea that this was a starting point – it wasn’t rigorously adhered to once that ball got rolling. I was more keen to just see where that ball went once it was in motion.
The Silver Road, somewhat precociously and provocatively, does away with the very common, traditional RPG idea of rolling dice when your character is middling at something, and the likely outcome is somewhere broadly around 50/50. (Or 60/40 – I’m talking in very broad terms here)
This is pretty much accepted through most trad games as the meat of most die rolls, and to some degree the meat of “what you spend your time doing”. By comparison, The Silver Road is a mechanical vegan. (That’s a ridiculous sentence but sometimes arising thoughts can’t be denied)
Rather than focus on characters being middling in their abilities, and what happens being determined by die rolls around that middle ground, the Silver Road takes a different, more story-inspired approach. We’re not looking to somehow simulate “real life”. We’re looking to facilitate and inspire the kinds of things we see in stories.
In The Silver Road, your character is either good at things – meaning you will succeed, with a slim possibility of enduring some consequence, – or you’re bad at things, which means you have a very low chance of success and a high chance of consequences occurring.
A protagonist is at worst very likely to attempt something, struggle briefly, and then succeed.
It’s quite a shift of outlook and expectation, and we’ve found it to be a really interesting space to explore if you’re into this kind of thing. It is self consciously different and experimental.
In Silver Road, the content that the mechanics and procedures provide doesn’t come from undertaking a closely-matched probability test, aimed to tell you if your character can do a thing or not.
You’ll know ahead of time with some certainty that your character can do the thing. (With a little glimmer of risk that they can’t do the thing on this turn, but they will succeed on their next turn). Or perhaps that they almost certainly can’t do the thing. (With a similarly rare likelihood that they might fluke it).
The fun comes from describing how they do the thing, and how your fellow players interact, since there’s a high chance they will get an opportunity to add to your narration with a “but…”. (That’s a story for another blog).
It’s Friday and we are starting a new BEOWULF blog today. We will talk about the design, structure and production of the core game, supplements, adventures, etc. and we will even drop some hints about products under development. Today, we’ll tackle feats.
Continue reading “Behind BEOWULF”You can grab a bunch of cool BEOWULF merchandise at Redbubble. We sporadically add new designs, so keep checking back. The various designs are available of a ton of different items, including large desk mats, art prints, drinking bottles, T shirts and loads more!
We’re off to the first big event we’ve attended since before the pandemic! UK Games expo is on in Birmingham from Friday 3rd of June until Sunday the 5th.
We’ll be there with a stand in the trade hall.
We’re in Hall 1, stand 228. That’s on the left hand side of the hall as you come in.
We’re bringing a curated selection of our favourite things. Here’s the planned list of what you’ll be able to grab at the booth.
Here’s a list of what WON’T be there:
a|state Second Edition: it’s not printed yet. The PDF is out now, and printing begins this week! Pre-orders are open now.
Trials of the Twin Seas: it’s not printed yet. The PDF is almost done though!
Map tiles. We’re due a reprint of several sets with only one or two copies in stock, Bringing along a less than complete range seems like a lot of weight to bring. You can get them on our web store.
Battle mats. They’re 36” square and once you’re dealing with more than a couple they weigh a ton. We’ll happily send you one through the post though!
BEOWULF inspiration mats. We’re down to just a couple left. We might bring those along in Jon’s suitcase but they won’t be “in stock” as such. We’re printing a new one for the Twin Seas campaign.
Posters: These are too tricky to transport and display well, and much easier for you to mail order than carry around Expo!
Jon will be be at the booth all weekend, with various helpers popping by too. We’d love to see you for a chat after such a long time away from shows, so please do swing by and tell us all about your adventures!
At Handiwork Games we all talk about games all the time. One strand of that chat for the longest time has been about indie, minimalist story games: the things we like, the things we don’t. The Three Coins for a|state grew out of that very conversation.
And suddenly out of that same chat the potential for an entire new game appeared.
(This is Jon writing by the way) While we waited for the Twin seas Kickstarter funds to arrive I had a bit of spare time, and so I started writing and testing.
The Silver Road is the result.
When playing The Silver Road, you and some friends can get together and tell stories.
This is an unashamedly minimalist story telling game. It has a simple core mechanic that is applied any time there’s uncertainty about what happens next.
For the most part in this game you’ll succeed in whatever you narrate your character is doing.
Even where you don’t succeed, if your character is good at doing the thing you’re attempting, you’ll succeed on your next turn.
The obstacles which you face in the game will have a chance to provide a consequence for your characters, which add to the story, and then they’re overcome, and the story moves on.
For a long time I’ve mentioned in passing that I tend to run games in a very loose way, and I thought it was about time I made that into something other than a slightly awkward confession. I like running a loose game where everyone throws in their contribution on what happens, and where we don’t get hung up too much on the finer points of system stuff.
And don’t get me wrong – get this – I can like several things at once. I do also enjoy it when we play crunchier games “properly”. I certainly don’t object to tracking arrows, and facing challenges based on the specifics of what my character owns and precisely how good they are at skills.
I also have a special place in my heart for very light games that rely much more on improvised creativity. And that’s The Silver Road.
I also wanted, as is our eternal mission, to make a beautiful thing.
The game is illustrated by Mike Franchina, an old friend and incredible artist. Each page has a unique illustration.
For this game Mike has made use of Midjourney, an AI art creation tool. It (in the hands of Mike) is brilliant at creating the kind of startlingly weird and evocative imagery you’ll find in The Silver Road.
We’ll release The Silver Road in PDF (and pre-order with free PDF) next week. We’re hoping to have some advance print copies of The Silver Road at UK Games Expo.
You can now pre-order a|state second edition, and get the PDF free!
The PDF is also available now via DrivethruRPG!
Also released today is The Three Coins in pre-order with free PDF, and in standalone PDF!
Step inside a baroque urban nightmare, the world of a|state.
In The City you’ll fight off threats to your canalside home, trying to make this grim and haunted place safer and better, somehow.
a|state brings a new, hopeful approach to the much-loved Forged in the Dark ruleset. Your ability to Care counts as much as your ability to Fight.
Create Troublemakers such as the deft and deadly Ghostfighter, the caring and curious Lostfinder, the persuasive and passionate Activist, and the striking and stealthy Sneakthief. If they can trust each other they might have a chance.
Defend your corner from selfish authorities, angry gangs and heartless industries, and deal with the spiralling consequences of your own actions as you struggle for a better tomorrow.
Bringing the wine-dark visual vibes of Dark City and The City of Lost Children, a|state delivers Dickensian anti-Thatcher sparks and knives sci fi.
Here’s a glimpse of some of what you’ll find in a|state second edition, in chapter order:
This is the story of how you fight back.
Written by Malcolm Craig, Morgan Davie, and Gregor Hutton with Tanya Floaker, Brian Nisbet, Gareth Ryder Hanrahan and KC Shi.
Illustrated by Paul Bourne, Jon Hodgson and Scott Purdy.
