Blog

Hello you! 
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.

Trials of the Twin Seas Late Pledges

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.

a|state Coins Arrive

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:

Upcoming titles

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/

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. 

About The Silver Road

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).

The Silver Road Important Game Facts

• 24 pages long (plus cover)
• 21cm x 21cm full colour book (portable, loveable)
• Rules-lite, minimalist story telling game (if you like rules this might not be for you)
• Setting agnostic (bring your own)
• Written by Jon Hodgson
• Art by Mike Franchina
• Layout by Paul Bourne
• Releasing May 24 to preorder with free PDF