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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.

In Spoons, In Knives

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.

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.