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The Adventure Overview series takes a look at the various adventures we’ve released for BEOWULF: Age of Heroes. We don’t spoil the adventure but we do tell you a little bit about the adventure setup and its themes.

Far to the north there is a settlement named Orkness on the firth of land known as the Spearhead that has long been plagued by the Stoor Worm, an immense sea serpent. Desperate to break the cycle of tragedy for her people, one of the folk seek out the Hero, hoping to destroy the Stoor Worm.

Written by Elaine Lithgow, and with art from Jon Hodgson, Paul Bourne and Scott Purdy, Seven Stones provides a wealth of NPCs to meet, locations to explore and adversaries to battle. At 33 pages long, illustrated in full colour, it comes with VTT battle maps and tokens so that if you can’t play in person, you can play on the virtual tabletop of choice.

With an open-ended finale, it really is up to the player to solve the mystery of what is going on at the Spearhead and determine how best to resolve it.

Buy it here!

We are selling a limited edition of 50 of signed prints in aid of the Ukrainian people.

All proceeds will be donated to the  Help Ukraine Emergency Appeal organised by The Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain (AUGB). We feel that organisation is well placed to directly support Ukrainians in danger.

The print is A4 in size to facilitate easy shipping. It is printed on 200gsm Matt laminated stock and signed by the artist.

The image features heroes from BEOWULF Age of Heroes, and the text “To those who battle monsters”, which appears as the dedication from the BEOWULF core rulebook.

We are expecting the prints to arrive 2nd March, and will dispatch them as soon as we get them.

We have ordered and paid for the prints, and will pay any taxes on the purchase ourselves, so that 100% of your purchase will go to the charity.

“Battle Monsters” Print in Aid of Ukraine

An A4 print sold in aid of the Help Ukraine Emergency Appeal.

£10.00 Original price was: £10.00.£0.00Current price is: £0.00.

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The Adventure Overview series takes a look at the various adventures we’ve released for BEOWULF: Age of Heroes. We don’t spoil the adventure but we do tell you a little bit about the adventure setup and its themes.

The Witches and the Wyrm is the fourth adventure released for BEOWULF, following Horror at Herrogate. It was written by Jon Hodgson, and Jon, Scott Purdy and Paul Bourne provided the artwork. Editing/mechanical support was provided by Jacob Rodgers.

We encourage a progression for BEOWULF that allows a Hero to explore their newfound features for each new level, so it’s designed for heroes of levels 3 or 4.

The snake will not die and time does not turn properly. Three witches summon the Hero to do their bidding and conquer the defiant serpent. The Hero seems to step into some liminal space where the natural order of things has become broken because of the serpent’s refusal of the natural order of things.

Buy it here!

5th Edition seems to be a hot topic right on social media and forums right now, and we’re seeing frequent reference to what a great implementation of 5e BEOWULF is, often paired with Adventures in Middle-earth, which we all worked on too! Which is really cool – thanks folks!

We’re continuing our experimentation with the 5e framework with our current series of Scenery Monsters over at www.handimonsters.com

Scenery Monsters are something adjacent to Lair Actions, but separated from a location, and expressed as a kind of lesser monster. Scenery Monsters are a stripped down kind of background creature that can spice up a location, without requiring the GM to deal with a whole stat block.

Scenery Monsters never make attack roll, have no hit points, and function a little more like traps, or obstacles, but embodied as creatures. Some can move around, some are static features, others are more abstracted.

One of the real strengths of the subscription model of Handimonsters is that we’ve been able to experiment with the core idea, and develop it week on week. Now that we’ve released a handful of Scenery Monsters we’re more able to cook down exactly how we design them to a list of questions:

• What is the saving throw the target makes, and how that can be interesting? For example, this week’s monster requires a Wisdom saving throw to avoid a condition. This means you can involve less able fighters as being key to resolving an encounter.

• What is the effect of failing the saving throw? We’ve avoided HP damage for the most part, favouring the infliction of conditions – disadvantage, poisoned or prone for example are all interesting conditions to wield during a battle, and can become a bit more interesting and varied than glancing at how many HP you have left.

• Why cant a PC run up to the Scenery Monster and do HP damage to it? Because Scenery Monsters don’t have a full stat block, and we don’t want the GM to track HP, this aspect needs to make sense, and be intuitive to the monster. We’ve used creatures that automatically flee, or become prone when approached. We’ve also used plant-like creatures that can’t be killed by attacking them with weapons. Any time a Scenery Monster would stand and fight toe to toe? It’s probably not a Scenery Monster.

• Why is “the attack” not an attack roll? Scenery Monsters do not make attack rolls. And this needs to make sense very quickly. It could be its “attack” is a barely-directed cloud of gas, or because it’s a volley of rubbish thrown very general direction by unskilled civilians. The “attack” of a Scenery Monster becomes more about the Player Characters’ resistance to it than skill in combat.

• If the monster doesn’t have HP, how is it overcome, or can it indeed be overcome? Sometimes it’s ok to deploy a creature that must just be avoided, or which makes a part of a location less favourable to traverse. But sometimes that can be an unsatisfying feature of an encounter. And we all know how some players want to attack everything. It is also important to give the players some kind of agency in being able to do something to affect the Scenery Monster. Shutting it down for a number of rounds is a nice outcome of specific actions on the part of the players.

We’re coming to the end of our first run of Scenery Monsters – and you can grab the entire back catalogue of all of our monsters when you sign up at www.handimonsters.com – but we’ll be back with more!

You can also get all of last year’s handimonsters in the 2022 Annual!