Blog

On the Blog

If you missed any of our recent blog articles here’s the links:

• Jon talks accessories – we love them, but you don’t need them.
• Jacob gives Ham Anfeald and The Wolf Child the spotlight in Character Queue
• We took a look at Hadrian of Canterbury in celebration of MLK Day
• Handimonster Themes – Jacob takes a look at how we theme our 5e monsters.

BEOWULF Digital Pack Eight Out Now

BEOWULF Digital Packs bring you fresh material monthly for your BEOWULF Age of Heroes games. In this eighth Digital Pack of bonus content for BEOWULF: Age of Heroes, we bring you:

• A deck of 44 print and play Story Cards to inspire your adventures and NPCs, complete with instructions
• 2 battle maps
• A set of VTT tokens
• A PDF about Boundary Ghosts
• A PDF adventure “Fragment” featuring a Boundary Ghost
• 2 new music tracks 

Grab it now!

Handimonsters Annual Arrives

The first Handimonsters Annuals arrived, and preorders went out – individually to the UK, and en masse to the US. They should arrive in the US next week, and be sent on to you. We’d originally planned to also print in the US, but (slightly bizarre?) changes to pricing on that specific size of book with our US printer meant a change of plan. Still, it’s barely a couple of days difference, so all good!

The Annual gathers together a year’s worth of Handimonsters into a lovely softcover book. You can also grab it in PDF too!

You can order your copy now.

Newsletter exclusive: BEOWULF Art Book

In our email newsletter this week we’ll take an exclusive look at the contents of the BEOWULF art book. You can subscribe to the newsletter here:

Upcoming

Releasing in the near future we have The Triple Serpent for BEOWULF Age of Heroes, and the BEOWULF Annual! We’ll have more news on those soon.

This Monday’s Handimonster is Barrow Moss, the first of our Scenery Monsters that bring a new twist to background monsters that don’t quite need their own stat block, but still make adventures more fun to run and challenging to play!

And lastly and perhaps most excitingly, we’ll have Hellenistika news too! We have a whole chapter on hand!

The Handimonsters Annual 2022 collects our last year’s releases of monsters into one fantastic print format! Here’s a little bit about one of the monsters and how it can be to be…

The Stonerooster was not an easy monster to bring forth, but I’m proud of the eventual approach that we used and just how unusual a monster it is. It began life and a monster drawn out by Scott, with (as far as I know), no particular asperations as to what it was capable of. The beast had these strange, hynoptic almost-style eyes, so that was some inspiration. But was also rather ugly and I wasn’t really sure what was going on there.

A bit of pondering and some snatches of old jazz standards had me thinking about rooster eggs and so I decided that could be a bit of fun. What if we have a creature so weird and magical that it really does lay (well, find) rooster eggs and they hatch?

We love a good accessory here at Handiwork Games. Whether it’s battle mats and minis, fancy dice or metal inspiration tokens we can’t deny our commitment to feeling fancy in our hobby time.

But something we always keep in mind when making our games is that not everyone gets to splash out on all the bells and whistles. So we’re committed to making games that can be played just as effectively without the fancy stuff.

The inspiration mat and tokens from BEOWULF are fine examples of this. While we love the feeling we get from playing with the fancy versions, we began developing those tools with far more basic implements. And the BEOWULF inspiration pool that powers duet play in 5e works just fine with a piece of paper and some buttons (or in the above example a flower, an acorn and a groovy beach pebble. Cozy style!). Indeed, that’s how they began, long before we considered (admittedly incredibly beautiful, weighty and atmospheric) metal tokens and neoprene play mats.

And of course there’s a nice halfway house available as part of The Hermit’s Sanctuary in the form of a printable inspiration pool and tokens you can cut out and stick to board or coins.

Likewise, our heroic-sized Q-Workshop BEOWULF dice are a lovely thing to hold and roll, but you don’t need them to play – three (or even two) different coloured D20s work perfectly well.

Of course this all stems back to Bang and Twang, where the game comes with everything you need to play, but if you want to get fancy you can get a lovely set of metal coins to play with.

With all that in mind it seemed worthwhile taking a moment to mention if you’re playing any of our games with stuff you’ve made yourself, we’d really love to see it. And if you’re just using pencils and paper, you’re playing the real thing too.

What do you think? Let us know on Discord, Twitter or Facebook.

Character Queue is an ongoing series where we dive deep into our pregenerated characters that we made as part of our introduction to our BEOWULF:Age of Heroes roleplaying game. We were fortunate enough to fund sculpting and casting these characters, so not only do they appear in character sheet form but as professional miniatures as well.

Our character today is The Wolf-child.

“She just stared at us. The wolves beside her waited patiently. I got the sense that she must be deciding something and if it went poorly they would attack. The bird on her shoulder also stared silently at us. Finally, she lunged forward and grabbed the meat from my hand. It took all I had to not flinch.“

Today’s the official observance of Martin Luther King Jr in the United States and to celebrate the occasion we thought we’d take a look at a famous person of colour from the period of BEOWULF Age of Heroes.

Hadrian or Adrian of Canterbury was a prominent North African scholar, born in 637CE who came to England in roughly 669 (after some adventures in Frankia). He had travelled from Rome with his friend Theodore of Tarsus, in modern-day Turkey. Hadrian was sent on this journey by the Pope to accompany Theodore who was taking up the archbishopric of Canterbury.

Hadrian became Abbot of the monastery of Saints Peter and Paul in Canterbury, and set about instituting a new respect for learning and study, paving the way for the importance of Canterbury in the Christian Church.

Not only was Hadrian of Libya well versed in religious matters, but he was a prominent scientist and teacher, who travelled all over the islands of what is now the United Kingdom, teaching those he met.

A hundred years (or thereabouts) later, King Alfred references Hadrian as a wise and learned man, and he sought to emulate him in furthering his own quest for education and learning.

After his death, Hadrian became a saint, and we’re not long past his feast day of January the 9th.

Check out more Hadrian facts at wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_of_Canterbury (and naturally in the spirit of Hadrian of Canterbury, find a book or two about him!)

Happy MLK day!

With the release of the Handimonsters Annual this week, we asked Jacob about some of the design inspirations behind the monsters, especially the connections between monsters. This week, he talks about some of the more subtle, earlier connections. Next week he’ll dive into the bigget categories like Dungeon Constructs and the Wildfolk.

I came up at the tail end of 1st Edition (D&D) and most of my later high school and college gaming was squarely in the days of 2nd Edition. This was the high days of Settings and, though we more often played in our homebrew world, it seemed like each of us collected at least one setting (one friend collected Dark Sun, another loved Planescape, etc.) and we all shared the ideas around. My setting of choice was Ravenloft. I loved the Gothic horror stuff, especially when it was time for the Halloween one-shot each year, the limits of the demi-dimension and the ‘easy to enter, hard to leave’ aspect.

Hello! Happy New Year! We hope you managed to get a peaceful break over the festive season. We’re back at work and are all hard at it making the very finest books and accessories for your gaming table. It’s all happening this week, so let’s get into it!

Handimonsters Annual is out!

The Handimonsters Annual 2022 is out now in PDF and for pre-order in print! Collecting a year’s worth of unique 5e monsters from www.handimonsters.com, this US Letter-sized, full colour softcover is on the webstore right now for pre-order, or in PDF at DrivethruRPG. It’s a gorgeous book.

The Triple Serpent

The next adventure release for BEOWULF Age of Heroes is the final one unlocked by our mighty Kickstarter backers. Written by the Uber-talented Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, The Triple Serpent takes our Hero to Ireland, where they must unravel the mystery of the serpent troubling a local hall and church.

This week we unveiled the cover, and Jon gave us the low-down on painting it in a blog post here.

Poster Prints

Thanks to the success of the Whale Road poster, we’ve decided to make prints a regular thing. We have 3 initial designs with which to tempt you in A3 size – the BEOWULF cover, and “The Valley Hall” by Jon Hodgson, and “The Abandoned Shipyard” by Paul Bourne from the forthcoming a|state. We have a mix of numbered open edition and limited edition prints. We’ll let you know when you can grab them!

a|state Coins and Compass

Recently on the blog, we took a look at the amazing a|state compass and coins made by our friends at Campaign Coins. These aren’t just beautiful accessories – they’re used in the games of a|state and The Three Coins. Learn more in the blog post.

While we finish up editing and layout of the a|state second edition PDF, late pledges remain open. But not for much longer! Grab a late pledge now!

Ralph’s art book

Last year Handiwork Games helped our friend Ralph Horsley make and kickstart his art book. We’re currently weathering the storms of global logistics in the time of Omicron, but books are on their way to our UK fulfilment partners right now. We’ll have a bunch of copies for sale in our webstore in the coming months. Keep your eyes peeled – it’s a very finely crafted book full of absolute delights for any fan of fantasy art!

BEOWULF Art Book

The BEOWULF art book is out! Pre-ordered copies are winging their way to customers, if they haven’t already arrived! We put this together as a thank you for our US backers, who’ve been incredibly patient with getting their books last, thanks to the global shipping excitement of last year. And of course it’d be a shame if we didn’t share it with everyone.

This cute little square book is packed with our favourite art from BEOWULF, along with analysis and behind the scenes commentary on each piece. Grab yours and get a free PDF version right now. Or just grab the PDF.

What’s this?

Something brand new just arrived at Handiwork HQ. Could it be something to do with the fabled companion game to the Forest Dragon Farmer? Could we be on the brink of uncovering the secrets of the Pie Man?

Links

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Here at a Handiwork Games we love an accessory, and we pride ourselves on creating very beautiful things that enhance your (and our) gaming life. We’re also careful to make sure they are all entirely optional, our fancy kit is all easily replaced by things you already own. 

Just before the festive period we were delighted to receive these samples of our a|state coins and compass ahead of the main production run. As ever our friends at Campaign Coins have outdone themselves with the sheer quality of these metal alloy tokens. 

Deigned by a|state co-creator Paul Bourne, the compass is styled as an in-world artefact. Denizens of The City might well have one of these in their pocket to help orient themselves amongst the canals and back alleys. It’s a truly attractive souvenir of the campaign, and a piece of The City, the setting of a|state.

As part of our Kickstarter for BEOWULF Age of Heroes our mighty backers unlocked a series of PDF adventures. The very last of these is The Triple Serpent by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, and we’re finishing up production of that adventure right now – it should be released this month!

Jon has been painting the cover to this adventure, and he takes up the story with this look at the process.