BEOWULF. a|state. Maskwitches. Cold City:Hot War. FiveEvil
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.
When Waelwulf drinks a door is opened in his mind and Tiw, the god of war steps in.
Continue reading “Character Queue: Waelwulf”The first BEOWULF annual will soon be available to pre-order tomorrow (Thursday 3rd Feb) and all orders come with a free PDF!
This 64 page, full colour softcover book collects together all the written content from the first 8 digital packs for BEOWULF Age of Heroes.
You’ll find new monsters, articles on building characters, new Followers, useful treasures, magical weapons, an example of combat, a sword name generator, things to see at sea, and more!
It will be available in PDF, and if you have already bought Digital Packs 1 to 8 on the day of release, you’ll get the PDF free.
We’ve been selective in what’s in the Annual, focusing on the written gaming content. There are things from the Digital Packs that are not included.
We haven’t added all the battle maps and tokens from the digital packs, since they don’t seem very useful printed in a US-letter-sized book.
The print and play story cards from pack eight aren’t in there either – again they don’t seem very useful printed in a book. No one wants 11 pages of cards to cut out of a book!
There’s no Digital Pack video content included, nor any of the form-fillable PDF character, follower or monster sheets.
And of course the atmospheric background music doesn’t print so well.
This means the digital packs are still well worth your time at the great price of just $2.99 each. Even if you grab the collected Annual!
Find out more about BEOWULF Age of Heroes for 5th Edition here.
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.
Born of royal blood, but fostered to a far away land across the sea, Alys found she did not fit in with the other princesses. More interested in learning to read and write, and the wonders these skills revealed, she spurned the traditional crafts of hospitality and needlepoint and the wifely duties expected of her.
Continue reading “Character Queue: Alys, A Princess”
Did you know that Handiwork Games produces a whole series of virtual/physical tiles for your adventuring needs?
We have tonnes of gridded tiles and non-gridded tiles for your use! And you can download them from DriveThru for digital use! Expand your adventure locations today!
The Three Ogre Brothers is the introductory scenario for BEOWULF: Age of Heroes. It’s a bit unusual as such scenarios go, since it’s a more complex situation than a typical BEOWULF adventure. But we wanted to give players a good result for their investment and also build off of The Hermit’s Sanctuary, our free adventure.
The adventure begins with a prologue, suggested by Jon, that sets the mood. The Ogre Lands were once the kingdoms of men, and rightfully belongs to them. The Hero meets the ghost of the dispossessed king and his slain sons in a church near to the starting location for the adventure.
Continue reading “The Three Ogre Brothers”To celebrate the release of Digital Pack Eight, heres 8 things about BEOWULF:
1: BEOWULF is an ENnie-award nominated setting and set of additional rules for 5e.
2: It’s aimed at making 5e shine for one player and one GM.
3: The player takes on the role of the Hero class in the myths of the “dark ages”.
4: There are 6 subclasses, one for each ability score. So there are Strength Heroes, Dexterity Heroes, Charisma Heroes and so on.
5: Lone Heroes are bolstered by Followers – NPCs that work a little bit like spells, coming into the spotlight when they perform an action and then retreating into the background.
6: Digital Packs are packages of additional content for the game, including new material in PDF, music, useful VTT assets, new monsters, beautiful battle maps and more.
7: There is a whole series of adventures for BEOWULF Age of Heroes available in PDF.
8: You can start your Hero’s story for FREE with the full-length ENnie-Nominated Hermit’s Sanctuary adventure.
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 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:
Grab it now!
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.
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:
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.
