Every Hero in BEOWULF: Age of Heroes is human, from somewhere among the many lands that surround the Whale Road. They may be from nearby, Baltic-born and stern as the sea. They may be from strange lands to the south, with strange speech and tales no one has ever heard before. Each Hero comes to a life of adventure by a different path. Their background represents both their lineage and their life experience.
First and foremost, every Hero has access to the same Ability bonuses as any other. Adding such modifiers allows you to customise your character but is not dependent on where they were born or what they look like. Similarly, you can roll on a table (or pick) a special quirk (benefit) that is personal to you. You make some other choices, such as your age, alignment and languages and every Hero gets to start with a Feat. You then choose a background, and start building a story of how your Hero came to be. We posit the existence of a Trader’s Tongue that the folk of the North Sea and Baltic use when making deals that has loan words from a variety of languages, so that everyone can understand one another.
BEOWULF: Age of Heroes is designed primarily as a duet game, with one gamemaster and one player. Thus when it came time to design the classes, we quickly resolved that the idea of class roles was something that wouldn’t quite work. It was okay for a player to choose a focus for their Hero’s class, because Followers (non-player characters that accompany the character and are able to temporarily aid them) can help support the player in weak areas. But every character needed to have a certain measure of toughness and some ability at combat. We decided to create just a single class, the Hero class, and use 5e’s subclasses to allow a player to choose a focus for their Hero. We ended up with six different subclasses. Each based around an Ability score.
BEOWULF: Age of Heroes is a roleplaying game inspired by the ancient epic poem Beowulf.
As gamers and designers reading and enjoying the poem, we quickly realised it focused on Beowulf’s struggles against the various Monsters he faced and his relationships with the folk that he met, such as Unferth, who was at first critical of the hero but then gave him his magical sword to hunt Grendel’s mother, and Wiglaf, his loyal follower.
Well this is exciting! Our very first pre-production miniatures! If you’ve played or read The Hermit’s Sanctuary you might recognise some of these characters.
We’ll have a range of figures to accompany the BEOWULF: Age of Heroes Kickstarter, which we’re hoping to launch this month!
We have just released four new characters for The Hermit’s Sanctuary, the free adventure for BEOWULF: Age of Heroes! Each new character comes with full-figure character art, a unique background, a 5e character sheet, and a choice of starting points for The Hermit’s Sanctuary adventure.
Meet: Blaedswith, the Karelian Amulet Witch Ham Ansfeald, the Hero-Sailor Waelwulf, the Doomed Monster-fighter The Wolf Child
There are also new follower cards for Ham Anfeald, who is always accompanied by his hand-fasted best friend, Bald Haeri, and The Wolf Child’s family of wolves.
This new pack also includes VTT tokens, and is Pay What you Want, with a suggested price of £1.60/$1.99.
Jon: As part of The Hermit’s Sanctuary, the free introductory scenario for BEOWULF, we wanted to include a bunch of battle maps. It’s worth mentioning here at the outset that BEOWULF doesn’t rely on battle maps. Theatre of the Mind works just as well. Like in any 5e game, they’re purely optional.
But we love a good map hereabouts, and painting miniatures is something that’s been a very useful diversion in these times of lockdown.
I’ve been running a Patreon for almost 2 years now, supplying painted battle maps for people’s games. I also made a load of them for our recent collaboration with Onyx Path Publishing on the Scarred Lands Creature Collection. And so it seemed like a good idea to include some with The Hermit’s Sanctuary.
I specialise in really big maps, mostly because… I can! Digital delivery and virtual tabletops make these really accessible. But I also like to print them out and use them in the traditional way with miniatures. Today I’m taking a look at how that’s all shaped up.
So here’s the map of the Sanctuary itself.
For my games, I went to town and picked up a bunch of animal minis from Warbases. They’re just across the Firth of Forth from Handiwork HQ, so it’s nice to shop local! They do a great line in farm animals, so I’ve added some geese, Jacob sheep. I already had a couple of pigs for a BEOWULF Hero concept I’m working on – a seer who has oracular pigs as her followers. Must get on with that! As you can see, I’m no master painter, and I gave these a very quick paint job, but they’re a nice addition to the table.
For the main NPCs in the scenario, I needed some quite particular figures. These ended up coming from a wide range of sources.
The Housekeeper is a personal favourite, from Gripping Beast. She’s a cracking miniature.
The Builder is a really lovely figure from Perry Miniatures. He’s one of their First Crusade Pilgrims, which makes him a bit out of period, but civilian clothes don’t change tooooo much in this era, so I think it works.
The Provisioner is from Gripping Beast – he’s the attendant in their Saxon bishop set, who is perfect for that NPC.
The Hermit himself is a monk from Perry Miniatures. He’s not a perfect fit for the NPC description, but it’s a nice model.
The Boy was the trickiest match to find. I couldn’t find any early medieval children figures that fitted the bill. It was wonderful that an old friend Matt who runs Knucklebones Miniatures volunteered to sculpt me one. If you fancy getting your own, I’m sure Matt will send you one for a reasonable payment!
While avoiding spoilers, the Sanctuary map might feature two or three times in the scenario, depending on how it plays out, and the details of the scenery add quite a few options to the potential second and third usages.
Next up is a map for the Battle at the Standing Stone, which may or may not occur in the adventure, depending on the actions of your Hero. This is a nice big open map, set on the moors of the Hermit’s island home. Again, no spoilers, but I can imagine some running around on this one… Our Monster here is robustly played by a Red Box Games troll.
In this playthrough, we’re using the regenerated character Alys (who I always considered something like an early medieval, welsh Hermione Grainger).
We’re using a Footsore Miniatures Shield Maiden for her figure. Footsore also provided one of the followers. I highly recommend their work. Their new range of Anglo-Saxons is gorgeous.
For additional followers, Victrix Vikings and Anglo Saxons and Anglo-danes are perfect. There’s also a character model from Bad Squiddo in there, who I highly recommend! (I expect we’ll use her model for a Hero at some point in my games)
There’s an additional variant map included for another optional battle, which I haven’t set up, since I didn’t need it for this play-through, but it’s worth mentioning – it’s a flexible map that could easily see use in other games.
The Walled Graveyard map created a lot of nerves for the player in this run through! Can’t say any more than that! Physically, this is the smallest map, and I don’t know if that added to their worries?
The Ruin is a personal favourite location. It’s based on a ruined broch, not that the characters in the scenario know this. There’s one of the very few lowland brochs close to Handiwork HQ, in the form of Tappoch Broch, and we’ve very much taken it to heart, making dice trays featuring it! The broch ruin is another map that might come in handy for other adventures, It’s a nice big one!
In this image you can see the Inspiration Pool at work – you get a printable one, along with some tokens, as part of the Hermit’s Sanctuary. There will be neoprene mats and really gorgeous metal tokens available as part of the BEOWULF kickstarter.
The map of… this location, let’s call it, is filled with spoilers, so there’s not much to say. I just hope that your Hero ends up seeing this one when they’re well prepared! The stones here are from Warhead Studio.
This is probably the most useful map to use in play, even if you’re doing theatre of the mind. Printing it on A4/US Letter and using counters might come in handy, as one of the potential climactic battles is something of a mini-game to itself. This is a common feature of scenarios in BEOWULF – the battle against the big Monster always has some kind of cool twist to make it really memorable.
We have our own range of miniatures being designed right now by our dear friends at Cold War Miniatures, and the initial range includes all the pre-generated characters from the Hermit Sanctuary. Here’s a sneak peek at some of the renders!
We’re very close to having pre-production examples on hand – the last piece of character art is heading over to be sculpted today! We showed him in progress earlier in the week – here’s the more or less finished art. He’s a doomed hero archetype, searching for an enemy worthy enough to gift him a heroic death.
The Hermit’s Sanctuary is available absolutely free here. It includes all the maps in this article, as PDF posters, jpeg versions for VTT, and sliced up easy-to-print versions.
Hello, Jacob back to talk about BEOWULF: Age of Heroes today with a discussion about “dual-wielding” (two-weapon fighting) and the design process.
Now Jon is well known for HATING dual wielding. (editor: it is true, I hate dual wielding and I cannot lie) So it was a bit shocking when he raised it as something worth including. After I collected myself off the floor, I took a careful look at things. One of our goals with BEOWULF (and all the work we do) is to make sure things fit within the milieu of the poem. Not every feature of 5e fits BEOWULF. Lots do, some need some tweaking, some need some rescaling, some just don’t belong at all. But we also want to be as inclusive as possible. If you want to take one of our adventures and run a group of four dragonborn sorcerers against our mystery and our Monster then we want you to have fun. So that means that we often consider aspects of 5e that aren’t exclusively prohibited to be ‘out there’ for use, even if we don’t ever make use of them in our pre-generated characters or examples.
And that’s where dual wielding had been living. We hadn’t specifically forbidden it, but we hadn’t encouraged it. We also like to think that, by careful curation of the weapons and armour lists, that we can represent that dual wielding was a dangerously aggressive technique not well-suited to the time period. After all, when I think of practical two-weapon fighting, it’s in the context of rapier and dagger or katana and wakizashi, neither of which fits into BEOWULF.
But Jon’s point was that there was something to that ‘northern courage’ that Tolkien was so enamoured of in the source materials that fit with doing something so bold and reckless. At the same time, we’re also tweaking the equipment lists to make sure that we represent the poem and the setting properly. Helmets and shields are important in the literature of the day, and relatively little attention is given to the other armour. So we’re resolved to make them important. We’ve now given additional properties to shields and helmets, such that a shield can provide up to a +3 for armour class and a helmet up to a +2. That means a Hero can jump up from beside the fire in only their weaponshirt and don a helm and shield and have an AC equal to 16 plus their Dexterity modifier.
It also means that choosing to give up that shield in order to wield a second weapon is even more of a trade-off. After all, you could be giving up 3 points of Armour Class (plus all the neat interactions with other weapons and feats that shields in BEOWULF provide)! For the base version of two-weapon fighting, giving up that shield can really hurt. But what about our bold and reckless Hero?
Feats to the rescue! We already had a couple of feats provided that allowed a Hero to do a bit of Barbarian-like berserking and that seemed a perfect place to add in dangerous and deadly two-weapon fighting. So you can wield any weapon in either hand, as long as it’s not heavy or two-handed. And you get advantage on your attack rolls but attackers had advantage on attack rolls against you. So now you can go berserk with two bearded axes or two swords or a fransiska and a long-seax or other exciting combinations. You’ll do lots of damage, but you’ll be in lots of danger at the same time.
I hope you enjoyed that deep dive into some of the mechanical considerations behind BEOWULF: Age of Heroes. We’re working steadily away on it, and will have more news in the coming months. Stay safe and enjoy all the adventures that gaming can bring you!
This week we’re going to be talking more BEOWULF! We’ve got a designer diary by Jacob, some chat about maps and minis (which are entirely optional, by the way!) from Jon, and we’ll be taking a look at some of the cool things we’re making, and have made for BEOWULF: Age of Heroes, including miniatures!
Credits! Miniatures from Footsore Miniatures, Gripping Beast, Perry Miniatures, Knucklebones Miniatures, with rocks from Warhead Studios. The dice are from Triple Ace Games (their very tasty Viking Dice).
Here’s the poem that Dave composed for The Hermit’s Sanctuary. There will be more poems to be found in the core setting book of BEOWULF: Age of Heroes from Dave and others.
Hwaet!
A far flung isle
Mist mantled, Rune deep.
Surrounded by the whales way
A speck of footfall- firmly set
Upon a blue bright shield
A stone boss boldly sits
Battle-battered by billow maidens
Ancient bearer of grave and grove.
Home of bristle backed boar
Racked by wild winds keening.
Gulls wheeling screech, its scops;
Baleful beaked eagles unlock their wordhoard.
Bitter brine- not balming beer
Is lapped by that wyrd- wrought isle!
Once a holy held place
A blessing not bane to honest kin.
In hearth of deep dwelled slaughter,
Its leavings glut the grey cloaked wolf
Gorges the black ravens bent beak
Feast giver for Woden’s greedy birds.
Moon bleached, snow skinned
Shield breaker, blood drinker
A pale scabbard for a sword host
Of battle- bold warriors!
Hardened hearth-troop wreak their craft
Battle lights sing but do not sever
Blood embers swing –harmless their hewing
No war sweat stricken from war needles striking.
Forge fired, handiwork of smiths
Have no power present there.
Wyrd unravelled, blades bite dulled
Fates weave woe in warp and weft.
About The Hermit’s Sanctuary
The Hermit’s Sanctuary is a free, full-length, introductory adventure for the forthcoming BEOWULF: AGE OF HEROES for 5e!
Designed for one player and one GM, BEOWULF provides unique rules and support for single-player games in the Age of Heroes. Take to the Whale Road as a monster-slaying hero! Voyage to the island of the hermit, and investigate the cause of its woes!
Complete with pre-generated characters, maps, printable accessories, and more, The Hermit’s Sanctuary is entirely free.
