It seems like a busy week for enjoying content around our games!
The latest Yes Indie’d podcast features Paul Beakley, and he has some very kind things to say about a|state: “It is in my opinion the best Forged in the Dark game out right now”.
The a|state chat begins at 43:54, but Paul is a very interesting guy to listen to, so we highly recommend the whole thing. And if you missed his deep dive on a|state, be sure to check that out!
And stay tuned, Maskwitches fans, we’ll have some exciting news for anyone attending UK Games Expo in less than 3 weeks’ time! (And yes we are exhibiting at Expo, even if the UK Games Expo site thinks otherwise. You’ll find us right next to our friends Nightfall Games.)
We’ve enjoyed using these very clear wooden dice so much in our Maskwitches game that we’ve sourced a small stock for our webstore. They’re 15mm across and come in a cotton pouch.
Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland is a standalone storytelling game powered by the minimalist Silver Road rules. It takes your stories to Forgotten Doggerland, where you’ll take on the role of the mysterious Maskwitches, protecting the community against arising spiritual threats!
The Meat Spoiler is the first ever scenario for Maskwitches, and presents a host of material for Mediating your first Maskwitches story. We can’t say too much about it without spoilers! But things go wrong, and the Maskwitches must put them right!
The Masks and Amulets Deck PDF presents a set of print-at-home cards to track which witches are holding which masks and amulets: in the game your character is defined by their masks and amulets, and their masks can be traded between characters. These homeprint cards are a helpful accessory to track your character and who has what masks at any given time.
The PDFs are also available for free with a pe-order of the Maskwitches soft or hardcovers or the card deck:
Tuesday (that’s tomorrow at the time of posting!) sees the PDF release of Maskwitches of Forgotten DoggerlandAND the first story scenario for Maskwitches – The Meatspoiler. They’ll both be available on DrivethruRPG tomorrow!
Powered by The Silver Road rules, Maskwitches of Doggerland is a psychedelic mesolithic storytelling game. Players taking the role of the Maskwitches in a desperate battle against evil spirits spawned by disharmony in their community. Meanwhile, the tide is rising and nothing can stop it…
Of course if you’d like the PDF of Maskwitches /free, you can pre-order Maskwitches in book form here:
Did you miss the Quickstarter for Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland? It ws easy to do, since it was only a week long! But have no fear – you can pre-order the books and the card deck here on the Handiwork Games web store right now!
Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland has reached £14,000 and unlocked a new Silver Road setting to go with Maskwitches, penned by Malcolm Craig (Cold City, Hot War, a|state). It is called “The Burn”. All backers at a reward level will receive this in PDF. Very exciting!
At £16,000 we unlock another art print for everyone.
Which allows us, at £18,000, to open the Young Designer Fund, should we reach that level of funding. This will aim to find and commission an up and coming young RPG designer to write a scenario pack for Maskwitches or a new adjacent Silver Road setting, depending on what they’d prefer. This will be aimed at giving a new young talent an opportunity to reach a new audience and be involved with an established creative team. They will of course be paid properly for their work. We will publish the setting and share the proceeds with them.”
In discovering, exploring and journeying deep into a painting cave, Maskwitches may win secrets from the painted stories they make together. They may also gain both the understanding of new amulets and the knowledge of how to make new masks. They may also break masks and amulets. Their amulets and masks may be transformed.
Placing stilled thoughts and frozen rhythms into the very guts of the earth. Paintings are sight which stays. Fixing ideas to walls with ochre and pitch and resin allows those ideas to become both stronger and weaker. Vision halted, captured, and placed into the forever darkness. Secret signs hidden deep in the earth where seeds grow and bodies rot. The source of the past and the future growing outwards like roots spreading and dividing.
Stories told in paint here in the secret places deep under the ground are true, where the past and the future are connected and the painters and the painted become one.
Unseen designs carved into the winding ice tunnels of the great ice walls are melting. The thoughts stored there released forever. The rivers are too full of old songs. Spirits rise. An eel mask or a spider mask for the dark seeing and sinuous weaving of grace in dark places. Navigating the sunless red insides of the earth. Emerging from the stone birth canal reborn.
Huh. Jon here again, talking about Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland. So a little while back I spent the evening making images of drums for Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland. But you know what? I’m not going to use them. Which is kinda interesting.
Long post is long.
It’s very complicated, and would require too many words for blog post that anyone will read to the end, but I have some concerns about Maskwitches cleaving too close to real world Siberian shamanism (and we could throw in some other religious practices that one might call “shamanism” too) as an influence.
There’s a line on that I don’t care to cross.
Troubling echoes can be created when we take a religious practice first witnessed and recorded by non-indigenous peoples a few hundred years ago, and uncritically project it back the best part of 10,000 years into a gleefully “historio-gonzo”-but-attempting-to-be-internally-credible, fantasy game.
I’m reading a reference work right now which specifically falls into this trap, and I don’t wish to echo that mistake.
As it was being made, “Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland” walked a very precise line as the project developed, and I needed to trust its direction. Underneath the clear glee I have in assembling its range of fairly wild influences, and revelling in assembling the parts that “feel right”, there is a very deep well of seriousness in both a moral compass on appropriate or acceptable appropriation, and an honest creative process.
Creatively, I went looking for these drums in a self conscious way, and of course I found them. They did not find me, unlike all the other ideas in the book so far. And so they just don’t belong. They were made in the wrong way.
And in terms of moral compass, they’re giving me some bad vibes. Too on the nose, too lazy, verging on the unpleasant end of ethnography.
Contrast these with the “witch-knives” that came out of nowhere, feel really right, but don’t… take from anyone? It’s a very fragile sensibility but it matters to me as the creator. Making “right” things requires those fine-tuned delicate aerials, I think.
These drum images are however still enjoyable. And may yet find a use. But not in the panopoly of the witches for this project.
I thought this kind of curation and careful backward step might prove mildly diverting for you. Also: cool drum pics bro.
