Maskwitches Hardcovers and Pine Pitch Black arrive!

The hardcovers of Maskwitches and Pine Pitch Black are here! We have *almost* everything to start dispatch for a bunch of backers/pre-order customers. That’ll kick off next month!

Find out more about Maskwitches, the storytelling game of the psychedelic Mesolithic here.

“A game that feels like a conjuring – a curious and compelling artefact. It is strange in the best possible way, a genuine work of art from the prose to the mechanics to art.” -Gareth Hanrahan, author of THE BLACK IRON LEGACY SERIES, THE LANDS OF THE FIRSTBORN TRILOGY, THE EYES OF THE STONE THIEF, THE DARKENING OF MIRKWOOD.

Maskwitches Softcover Print Run Arrives

We were excited this weekend to take delivery of a ton of boxes containing the softcover print run of Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland Redux Edition. We were less excited to move them from the spot the massive load of books were dropped off to the office, but them’s the breaks! We’re delighted to have them here. Next up: we’re awaiting the hardcovers and Pine Pitch Black!

There’s still time to pre-order your copy, and get the PDF free.

Malcolm and the Burn

You may have seen that we recently released The Burn, a charmingly unique setting for The Silver Road.

Penned by Scottish RPG design legend Malcolm Craig (a|state, Cold City, Hot War), The Burn is all about childhood memory and folklore, specifically local to Malcom as he was growing up in Polmont, Scotland. It just so happens that the Handiwork HQ is in the very same district of Falkirk, so Jon was able to shoot all the photographs that illustrate the game in the very same locations that “Wee Malcolm” haunted as a child.

Not so long ago Malcolm was in the area, and we took a tour of some of those sites, book in hand, and here we present the photo story of heading back to The Burn.

We also discussed The Burn as part of our latest History in Games, Games in History podcast:

The Burn: Making the Wee Folk

For The Silver Road setting book The Burn, I knew we would need something different. 

The locations in the book are real – albeit seen through the eyes of memory and a kind of folkish magical realism. 

The wee folk who you play seemed really the crux of the whole thing. And of course coming out of finishing up the Maskwitches Redux, models and sets were on my mind. But in this case the sets were life size – the real places along the Polmont Burn, just moments from my door, and coincidentally where the author Malcolm played as a child. 

It seemed like a good idea to build some figures and I have wanted to do this for a while. The pre-made figures I used for Maskwitches have their advantages, but also many limitations. 

I already had some armature wire on hand – it’s thick, but very flexible metal wire that bends easily but stays where you put it. It’s easy to cut, despite being several millimetres thick. I enjoy working with it. 

Continue reading “The Burn: Making the Wee Folk”

The Silver Road Version 2 out now

The new edition of The Silver Road is out now in both PDF and print! The stock of print books arrived today and look great!

If you already purchased the PDF you have the new edition waiting for you in your DrivethruRPG library at no extra cost.

About The Silver Road

The Silver Road is a minimalist storytelling game for three to five players, including a Game Mediator. Written by Jon Hodgson and illustrated by Jon Hodgson with Paul Bourne.

When playing The Silver Road, you and some friends can get together and tell stories.

This is an unashamedly minimalist story telling roleplaying game. It has a “breathtakingly simple” core mechanic that is applied any time there’s uncertainty about what happens next.

Cave Painting in Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland

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.

Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland

Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland – a standalone Mesolithic story game goes live on kickstarter today at 5pm UK time! Click the image to be notified when it goes live:

Click to be emailed when the campaign goes live!

But who are the Maskwitches?

In Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland, the witches are defined by their masks. They begin the story with two masks, each of which allows them to do a thing well. The witches can trade masks among their number as needed, making them highly fluid and otherworldly as characters.

You’d be forgiven for wondering, as the sharp-minded person you are, if the things the witches are good at are defined solely by their masks, and they can swap masks with one another, who then are they? What is their inner character? Who is the person under the mask?

There are three possible answers. 

The first is that that is something you will discover through play. How did your character become a Maskwitch? What was their training and what events shaped them into the person they are in this story?

The second is that the witches entirely believe in a self-creation story that we see in many so-called “shamanic” (see the reader’s notes in Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland for more on our approach to the difficulties surrounding the terms shaman and shamanism) or, more appropriately, “folkloric” tales. That they were created when a normal person was visited by a spirit, often in the form of a bird, which removed and substituted their eyes and possibly bones and internal organs with magical replacements, usually made from a material like copper or flint. This often happens at the bottom of the sea or a lake. Or at the peak of an unscalable witchmountain. Whoever they were before is forgotten, like a snake leaves behind its skin each year, or an elk leaves behind its antlers. A witch might have their own tale of this kind, they believe it, and for all intents and purposes it is true. 

Or perhaps the secret truth is that the maskwitches themselves are as “real” as the spirits they are fighting. The spirits embody the problems of the community and must be dealt with ritualistically to resolve them. The witches are the personification of the community’s desire to heal. They are not people at all. ThIs does not stop a maskwitch from acting exactly like a real person, with feelings, hopes for the future, and relationships with the past. They are made from the very stuff of humanity: a care for others and an ambition for things to be better. Exploring this can make for deeply affecting tales.

Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland is a standalone storytelling RPG coming to Kickstarter as a week-long campaign this month. Sign up to be notified and don’t miss out!

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A look at the prototype of Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland

We took delivery of a prototype Maskwitches book. In this video Jon takes a look through the prototype which we filled with full page Doggerland art, in advance of the final text being ready. And after a lot of rambling about the various aspects of this setting and the art we’ve been making, there’s a surprise delivery!

You can sign up to be notified of the launch of the Maskwitches campaign here:

A Maskwitches Timeline

Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland is an upcoming setting for The Silver Road story telling game.


While the game is a psychedelic fantasy version of the mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) period, it never hurts to put things in historical context. And so here is a section from the forthcoming book, detailing historical timeline of events before and after the setting of the game.

You can also add this 7 page preview to your DrivethruRPG library by downloading it here.

Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland is about to go into layout. We anticipate a mini-kickstarter for the print book this month.

Why In Spoons?

Hello – Jon here, writer of The Silver Road and its first supplement In Spoons, In Knives.
In Spoons is now printed and in stock, all pre-orders have been dispatched and it’s now a regular purchase on our webstore, and from selected stockists.


In Spoons, In Knives” the first supplement for The Silver Road came out recently in PDF, and the print book is on its way to us now. Let’s chat about the why of it all. 

So why 1930s? Honest answer – I was experimenting with Midjourney AI, and catching up with the latest series of Peaky Blinders and listening to the music of PJ Harvey for the first time in a long time. All of these things clicked together, and Midjourney and I made some really cool images with a 1930s theme. 

And I’ve wondered about something like a Peaky Blinders rpg for a while. I didn’t want us to go for a license (and not being funny, but we could credibly try – although I suspect someone else already has it…) and I certainly really enjoy those stories, but all my initial ideas for In Spoons were about making something broader, freer, and shorter, with a wider set of inspirations. Which would also work for The Silver Road. None of which quite matches up.

The Silver Road is a focused toolkit for group story telling, and that means that supplements work best when they take the form of inspirational material – curated by us to build towards a set of “feels” that you can take and run with. Rather than a more traditional/dry setting or “fixed” world book. 

The industrial cities of the 1930s in the UK is a really great backdrop for this. There’s loads of “stuff” that works really well for Silver Road. There’s a pre-existing shared space there. 

It’s also a time before a really huge upheaval. It’s the build up to the great clash of ideologies that expresses itself in WW2. But how does that build up play out for ordinary people?

I wanted to focus on industrial communities and their struggles. On outsider groups. Like the opposite of Downton Abbey. The Silver Road tells small stories in big settings well, I think. Focusing in on characters and their struggles. This all fits together. 

One of the starting points for The Silver Road was those scary 1970s and 80s children’s books by Susan Cooper, Rosemary Sutcliffe and Alan Garner. Imagining those feels in the 1930s just felt right. I can’t claim that’s necessarily a recognisable part of the book, but it’s a key influence and stepping stone. And one of the reasons there’s some spooky/supernatural stuff in there. 

The 30s as an RPG period is understandably dominated by the venerable Call of Cthulhu. Oddly enough, that provides really fertile soil to grow other crops. I’m not interested in HPL at all, but the 30s isn’t irrevocably tied to his work, nor percentile systems. Call of Cthulhu can handle all that stuff very well indeed, freeing In Spoons, In Knives to look in a different direction both in terms of setting and system. 

I think there are some brilliant, resonant stories to be told without any supernatural stuff. But there’s also opportunities for some great folk horror mixed with the Industrial Age and the dying of empire. For me, telling some stories about the forgotten gods of England being poisoned by industry, as a backdrop to some personal tales, is something I want to play. In Spoons, In Knives is really set up for that. 

Oh and if you were hoping for an explanation of the title, check out the video.