We’re bringing the two FiveEvil scenarios to print! FiveEvil Double Feature collects THESEUS PROTOCOL by Gareth Hanrahan and Glasshouse by Malcolm Craig in a glorious full colour softcover. With a cool beetle with a razor on the cover.
Cold City Hot War Digital Play Packs
We have just updated both Cold City and Hot War titles at DrivethruRPG with the Digital Play Packs. If you have already bought either title, you’ll find a zip file of the corresponding Play Pack in your DrivethruRPG library at no charge. This isn’t a new title, you don’t need to go and buy it separately – we’ve just added it to the existing core book products. If you buy them now the Play Packs will be included.
What are Play Packs?
Play Packs were collections of extra stuff for Cold City and Hot War which we expanded through the crowdfunding campaign. They’re primarily aimed at being a nice wad of printed things like character sheets and in world posters. We took the decision not to charge anyone for the digital versions very early on, so there were no Digital Play Packs. Everyone gets the Digital Play Pack for free with the core PDFs.
What’s in each Play Pack?
The Cold City Play Pack comprises:
• Berlin Map
• Cold City Character Sheet Side 1
• Cold City Character Sheet Side 2
• Cold City Situation Sheet
• Business Cards and Berlin photos
• ISLAC Entity Tech Assessment
• ISLAC Incident Analysis Report
• ISLAC Post-encoutner Evaluation
• ISLAC Subject Report
• Cold City Players Primer (deluxe version)
• Jazz club poster
• A Sheet of photos to use in briefings and as NPCs
What’s next for Cold City Hot War?
The print process is in progress. This is a lot of messing about, basically. We’re very good at making print files, but there’s always things to do to make sure everything is correctly built, the printers are happy, we’re happy with quotes and time lines, the logistics all line up and so on. This is very boring, and there won’t be much to say until we get an ETA, which we don’t have yet. We’re in the elastic piece-of-string time of printing now.
FiveEvil: Netherworlds
We’re excited to reveal the first print supplement for FiveEvil: Netherworlds.
Down into the basement to confront the nightmare man…
Creeping into the sewers to face the laughing killer…
Sneaking into the carnival to find the missing girl …
It’s the moment of supreme dread: when you muster your courage and step into the horror’s ultimate domain: the netherworld. A place of enormous danger and continual threat, where you will be pushed to the limit and never able to lower your guard.
Can you survive? Can you conquer what waits here for you?
This book shows you how to bring netherworlds into your FiveEvil games. Learn how to design netherworlds that can give your players nightmares, and find out how to run them for maximum terror.
Don’t let the realms of horror you imagine turn into tedious dungeon adventures at the table. Use these techniques to harness the full terrifying power of netherworlds, and lead your players places they will never forget.
Contents:
• Why netherworlds are special. A discussion of how to make exploration
scenarios work well for the horror genre.
• Complete guide to netherworld design. A fully detailed step-by-step guide to
designing a netherworld, from a scary basement to an entire country overrun by
horror. Develop its purpose and identify denizens, special qualities, and random
encounters.
• Exploration round by round. A procedure to follow that handles everything you
need to manage when your characters venture into a netherworld.
• Ready-to-use netherworlds. Discover a twisting sewer, a ruined space
colony, a city under the spell of nightmare, and more horrific environments. Each
netherworld is fully described using the rules in this book, and comes with
extensive advice on how to build your own scenario around it and which horror
suits the netherworld as the ultimate threat.
• Campaign scenario “A Lament”. A short campaign in duet mode, or easily
adapted for a group. Your Dad married someone you’ve never met, and moved to
a town you’ve never heard of, and then you found out he’s really sick. That’ why
you’re here, in this weird town in the mountains, trying to work out what’s what.
First, you’ll make sure he’s okay; and then the real work starts. This place has
secrets, and you aren’t going to leave without finding out what they are.
FiveEvil: Netherworlds is written by Morgan Davie, illustrated by Scot Purdy and Jon Hodgson. We’ll have more information about the release date soon.
FiveEvil Character Keeper
We love a straight-forward tool at Handiwork Games (make of that what you will) and we’re delighted to be able to share with you the FiveEvil Character keeper.
Simply head to the link, make a copy, and edit away to your wicked heart’s content.
You can also grab pre-made characters for the first scenario in the book, Wakefield House, in the same format here.
Backer copies of FiveEvil are arriving with our UK backers, and heading out to everyone else right now.
You can pre-order your print copy of FiveEvil here, or get the PDF – currently in the Halloween Sale at DrivethruRPG here.
Mechanics in Cold City and Hot War
With both games now available in PDF, and the preorder for the print editions open, let’s take a look at the core mechanic in Cold City and Hot War, and talk a bit about what’s changed from the first edition.
Cold City Hot War Conflict Resolution
When it comes to resolving conflicts in Cold City and Hot War, both the players and the GM have access to groups of ten-sided dice to roll, and they gamble on how many to use in a given conflict.
Continue reading “Mechanics in Cold City and Hot War”FiveEvil out now in PDF!
FiveEvil is a standalone roleplaying game from Handiwork Games, the fiendish minds behind BEOWULF Age of Heroes, a|state second edition and Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland.
FiveEvil is designed to evoke the horror genre via a set of clever twists on the underlying fifth edition ruleset. Less a version of 5e, FiveEvil is a ruleset about 5e, making use of its subversion to defy expectations and intensify the horror.
Make no mistake: this book is not just some 5e stats for horror entities and a couple of rules tweaks. This is media-literate deconstruction of the primary RPG paradigm of the day!
Whether it reads as a game about what 5e could have been in the hands of an extremely capable indie designer, or a celebration of just how far the rules of 5e can be stretched, is up to you.
The primary setting focus is modern day horror, inspired by the work of Stephen King, and moody, character-driven horror films like The Ritual, The Descent and Jacob’s Ladder, alongside mini-series like Midnight Mass by Mike Flanagan, and the scariest of Twin Peaks episodes.
Rather than seeking out evil in order to vanquish it, or investigating clues to battle malign influence, characters in FiveEvil are regular people trapped in a terrifying situation attempting to survive and escape.
FiveEvil was created and written by Morgan Davie, features art by Scott Purdy and Jon Hodgson, and boasts graphic design and layout by Paul Bourne.
The Hermit’s Sanctuary 5 years on
5 years ago this week we released our first RPG title – The Hermit’s Sanctuary for BEOWULF Age of Heroes. It remains free, and you can download it here. You can get a print version here.
This week we’re taking a look at The Hermit’s Sanctuary with some reminiscences and new spotlights cast on its wealth of free bounty!
Let’s start at the beginning.
Why did we make The Hermit’s Sanctuary?
There’s an obvious reason: getting attention to a new thing is hard, and giving something to people for free is an easy way to show them what you’re doing.
We were also confident that, to the right audience, this was a really high quality thing. It’s not just another setting for 5e, nor is it just another allegedly “norse” setting that has no research behind it. It’s a set of additional rules that fundamentally change and structure the way you play 5e. And the research is solid. It’s not your typical “ren-faire dnd in clothes from HBO’s Vikings” effort. This is a game made by people with decades of experience in researching this period for games. With a commitment to exploring something of the mindsets of that era underpinning a load of monster-slaying good times.
At its heart, BEOWULF still makes use 5e, and that’s both accessible and easy for a lot of people to play. (Don’t @ me, it’s a massive game with a huge audience.) But BEOWULF does some cool extra stuff, and we wanted to show that.
Getting people to cast their eyes over that cool stuff is a lot easier if you show it to them, and let them play it for themselves, rather than just tell them about it. It’s why most of our titles have some kind of sampler, intro scenario of free thing you can enjoy. We’re happy to show you what we’re up to.
We also knew that there’s a danger with “QuickStarts” where you gut your own game to emphasise the quick part. We didn’t want to do that. So The Hermit’s Sanctuary has everything you need to play.
It was a risky strategy on some ways. We’re giving you everything you need to play BEOWULF. But it was a calculated risk. Showing off our ideas and the way we present them, the art, the production values? It was worth taking that gamble.
And it paid off! The Hermit’s Sanctuary was nominated for two ENnies, and BEOWULF itself also got an ENnie nomination. The subsequent crowd funder was a success, and BEOWULF remains a great seller for us. Thanks Hermit’s Sanctuary! You’ve done us proud!
There’s also a less obvious reason, and we’ll talk about that tomorrow.
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Cold City Hot War Conflict Resolution
Cold City and Hot War are live now on Kickstarter!
Let’s talk a bit about the core mechanic.
When it comes to resolving conflicts in Cold City and Hot War, both the players and the GM have access to groups of dice to roll, and they gamble on how many to use in a given conflict.
The GM’s dice pool is drawn from groups representing different thematic elements of the setting. The players help allocate dice into the groups at the start of play.
The players build dice pools based on the things on their character sheet.
The things drawn upon to add dice to a pool are put at risk in a conflict.
Continue reading “Cold City Hot War Conflict Resolution”Cold City How War campaign video
FiveEvil Opening Spreads
Hello! Let’s have a FiveEvil update!
We were especially impressed with the opening chapter of FiveEvil as we were editing it.
It contains this really amazing set of muscular and compact guidance on playing the game, the horror genre, and safety tools. Morgue has done a brilliant job on it.
We didn’t think it was the right thing to just flow these thoughts into 2 columns – they’d get lost, and each piece is really powerfully written and deserved a bit more. We want the reader to slow down and take each one in, and to be able to track back, reread and reflect on them. They really are important.
So we’ve laid out the first chapter in a slightly more involved way, and we thought you might like to see a couple of sample spreads. The underlying art isn’t quite final yet, but it shows where it’s going. There’s more to each of these sections than is shown here, but you get the idea hopefully.
