Jon at Handiwork Games

A photograph of a spread from FiveEvil showing the nuclear explosion piece in situ, along with some freakish doll art.

FiveEvil is our standalone horror game by @fromthemorgue.bsky.social It’s very clever and really good. In fact it was the last thing I played.

The hardcover is in stock now: handiwork.games/fiveevil

A piece of art from FiveEvil - a montage with a man smoking a cigarette overlays with a round ashtray full of stubbed out cigarettes. The word “PUSH” appears written backwards, as if it’s on the other side of a glass door or seen in a mirror.

A piece of FiveEvil art that montages a nuclear explosion into a painterly US city scape. It’s all in reds and oranges.

A gloomy painterly image in earthy tones of two figures wandering towards a ruined Manor house.

A montage from FiveEvil. A tall image of a railway tunnel or mine, with a skeleton lying between the tracks. Above the tunnel is a painterly rendition of a pistol.

Diving into some FiveEvil art tomorrow for the new book “Netherworlds”. Really enjoyed working on these - montages and paint overs and assemblages is something I’ve always enjoyed doing, way back to the earliest days of my art foundation course. Nothing is wasted eh? FiveEvil is a handsome book.

The cover of Hot War on a tablet. The cover is red with the logo in white splashing across a map of London.

Just released! Hot War Second Edition by @malcolmcraig.bsky.social
A game of friends, enemies, secrets and consequences in the aftermath.

Preorder the print edition at our web store: handiwork.games/product/hot-...

Or get the PDF @drivethrurpg.com
www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/5... #coldcity

Oh shit LOADS of Palladium Fantasy and TMNT. Like an ungodly amount of Palladium Fantasy.

Never played much scifi though I don’t think. Oh wait - a lot of Cyberpunk. I played in one Twilight 2000 game with a different group during a friends tiff, & it was absolutely terrible due to wildly divergent play styles. No talking in character or roleplaying with NPCs of any kind. Just killins.

We played dnd, but it was one among many, and never really felt like the 800lb gorilla. Which may account for why I still like it. We did the lot really - Dragon Warriors, Maelstrom, BECMI, AD&D, GW non-Glorantha Runequest (never been taken with Glorantha), CoC, MERP, WFRP, and our own games.

Hot War Second Edition. "Work together for a brighter future."

Print pre-order with free PDF: handiwork.games/product/hot-...

PDF: www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/5...

Nice!

The Cold City Hot War Slipcase

The Hot War Play Pack, comprising maps, character sheets, a play sheet, and various in-world ephemera.

(And if you have a poke around you'll also find you can order the slipcase, and the play packs, but social media can only take so much in one post!) handiwork.games/product-cate...

The cover of Hot War on a tablet. The cover is red with the logo in white splashing across a map of London.

Just released! Hot War Second Edition by @malcolmcraig.bsky.social
A game of friends, enemies, secrets and consequences in the aftermath.

Preorder the print edition at our web store: handiwork.games/product/hot-...

Or get the PDF @drivethrurpg.com
www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/5... #coldcity

A 3d mockup of Cold City and Hot War books and supporting literature. Plus a mug and some painkillers because we know our audience.

Just now I’m collecting material from the Cold City Hot War Kickstarter campaign updates to repost on our blog. There’s a lot of material there explaining in detail how the games work.

But I’d forgotten I’d made these 3d mockups of the games and supporting material.

I could animate these…

A random mask from the Maskwitches Mask Generator app. This mask has longhair, a garland of harpoons and a slate eye protector

A mask from the Maskwitches mask generator app. This mask is made from a seed pod and has roots for antlers.

A mask from the Maskwitches mask generator app. This mask is slightly comical, with a round wooden faceplate and acorn eyes, with a little surprised looking mouth hole.

A mask from the Maskwitches mask generator app. This mask is quite serious looking with a stone for a faceplate, weird mismatched cod eyes a bone antlers.

Haven’t done one of these in ages! Our Maskwitches Mask generator is free to use. You can generate masks for your maskwitches, even print them to make into actual masks. You can also generate characters too. Works on your phone or desktop. Nice.

handiwork.games/maskwitches-...

A trio of weird Knucklebones minis organic looking sci-fi machine miniatures against a Pro Series 1 Backdrop

A trio of weird Knucklebones minis organic looking sci-fi machine miniatures against a Pro Series 1 Backdrop

A trio of weird Knucklebones minis organic looking sci-fi machine miniatures against a Pro Series 1 Backdrop

Behind the scenes of photo shoot of a trio of weird Knucklebones minis organic looking sci-fi machine miniatures against a Pro Series 1 Backdrop

Having some smoke machine fun with some Knucklebones Miniatures weird stuff and the new Pro Series Backdrop Book in A3 (It's out now on the Handiwork Games web store in A3 and A4) handiwork.games/product-cate...

A photo of some converted Gunpla kits all rusty and tufty in front of a Skies Backdrop Book.

A photo of some converted Gunpla kits all rusty and tufty in front of a Skies Backdrop Book.

A photo of some converted Gunpla kits all rusty and tufty in front of a Skies Backdrop Book.

A photo of some converted Gunpla kits all rusty and tufty in front of a Skies Backdrop Book.

More Sunday Backdrop classics - rusty rewilded gunpla. Using the Skies Book and the Deserts and Warmer Climes Book.

#jhbackdrops #gunpla

I have a TED talk about how "games as vectors to make accoutrements, which profit everyone except the customer", which just needs a final scene about how the accoutrements WE make are different and good. (I mean they are - they all can be replaced by buttons or a pencil, by design. But still: irony)

Once again it is time to be clear in how much I enjoy Seyed's reviews. I have found them extremely enlightening about our own material. The summaries of systems are really sharp.
I've said it before, but I really admire Seyed's ability to engage with creator intentions. Nice.

Inevitable post-script: "They've lost 35k before they begin" was inaccurate language. "Lost" is incorrect.

"Spent" is better to aid understanding that spending money to make money is absolutely fine and dandy as a concept, but you probably wanna be careful with how much and for what reason.

What I like about this sort of maths is the independence it offers. You gather data from observation, and then make decisions for you, and your specific needs and desires. You know what you’re doing and why. And that’s my ideal place to be.

Right I better do some work eh?

But what I like isn’t the point. It’s YOUR project/business/game/art. Even defining which of those things best categorises your efforts is important.

A lot of words for some “know thyself” Socrates guff. ;)

Again, maybe the big-splash-plus-template is how you want to roll. That might be your ideal way of working. Cool!

I’ve done that and I didn’t love it as much as I love moving slower and more directly, without farming creative stuff out. I can’t knock “big” as I learned my trade doing it that way.

The model you choose determines a bunch of other stuff. To deliver a larger offering can potentially takes more people. Which moves what you’re doing closer to needing to be templated. Which is fine. But it’s not nothing, creatively. Templating (a term I’m using very broadly here) sets a tone.

Now the flip side is there are some efficiencies in doing 4 together. You can ship them all at once from the printer, you have a larger lump sum to negotiate down expenditures, potentially. For me that doesn’t hold up against quality of life benefits of going slower. But there are reasons to do it.

If that same Kickstarter is paying 25% to a promoter, and 10% to the platform? They’ve lost 35% before they begin. So they’re making 4 books on 65k. Thats 16.25 a book. Whoops. That’s quite a lot of pain for fancy optics.

So examples. A Kickstarter that makes (say) 100k looks groovy. And that has optics benefits. But if it’s for 4 big books? That’s 25k a book, with a lot of deliverables. I know we can fairly reliably get 25k a book and spread that work across time. Heck I know we can do 30, and make 120k for the 4.

And hey - as I’m often attempting to do - this isn’t about “good” vs “bad”. It’s about understanding what you might choose to do and why. For me, it’s really important to constantly be searching for the sweet spot of costs vs creativity vs quality of life for our purposefully small team.

And you’d start to get a sense of what levels of risk vs reward you’re happy with as a creator or company runner, and the kind of projects you want to make.

I’m a massive fan of getting under the hood on the numbers to understand why you might want to do or not do a given thing.

It can then get quite exciting (for certain values of “exciting”) when you look at how that content is delivered. Does it use a lot of freelancers? Did it use/require third party promotion? Some folks are paying north of 30% of their total and more, which is wild

Random publishing thoughts 🧵 : it’s interesting to do maths and work out how much a crowdfunding effort has made per equivalent item offered or even per page of content. You can then usually also work out some ratios for the size of the team working on it. It can be surprising stuff.

Making Maskwitches Behind the scenes of Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland

Thanks! If you have time to wander around a blog, there’s a bunch of stuff over this way: making-maskwitches.ghost.io

A selfie of OP with a stupid moustache.

Hey talking about hair remember when I grew a moustache for men’s mental health charities & I absolutely hated it but accidentally raised loads, and then in the middle of “movember” had to deal with some of the worst news a person can get while sporting a ridiculous frikkin handlebar moustache? Jfc