Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland ENnies Emporium Late Pledge store

Hello,
Hope this finds you well!
We have the pledge manager all set up, and the first 10% of surveys have gone out as a smoke test to check everything works ok. Once those are done and everything looks like it's working, I'll send out the rest. Hopefully that will be on or before this Monday the 10th of August.

I am aiming to lock orders around the 15th of the month, and then charge cards on the 17th, so we can keep everything moving along.

Late Pledges are Open!
If you missed the campaign, you can still get on board here.

Boring Housekeeping
It's much much easier for us, and better for you, if everyone does their survey in the next week or so. It's not long or complex - we just need your address for shipping, and a card to pay for shipping if you pledged for physical rewards. Once your survey is done we also get your email for PDFs. You'll also get a chance to pledge for anything else you might want.

I'll remind everyone of this when the main body of surveys goes out in a couple of days, but:
If you don't do your survey by the 15th of August, we'll put your pledge into "phase two" shipping. That will be a separate process to the main dispatch, and we will make all the arrangements for phase two once phase one is done. 

This means I do not know exactly when phase two backers will have their rewards shipped - ou of fairness, our priority has to be folks who do their survey nice and fast.

Later on, we'll set a date for locking phase two, and if you miss that, you'll go into phase 3. If you miss that, then I'll keep your money and spend it on sweets and crisps. Yum!

So please do that survey when it arrives with you! I have my waistline to think of!

Here endeth the boring housekeeping, and here's some of the latest images from the GMs Companion!

Hello!
Just a quick bit of housekeeping so you know we're working on things!

I haven't used Backerkit before, so this is all quite new to me. The funds have arrived with us now, and the pledge manager is under construction. Once that's in place I will know who has pledged for what exactly and will get those PDFs out to you. I thought I'd be able to do it sooner, but it appears not! Won't be long though.

Hey, I've been making a bog to illustrate one of the GM's Companion scenarios, and I figure it'll see quite a lot of use. The water isn't quite dry yet, so this is not its final form, but I thought you might like to see it! Everyone loves a Friday bog!

Anyway, I won't keep you, as it's the weekend, but I did want to check in and say everything is moving forward!

Thanks!
Jon

Hello!
At the final hour a kindly backer has been in touch to say that they noticed the Maskwitches Book Bundle deal seems to have a mistake in it. It's £155, but the value of the books in it is only £125!

And this is correct - originally when I set it up it also included Pine Pitch Black, but I opted to take that out because it didn't feel right to "make" anyone buy two copies of the core book. But the change in price didn't stick!



If you see this update, and you're a bundle backer, please move to the new cheaper £120 option asap. The old option is now hidden, so no one else will pledge for it.

I have asked Backerkit to change the amount that the old pledge will charge anyone who doesn't move, and they're been super helpful as anticipated. But it's yet to happen and time is short.

In the meantime this is a solution I can personally implement, which fixes the issue.

If that backstage fix doesn't happen in time I will of course refund everyone who has overpaid - we don't want to take any money we're not due! Or you'll be able to put it towards your shipping if you just want to leave it as is.

The main thing is we will of course look after you and make sure that you pay the right price. It's a simple mistake on my part, and I'm very grateful to Ray who spotted it! I also appreciate the faith of folks who went in at £155. Thank you.



Right! That bit of housekeeping over with, let's see what the final hours bring! It's been an amazing whirlwind of a campaign, and I've been very excited to see us bouncing around the top five of the Emporium leaderboard. We're a tiny operation, and with a book that has just one person doing art and writing we don't have much bandwidth to get the word out, so it's been great to see such positivity around a truly niche game! Thank you!


Jon

Hey you! Hope this finds you well!
I managed to find some time this evening to chat with Fede from Zephyr, also nominated for best art in last year's ENnies, also in the Emporium, and if you back both campaigns you get EXTRA STUFF OMG - an actual copy of a|state in PDF and Nibiru in PDF. That's 4 for 2. Not bad.
Anyway we chatted at some length about all the art and research and humanity in our games. Check it out, and tell all your friends that there's only a couple of days left to get on board!

Hello!

Wow thanks for all your amazing support! We'll firm up exactly what we're putting into the Witch Pouch reward - we've certainly gone a lot further than we expected to. There will stickers and art cards aplenty! (And for previous backers of Maskwitches these will be new stickers and cards - not just a repeat of the previous pack) Since this is a Ready-to-Ship campaign I don't think we'll do formal Achievements, but we'll see!

So! We've shown a lot of artwork - this is the easy stuff to get folks interested in Maskwitches. But what about the game system that powers it?

Maskwitches uses The Silver Road, which is available as a PWYW title on DrivethruRPG. While those rules form the basis of the game, there's some key additions to Maskwitches which really make it sing - we developed Maskwitches after months of Silver Road play. More on those additions below.

The Silver Road is a very rules light, narrative game, where the players and the GM share a lot of power over the story you tell together. It grew out of my home group playing games "wrongly", and realising we had a set of rules we should write down.

In the Silver Road rules every character is defined by two things they are good at, and two things they are bad at. These can be anything, and you make them up yourself. In Maskwitches there's a load of suggestions, which are largely practical things. But once you've played a few games you might want to try out some more esoteric subjects for "good at" and "bad at".



Play proceeds much as you'd expect for a tabletop roleplaying game, which each person taking the role of one witch, and a Game Meditator facilitating the opening of a story.

When your characters come up against an obstacle - and what constitutes an obstacle is varied and determines a lot of the nature of your individual story, you roll a single six sided dice, and your narration is guided by the result.

If it involves something you're good at, you succeed on any roll except a 1. If you roll a 1 you face a consequence, but overcome it on your next turn.

If it involves something you're bad at, you can only succeed on the roll of a 6. Otherwise you face a consequence.

Consequences are "pre-programmed" for each obstacle, and take the form of storytelling prompts, such as "someone is hurt" or "something is broken", and they're cycled through until the obstacle is overcome. Sometimes they can be a little more lateral, like "someone remembers something they'd forgotten" - they're not always negative.

Who you deal with a consequence, you as the player whose character is suffering it narrates what happens. It might not involve your character directly - "someone is hurt" for example, could be anyone in the scene. Or indeed someone somewhere else. It's up to you to play creatively and make a story together.

In the game you don't track any numerical resources. You're not trying to get to the end of the scenario with enough "mechanics stuff" left to win. Maskwitches isn't concerned with that stuff. Which is very freeing - you can take on consequences for your own character, or be handed them by someone else. You're not going to lose anything by such reverses - it's just a twist in the story.



In Maskwitches, the things your witch is good at are represented by masks. When you're wearing your "Good at convincing people" mask, you're good at just that. A key feature of Maskwitches is that you can swap masks around the group of characters, making their identities purposefully very fluid and posing some interesting questions about who they are. Sometimes you'll find or make new masks.


The things you are bad at are represented by amulets, which the witches carry as symbols of their human frailty and weaknesses. You may gain amulets as play proceeds.




The maskwitches exist to protect the hunter gatherer groups that roam The Land. When things go wrong for people, and disharmony starts to take hold, evil spirits are spawned and start to cause serious problems. This isn't "hiding things" or causing a bit of bad luck - they're 10,000 year old spirits from the ice made of dog teeth and birch tar, and generally they kill people. A Maskwitches scenario is always about hunting down a spirit and driving it off or destroying it.



The only weapon effective against a Spirit is the amulet of a witch.  So Maskwitches hunt down a spirit with the intent of leveraging their own weakness, and thus destroying the spirit. Think of it as a bit of a scapegoat thing. The witches understand their human weaknesses, and suffer them on behalf of the community. Witches know there are a range of useful activities in pursuing the Spirit - its name, where it might be and so on, all of which empower them to defeat it. 

In the final battle with a Spirit the players are seeking to gather all the faces of a die, rolled in battle with the Spirit, using their weaknesses.



Alongside this are three other key parts of play:

Magic numbers. Every player has a magic number. When it appears at the table during any roll they can “butt in” and change the direction of the story with a “but…”

Knap tokens. Witches that carry out witch activities like crafting, consulting an elder witch, reading patterns in the ice caves and the like, which are all detailed in the book, in order win knap tokens. These let players shift a die roll by one face per knap spent. That means they can avoid consequences for them and their friends, get to butt in, and most importantly move the die faces in that final battle to get a faster win without enduring too many consequences.



Predestined Events. The GM maintains a list of events which are triggered when so many of a particular die face are rolled. These can be anything they like, and you can play with them open, so you know when things are coming down the pike, or you can play closed without knowing. 

 
There’s a more thorough FAQ for the rules, with a lot of the thinking explained, over on our website here: https://handiwork.games/home/the-silver-road/the-silver-road-maskwitches-faq

Hopefully that gives you a bit more insight into what the game is all about and how it plays!

“Maskwitches was one of the most immersive, emotional and dramatic games I ever ran.” – Royston Harwood, Maskwitches playtester