At the end of the last ice age, as the earth warmed and the tides rose, the area we now call Doggerland was subject to ever-rising tides, and finally a vast tidal wave, and was lost forever.

Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland is a psychedelic Mesolithic storytelling game, placing your stories in Forgotten Doggerland – the land that lies drowned beneath the North Sea. You’ll take the role of the Maskwitches, tasked with protecting the roaming bands of hunter gatherers from evil spirits.

Designed by Jon Hodgson (co-creator, writer, artist: BEOWULF Age of Heroes, artist: Dungeons and Dragons, writer, artist, creative director: Adventures In Middle-earth, The One Ring RPG), this unique, standalone RPG and setting book is illustrated using props, models, sets, photography and digital painting.

We're delighted to have been invited to take part in this year's ENnies Emporium as a nominee for Best Art in the 2025 ENnie Awards. You'll be able to pledge for all the Maskwitches books we've published so far, and they're ready to ship out right away!

Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland has been nominated for Best Art in both the 2025 ENnie Awards, and the 2024 Indie Groundbreaker Awards. The books are unique and beautiful, presenting RPG visuals in a manner never before seen.

Maskwitches is be presented as a standalone hardcover, 21cm square, full-colour book, 168 pages in length. Maskwitches contains all the rules you need to play.

We will print the physical books as soon as the funds arrive after the kickstarter, should we be lucky enough to fund. 

The PDF comes free with the book, and is fully bookmarked and hyperlinked. The PDF will be delivered to you when the campaign funds arrive, approximately 2 weeks after the campaign ends. 

We do not use so-called "AI" to make Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland or any of our other games.

As a project, the first edition Maskwitches began as an experiment in 2021 with a very early beta iteration of a so-called "AI" image generator, when the things it made were absolutely wild and gloriously broken. As an artist I think it's important to investigate these things, and experiment with them.

In 2022, when it became clear that so-called AI was not being ethically trained or run and was not something I wished to use or be associated with, I stopped using it entirely and somewhat ambitiously pivoted the entire project to handmade models. I didn't want to abandon the game along with it, so started again, this time on extremely hard mode.

Hopefully the success of the post-AI game and the scope and ambition of this 100% handmade project provides inspiration for others in what can be done by one human with sufficient hot glue and ADHD.

If you'd like to learn more about the behind the scenes stuff, there's a blog all about it here.

We've collected the best of the behind the scenes material into the Making Maskwitches book, which you can get as part of this campaign.

We’re especially excited to be able to offer a new title as part of this campaign. The GM’s Companion to Maskwitches presents our collected wisdom from two years of running the game, and is packed with behind the scenes thoughts on how each part of the game can be constructed and run. It’s full of inspirational material for your games, and of course full of brand new imagery from Forgotten Doggerland. It also contains three modular story scenarios.

You can pledge for just this book on its own if you already own Maskwitches, you can add it into a pledge as an Add On, or pick a bundle that includes this exciting new title.

We're offering all of the physical books and PDFs in the Maskwitches line as Add Ons. We also have a selection of Handiwork Games titles in PDF that you can Add On too. Just click the rewards tab to find out more about those.

Every reward tier contains access to The Witch Pouch, or in the case of PDF tiers, the Electric Witch Pouch. These are collections of extra "stuff", which we'll send to all reward tier backers. As we go we'll add more things to the pouch and the electric pouch. Expect art cards, stickers, cards detailing spirits and that kind of thing.

Zephyr: An Anarchist Fantasy Game of Fleeting Identities was also nominated for Best Art in the 2025 ENnie Awards. We're delighted to say we've teamed up with Arakauna Media to offer some special rewards if you back both campaigns.

If you back both campaigns you'll get a free PDF of our game a|state second edition and a copy of Arakauna's first game Niburu in PDF.

The people of Forgotten Doggerland don’t call it “Doggerland”. That’s a modern name, coined by archaeologist Bryony Coles FBA, FSA, taken from the Doggerbank region of the North Sea, itself named after Dutch cod fishing vessels. The people who live there in our imagined Mesolithic just call it “The Land”.

The people of The Land live in scattered community groups scattered across a landscape understood less by space than by the different tasks undertaken in order to survive and travelled-through in a seasonal rhythm. As fisher-hunter-gatherers, the people of The Land build very few permanent dwellings, and hoard no surpluses. Status is gained by how much food an individual provides for the group.

Once the sun sets the only light is their temporary fires - they make no permanent hearths, and have little practical portable light. The invention of agriculture is yet to reach what we now call Doggerland. 

The people know that things are changing. The fenlands are growing every season, and marshes are becoming brackish. The habits of animals are changing, and they’re less keen to give themselves to hunters.

They also know that as people grow more hungry and the rhythms of tasks are forced to change the more spirits are rising to trouble the community.

These ancient spectres come from the melting ice, from the rising pools of brackish fens, from the smoke of a bone fire, or the sap-fumes of a lightning-struck tree. With names like The Howling Bone Grinder, and The Gasping Billow-cracked Pus-Bloom, and taking on a thousand different shapes, spirits are a terrifying existential threat to the people of The Land.

The only defense the people have against these ancient evils are the Maskwitches. You will take the role of these Maskwitches in their battle to protect the community.

In The Silver Road rules, each character is defined by two things they’re good at and two things they are bad at (there's more about The Silver Road rules below). In Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland, these take the form of the masks the witches wear, and amulets they carry. Witches are able to trade and change their masks, making their characters’ identities extremely fluid.

The only effective weapons against spirits are the amulets of the Maskwitches - the symbols of their human frailty and weakness.

In order to battle a spirit, the Maskwitches will need to find out its name and weaknesses. 

They might need to undertake a journey to seek the wisdom of the vanishingly rare elders of their group. 

They might journey to ancient caves or ritual sites to uncover tools and information for the battle. 

They might work to discover and explore a painting cave, and there collaborate in a new story that provides them information, new masks and amulets, all at the risk of breaking or transforming their current arsenal of masks and amulets. 

They might need to craft a witchknife.

Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland contains a wealth of inspirational material to help create your story about a corner of The Land, the people there, and why they are being troubled by spirits. You'll get tools to name and describe the horrific spirits, and define how they must be defeated, as well as tools to create characters and the landscape in which they live. In common with all Silver Road titles, inspirational material is presented in lists numbered in 6s, optionally allowing you to deploy a dice to generate endless inspiration details.

In addition to the imagined mesolithic (middle stone age) setting, Maskwitches also presents a 1960s/70s setting in the vein of the novels of Susan Cooper and Alan Garner with mechanical support to overlay the core setting. The Forgotten Doggerland events taking place in flashback, with significant objects and entities connected across the ages. This is an entirely optional section, but we enjoy it!

We have a variety of Maskwitches dice, tokens and a wicked little dice tray available on the Handiwork Games web store. Since this is a “Ready to Ship” event, we want to make shipping as smooth and fast as possible. That means we’re not offering these Maskwitches items for this campaign - we’ll stick to just books for this one!

We do also offer course make a ton of other games. While we’re offering PDFs of those as Add Ons, we’ve opted not to offer all our differently shaped books in this campaign for the same reason. This one is Maskwitches books all the way down!

Shipping will be handled with our fulfilment partners in the UK who are experts at shipping parcels all around the world.

We estimate that shipping of the corebook will be approximately:
UK: £7
EU: £20, for a Duty Paid service.
US: £15 (Books are tariff free, and we pay the admin fees)

We'll charge shipping for Add ons in weight bands and charged at cost.

PDFs will be fulfilled by coupons for DrivethruRPG

This is a Ready-to-Ship campaign. All the books will be ready to be printed as soon as we know how many we'll need.

We print in the UK, so there's no long wait for international cargo shipping. We also believe in this as a sustainability and human rights matter.

We anticipate having books on hand one month after we receive the funds at the end of the campaign.

PDF rewards will be supplied by DrivethruRPG as soon as we receive the campaign funds.