Beowulf Miniatures

 A bunch of freshly painted minis for tonight's Beowulf show down with the Sea Serpent.  These represent the Heroes' followers and Local NOCS.  All minis are 28mm Gripping Beast.

Beowulf Adventure 1. The Hermit’s Sanctuary

 

My new bookmark fits the theme nicely!

The first Beowulf Adventure is the Hermit's Sanctuary, which Handiwork made available as a free download on Drive Thru RPG.  You get some pre-generated characters, a lite version of the rules and a very nice scenario.  This was created as a teaser for their kickstarter and like everything else connected with the game was nicely produced.

This adventure is a bit Agatha Christie with Trolls.  You hero (or in our case party of heroes0 goes to the aid of an isolated island sanctuary beset my a recently appearing monster.  The party had great fun working though what is essentially a looked room mystery.  The socail interactions with NOCs are nicely thought out.  For instance the order that you approach the NOCt matters  as success with one chaacter may lead to a better (or wrse) chance of success with another.  They had to peice together bits of the mystery from the NPC's stories, ancient standing stones and other evidence.

 This was my first experience as DM in 40 years, and my first  experience with DnD 5e so I was rusty and made lots of errors.  I was too easy on my party, but it was fun with a good end result.  They solved the mystery, killed the Monster, sorted out a few things with the NPCs and sailed away.  Another weekends work for the Dark Age adventurer!

What I Played During Lockdown

Our group did a number of Zoom games during the lockdowns over the last year.  One of the games was an RPG campaign DMed by me using Handiwork Games Beowulf game.  We had a lot of fun with this very well put together and thematic RPG.  It is based on early medieval epics such as the Anglo Saxon Beowulf, although there’s room for Danish, Slavic and Celtic heroes and even Irish Saints.

Beowulf is by Handiwork Games and is best described as a DnD 5e hack.  They took the core 5e mechanism, hacked out a few bits and added different stuff.  Gone are magic using PCs, DnD alignments, and character classes.  Every PC is a hero, essentially a beefed up fighter and the only magic is run by the DM or NPCs.  They have really bought into the early medieval theme and the world created holds up very well.Beowulf was designed to be run in tandem play, one DM and one Heroic PC with a number of NPC followers representing the heroes’ followers.  However, we’ve run it using a party of up to four PCs and it’s worked very well.  I just scaled back the follower NPCs and scaled up the bad guys as required

AHPC Beowulf Characters for the Snowlord

Here's my response to the challnge issued by Curt. I'll have posts about our Beowulf games shortly.

 

My last post and it's my two figures to lay at the Snowlord's feet.  I present two 28mm figures of the Heroes Ham Anfeald and Ibn Uthman from Handiwork Games Beowulf RPG.  These were 3D printed by Curt for me.

A bit of background.  I'm am not an RPG nerd and I am way more of a historical gamer than anything else.  But I was given inspiration by former Challenger Edwin to investigate the Kickstarter for this game.  I liked what I saw, story based adventures focused on a specific era and location and really honouring the source materials.  So I jumped on and the Kickstarted hit tons of goals and is delivering the goods.

Ibn Uthman, Warroir poet of Baghdad is Curt's character.  He's been exiled for too clever word play and is fairly clearly modelled on Ahmad ibn Fadlan (as was Antonio Banderas' character in 13th Warrior).  I've tired to match the illustration below the Beowulf materials (the artwork in these is lovely).

Gamewise Beowulf is best described as a dnd hack.  They took the base mechanisms from 5e DnD and took out the character classes (everyone PC is a hero) , PC magic use, alignment and races.  They then added in their own versions to suit the era and setting.  It's designed for GM and one player, but we've played it with a group and it worked well.  I'll need to brush up on my rules and GM skills and also I need to make the masters tougher, but game play was good IMHO.

The setting is the misty historical era between the fall of Rome and the rise of Charlemagne and there are terrific opportunities there.   This is the era of Beowulf, Arthur, the Irish Saints and the Sutton Hoo king where history and myth blend together.  I'm a sucker for a historical link so I did my fall gardening chores listening to Seamus Heaney reading Beowulf, dusty o my histories of Sub-Roman Britain and am trying to figure out which translation fo the Venerable Bede I should pick up..

I hand painted the shield using my "looks good from 3 feet" standard based on historical arab designs.

Ham Anfeald is Stacy's character and is a merchant ship captain looking for more lucrative opportunities. Again I've tried to match the illustration below.  Dark age colours are muted which requires a level of subtlety that eludes me but I'm fairly happy with the results.  the forges themselves are nicely posed with good features.  Metal versions are available as well.

It's been a good challenge.  I hit my points target, made it to the Snowlord's altar in time and got the coveted Skull of the Week award.  I didn't paint everything that I planned to but isn't that the way things go...