An Introduction to Forgotten Doggerland
And the making of the Maskwitches Redux
Who is this?
My name is Jon Hodgson. I’ve been working on the tabletop games and print media industry for 25 years. I’ve also worked in TV and film, and spend many years as a props maker.
I’ve worked on a troubling broad range of tabletop games, from Dungeons and Dragons (3e, 3.5e, 4e and 5e), Warhammer Historical, a range of Tolkien Games (The One Ring, Adventures in Middle-earth, The Battle of Five Armies, a single card for The War of the Ring, and more), fan favourites like Dragon Warriors, Legend of the Five Rings, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (1st, 2nd and 4th editions), Pathfinder, as well as classic indies like Spione, Dust Devils, and new classics like Beyond the Wall, Old School Essentials, and so many more.
These days I own and run Handiwork Games, a developer and publisher of our own games, which also functions as a studio, providing help to other companies with our small but incredibly talented and experienced team. We publish BEOWULF Age of Heroes, a|state Second Edition, as well as a range of high end accessories.
In 2022, I wrote and published a game called Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland.
This year (2024) I’m making a new edition with all new artwork.
About Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland
Maskwitches is a very strange project. The name came out of nowhere, and stuck. And I immediately knew that it had to become a real thing.
Every part of the game is experimental and weird. The creation of it has taken me to some extremely unusual places and provided some very odd experiences indeed. I’ll be sharing more about those in future. The first edition was kickstarted, raising over twenty thousand pounds in a week long campaign, and was published in soft and hardcover.
The setting of the game is that of what we now call Doggerland - the area that now lies under the North Sea. 8000 years ago Doggerland was finally drowned by the rising sea levels as the earth warmed and the great ice sheets that had once spread across Northern Europe melted, filling up the low lying territory of Doggerland. Events within the game take place some time before that. The waters are rising.
The game places players in the role of the eponymous Maskwitches, charged with protecting the People of the Land, maintaining harmony and spiritual well-being. This is especially important as when things go wrong for the community, terrifying evil spirits are spawned that only the Maskwitches can battle and defeat.
Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland has seen me embark on a journey into historical research and imaginative interpretation. It is a fantasy, but it’s based on a serious amount of reading about the Mesolithic period in Northern Europe. I have read books which I have found incredibly hard to understand, and learned a vast amount. Through working in Maskwitches I’ve learned a great deal about my own neurodiversity. So far it’s been a wild ride, and it’s barely getting started.
It is a breathtakingly rules-light game, and players have enormous control over what happens in the story they create together.
The first edition was an experiment with the then-fledgling technology of so- called “AI” image generation. That entire field has developed away from curious widget that made wildly unpredictable and weird images into something quite different. In 2022 I decided to stop using it.
Maskwitches remains a game I want to write and publish new material for. And I want people to be able to play it. And so I am currently hard at work making new artwork for a Redux Edition.
That artwork seeks to maintain the otherworldly, unsettling atmosphere of the original, evoking an alien and mysterious world of the deep past, where there is no “indoors” as we would recognise it, no agriculture, no kings, or war. The world is that of hunter gatherers and their very different way of life to that which we recognise.
I want to make something quite unique, mixing props and models, photography, digital painting and mixed media art to make a really different-looking tabletop game.
The game has oblique things to say about identity, the environment, history and culture. It’s been very satisfying to see the first edition find favour with an audience interested in these topics.
There’s a dedicated webpage for the game here: https://handiwork.games/home/the-silver-road/maskwitches-of-forgotten-doggerland
What’s all this then?
I’m finding myself making almost daily updates to my personal Facebook page about the production of new visuals for Maskwitches.
It doesn’t feel right to fill up either the Handiwork Games blog, which is there to update folks on everything we do, nor my illustration pages on social media, with such focused and prolific content.
But I do want to share the development of the new edition. So here we are.
I’ll still be sharing Maskwitches stuff on social media - it won’t all be corralled solely here. But this will be the place to get all of the content, longer form articles, and it will serve as a browsable, dedicated document of the game’s progress into the new Redux edition. I’ll also be sharing other written pieces that I come up with which might only be tangentially related to Maskwitches. But hopefully still broadly of interest if you’re into what I do.
Please do subscribe to get each post delivered direct to your email in box, and that way ensure you don’t miss anything. And thanks in advance for joining me in documenting this whole weird business!