Bestiary playtesting update: The Hobyah

We haven’t been sitting still with A Bestiary of Enchanted England (coming to Kickstarter in October 2022). We’ve been making good use of time to add a fun in-character spin to the presentation and to do in-house playtestin of the creature’s statistics. Here’s a preview of the Hobyah by Mark Lawford! (Details are still subject to change as we do further playtesting and editing.)

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A gang of wicked goblins

The Hobyah

Illustration by Teresa Guido

Beware the Hobyah! A gang of wicked sharp-toothed goblins that come out at night, they are, all a-chanting “Hobyah! Hobyah! Hobyah!” as they look for your house. They be wiry little fellows with knotty joints, pointed heads and horrible faces, and they wear all ragged clothes of them they have killed before.

But if you are to protect you and your family - this here little one yours is she - then it’s a dog you need. See, they are right-scared of dogs, ‘tis well known, and like to turn tail and run at the sound of their barking. So get yourself a dog. Like this one here. He’s for sale, you know. A good dog, an all. No messing and no fussing, but he’ll see off the Hobyah before they can break into your house and carry you away, so he will.

Nasty, horrible, nighttime goblins, about four feet in height with pointed heads, pointy-chinned faces, and rows of sharp serrated teeth. Individually weak, the gang is modeled as a Mob (Magonomia, page 138) of a dozen or so.

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The Fate system makes it easy to combine multiple nameless NPCs into a mob that behaves like a single, much tougher, character. This takes a lot of burden off the GM, freeing them up to be the narrator of a dramatic scene. Our playtest was a stand-up fight between three wizards and a mob of a half-dozen Hobyah. Individually, they’re weak, but when you combine their combat statistics they become quite fearsome! Our mob was a match for all three of our example characters (Deborah, Ghida, and Aonghas) — and it would be easy to challenge more wizards by adding more Hobyah to the mob! We ended up reducing their individual damage tolerance so players can wear down that big group faster, before they run out of Fate Points. The end result is that if you do fight them, they’re ferocious at the start but then buckle if the PCs are able to hit back a few times. This feels about right: the Hobyah will mob ya! But after the playtest, the don’t have staying power any more.

Adventure in the works: "The Angry Birds of Essex"

Yesterday we played the second playtest of a new adventure for Magonomia, “The Angry Birds of Essex” by Jaclyn Lewis.

The wizards have been volun-told to investigate a disturbance in the market town of Coggeshall in Essex. Townfolk are fleeing their homes saying the place is accursed by a faerie queen. It is time to put your hard-won arcane skills to the test. Confront the menace and save the village! Fame awaits you if you prevail, and perhaps a still greater reward -- knowledge!

This is a short, 2-3 hour adventure that will become part of a new, free Quick Start product. The playtests have gone very well: the story is solid and easy to run. There’s more than one way to succeed. Actual statistics of the titular “angry birds” need a little tweaking so they don’t cause a TPK, but that can be done without playing through the whole adventure again.

We don’t have a timeline for release of this adventure yet because the rest of the Quick Start is yet to be written. We’re aiming to get it done by the end of the year. As you can see, we have same great art by Teresa Guido!

Our next playtest event is a different adventure, “A Surfeit in Surrey” on July 31 at 1 pm EDT. Check out Community and Events page for the playtest schedule (updated monthly) or subscribe to our special playtesters’ newsletter.

June development update

With my mystical senses I can hear the clatter of many keyboards as our freelancers busy themselves with writing and drawing great stuff! There’s too much going on for me to pick just one thing to post about, so here is a brain dump instead:

We’re about as busy as the people in this drawing: tending the crop and getting ready to bring in a fall harvest.

• A Bestiary of Enchanted England is still coming along steadily. Writing is nearly done and editing has started. This is on track for a Kickstarter this fall.

• Two new Magonomia adventures are in playtesting. You can sign up on our playtest calendar.

• Five more Magonomia adventures are in the development pipeline.

• Core Rules version 1.2 (updated Map of Enchanted England) is in quality testing and expected to be available by end of June.

Progress on Map Revisions for Magonomia Core Rules

As we posted at the end of February, the Enchanted England map in Magonomia Core Rules has some errors and we’re working on corrections. There’s some progress on that effort: this weekend the cartographer handed over the updated map for final polishing — getting those pesky towns settled into their proper places, and double-checking that notable locations mentioned in the book are also mentioned on the map.

When this is done, we’ll update both the consumer PDF and the digital master for print-on-demand, and order a new set of proofs. The updated map should be in the book before Gen Con.

The updated map will be available as a free download on the Shewstone website. We can’t afford to send out replacement copies to the customers who bought the version with the erroneous map, but we’ll give everyone who’s already bought the print edition (including crowdfunding backers) a coupon to order an updated copy for the cost of printing (plus taxes, shipping, etc.)

Bestiary Crowdfunding Delayed till Fall 2022

We’re hard at work on our first full-length Magonomia® supplement, A Bestiary of Enchanted England. Writing and illustration is going well; in fact, a few of the authors and illustrations have completed all their assignments. You can see our progress in our last few months’ blog posts about product development. This is shaping up to be a truly unique bestiary, firmly grounded in sixteenth-century lore and enriched with role-playing advice and plot hooks for each creature.

We’ve decided to delay the crowdfunding launch of this project until Fall 2022. We want to get at least some playtesting done before we launch, and we didn’t account for that up front.

The overall production and release schedule isn’t affected much. We’ve just decided to get the product further along in development before the crowdfunding launch.

The silver lining is that there will be some playtesting events and you can sign up to be invited to participate.