The digital version of Magonomia® Core Rules is now available on itch.io. All the cool people are selling PDFs there. We’re sure lots of people will love Magonomia as much as we do. The challenge before us is to get the word out about this great game! This new channel will help with that.
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.)
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.
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.
The example characters from Magonomia Core Rules breaking into Ely House. From left to right: Gemini, Aonghas, Christopher Hill, Ghida al-Asturlabi, Deborah Navarro. Illustration by Steven Bachan. ©2020 Shewstone Publishing LLC.
Magonomia Example Characters updated
It’s surprising how much little details of a character sheet can make gameplay flow smoothly. Players have a lot of details they need to consider when deciding and resolving their characters’ actions and we don’t want to go searching through the rule book every time!
One of the benefits of our hands-on approach to playtesting (Andrew Gronosky, the owner of Shewstone, GMs more than half the playtest games) is we get to see what goes smoothly and where players hit a little friction—which wheels are squeaky, so to speak. One of the sticking points has been knowing the difference between which spells a character can cast immediately and which require the 10-minute ceremonial setup. We’ve updated the character sheets to clarify that, as well as answer other questions like “what equipment is my (pregenerated) character carrying?”
You can download the Magonomia Example Characters version 1.2 here, on the Magonomia wiki, or (if you’re a DriveThruRPG customer) by checking your notifications on DriveThruRPG.
Kudos to Patrick Murphy of Mad Irishman Productions for an outstanding job designing a concise, playable Grimoire (spells) page for the character sheet. Another year’s experience running Magonomia has shown us that all we need to do it take a little more time to fill in the details on that sheet. The effort pays off when new or casual players have an easier time getting immersed in the spontaneous, freewheeling and unlimited magic of a Magonomia game session!
Betwitched starlings assault a wizard. Illustration by Teresa Guido.
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.
Shewstone Publishing has Joined Indie Press Revolution
Shewstone Publishing has joined the Revolution! Indie Press Revolution (IPR), that is. They’re our first distributor to brick-and-mortar game stores.
You can ask your friendly local game store (FLGS) or special order Magonomia. Support your FLGS! If you don’t have one, you can also order directly from IPR’s web store.