Mage Hand Press

Dancer

ANOTHER NEW BASE CLASS

Yes, another new base class! The development of the Vagabond class opened some interesting design doors to us, specifically with regard to “stances” from old 3.5 classes like the Warblade and Swordsage. Those classes used a system of passive battle stances to complement their suites of maneuvers. Though maneuvers have survived in the Battle Master and in our Vagabond, stances have been more complicated to implement (though we once tried with the Chann...

Vagabond

NEW BASE CLASS!

My cowriter Ben and I have been hammering design meetings for the last month and a half to conjure up a brand new base class for you. Because the Book of Extinction has the artists pretty locked down, I hope you'll understand that we didn't have time to get art for this class done for this first release.

Some background: The Captain class, as well as the Grey Watchman warden and other subclasses that utilize our Battle Dice mechanic are envisioned as "half...

Go Extinct with Us on Kickstarter!

The Book of Extinction is now live!

Pledge now! 

You’ve surely seen huge chunks of the Book of Extinction through our regular updates, so I’m thrilled to announce that the book is finally launching on Kickstarter! We’d be thrilled if you join and show your support for ...

Book of Extinction 7 (and other little updates)

It's been another very busy month! In addition to the Complete Martyr expansion, I've got various Book of Extinction chunks to show you. Remember, the Book of Extinction comes to Kickstarter March 21st! First things first: let's talk about what else we were up to this month.

Mage Hand Monthly

We're starting a new initiative called the Mage Hand Monthly. The premise here is really simple: we'll send you recaps of all the cool stuff we ma...

Complete Martyr 1.1

If life's a joke, dying's a punchline. And everyone's a comedian.

We're back to the complete classes for one final push with the Complete Martyr! We've got six new subclasses, including the Burden of Fame, which makes you a divinely-appointed celebrity, and the Burden of Ascension, which tasks you with completing labors to ascend to demigodhood!

If you haven't seen it before, the Martyr is a unique caster that uses its hit points to manifest divine spells. With a deep poo...

Late February Post!

Super quick note here that I'll be 24 hours late on this month's posts. Can't wait to show things off, but I need a few more hours to knock out the PDFs.

A Busy January!

We’re finally out of January, so I thought I’d give you a quick post letting you know what we’ve been up to.

Open Gaming Victory!

The month started off with leaks about the Open Gaming License and a general vibe of impending doom. If you weren’t plugged into the news, Wizards of the Coast mocked up a new license that would have ostensibly destroyed all VTTs and most of the 3rd-party content market, including us. To make it worse, the timeline was disastrous: they were to...

Witchy Cakes! The Witching Flour

Quick aside: I made a CARD GAME!

In Witchy Cakes you compete to build the tallest cake by matching colors and throwing cards at your friends. It’s adorable, easy to learn, quick to play, and spellbindingly fun. 2023-01-16 16:58:27 +0000 UTC View Post

Surprise Hyperdrive Fleet Post! | Czepeku Sci-Fi

I was supposed to take December off, but instead, I got another Hyperdrive Fleet collab post together! It's a bit late since I've been under the weather, but I'm pretty happy with it.

If you've been playing Dark Matter, but wish you had stats for ships that have actual battlemaps, this one's for you!

In other news, I may or may not have a substantial post for February 1st. Things across the industry are going to be a little wild for about a month, plus we're laun...

Book of Extinction 6

This time we've got a doozy for you! With another 38 pages (or 34, depending on how you count it), the Book of Extinction is getting really, really heavy. Here's a breakdown of what we've added this time:

• 4 new Dead Races
• 11 new pairs of monster entries
• 3 new magic items

If you haven't heard the tale of Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island Giant Tortoise, or the tale of Toughie, the last Rabb's Finge-Limbed Tree Frog, you should give those ...

Oni's Catch | Czepeku Sci-Fi

This month, we're continuing our ongoing collaboration with CzePeku's Hyperdrive Fleet by bringing you an adventure for 4th- and 5th-level characters. As always, I hope you enjoy the stellar (heh heh) maps and a punchy one-off adventure for your Dark Matter escapades!

In Oni's Catch, the party receives a distress signal from none other than Grax (of Grax's Guy's fame) himself! He's ...

Complete Necromancer

The dead rise, the dead walk. The dead reckon, the dead talk.

Embrace the dark side of magic with the Complete Necromancer! This class brings compelling (and balanced) minionmancy to your table and places the power of an undead horde at your fingertips.

The Complete Necromancer introduces six never-before-seen subclasses to the necromancer class, bringing the total up to a staggering fourteen! New subclasses include the sinister Crone, the mounted Black Rider, an...

The Busiest Mage Hand Month Ever

The coffee has flowed freely over here for the last several weeks as I've careened toward this day. Perhaps through serendipity, several huge deadlines have landed right on top of one another, leading to one of the biggest releases we've done in a while! 

1. New Mage Hand Press site! 

I planned to have this up today, but we're waiting patiently for the domain name to link to the new website host. Sometime tomorrow you should be able to see the site in al...

Bluejay's Call | Czepeku Sci-Fi

This is one of the most exciting collaborations we've ever done! Our friends Czepeku run a Patreon called Hyperdrive Fleet that exclusively makes battlemaps for starships and other sci-fi vessels. We're super thrilled to be working with them to make some Dark Matter content for their maps.

If you're at all interested in these sorts of battlemaps, 2022-10-01 05:30:59 +0000 UTC View Post

Cakewalk | Subclasses 1

It has been a nonstop month over here, but I've also put up record numbers for words written per month. A weird part of the way we build books now is that there's sometimes a lag of a month or two before I have art for things I've been making, but we've finally got some cool releases! 

Subclasses

This release contains six of the twelve subclasses that we've made for Cakewalk. And like nearly all of our subclasses, they're compatible with nearly all settings, contai...

Book of Extinction 5

This month's post is a little shorter than I anticipated, but it's still meaty as heck: 20 new pages in the Book of Extinction with nearly as many new monsters! If you're counting, that's 86 pages of dead monsters.

This month brings you some of the coolest stories and statblocks yet as we tackle the Atlas Lion and Bear, a transparent snail, and a whole mess of insects. (If you check out nothing else, the story behind the Rocky Mountain Locust will blow your mind.)

I've be...

Race Reworks! Cakewalk and Valda's

Last month, we ran a poll on Kickstarter to decide if it was worth it to redesign some of our races in the spirit of being future-proofed. There are pros and cons -- on one hand, sticking to newer standards of released D&D content strays a little from the SRD, but on the other, I actually agree with a lot of the changes that races are getting. They seem to make things easier to learn and more powerful at the table. In any case, the backers voted overwhelmingly for changes! 

The...

Complete Captain 1.2

Two blades, one banner. 

Didn't we just expand the captain with new banners and improved class features? We did! But our work on Cakewalk familiars, the improvements made in recent official books to monster spellcasting, and a bunch of playtesting had gotten us thinking: do we need to fix the cohorts?

After some spreadsheets, we realized the answer was yes. The cohorts needed more than a coat of paint. The Champion was overtuned, the mage was hilariously undertuned, ...

Cakewalk | Familiars

This month I've got the lion's share of the Cakewalk Familiar's chapter for you! Somehow, the familiars have grown to outsize complexity in this book of weird food races, which is A-OK, because they're extremely cool at this stage. 

First, this chapter kicks off with a setting-agnostic way to flexibly upgrade your familiars with a feat and an in-depth upgrade table. It costs a feat and some gold, but it's an intricate little system that I wish I thought up in time for Valda's.

Extinction 4

With this update to The Book of Extinction, we've doubled the page count, completely reworked the graphic design, added Prehistoric Megafauna and Prehistoric Lycanthropes (yes, you can play a saber-toothed weretiger), and added more core monster entries. My favorite new entry is probably the Pyrenean Ibex, the only animal that has gone extinct twice. Not only is it a cool story, but we've also turned it into a CR 20 legendary monster with lair actions. I think you'll enjoy i...

Cakewalk Update

We've been working like crazy on Cakewalk and have a lot of cool stuff to show off very soon -- a raft of subclasses and magic items probably next month. For now, I have a relatively modest 30-page update featuring the book's new graphic design and tons of new art. Some of these monsters, like the Bedeviled Eggs and the Breadnought, were buried in previously released adventures, but now they have the full bestiary treatment. Plus, there's a new race, the small-but-angry Berrians, designed to ...

Complete Captain 1.1

Just remember: if your best friend is a captain, that makes you the cohort, and therefore expendable.

• The Captain is back with more subclasses than ever before! The captain class lets you play as two characters at one time, so you can lead your allies to victory as a consummate leader. Since the last time this class has been featured on the Patreon, it's acquired numerous little changes from playesting and a completely reworked capstone. And now we've added four new subcl...
  2022-05-01 06:52:19 +0000 UTC View Post

Complete Alchemist 1.2

Wine tasting with an alchemist is like bloodletting near a shark.

The Complete Alchemist is the definitive version of our Alchemist class. Since practically every subclass and feature made the cut for Valda's Spire of Secrets, we decided that this standalone version needed to be expanded by just a hair. So in addition to migrating all the changes from Valda's (big and small) we've added two new subclasses: the paint-slinging Pigmentist and the sound-manipulating Resona...

Strange Owlchemy and Hollynock Hijinks

As a bonus this month, I thought I'd offer the fully completed version of our two most recent adventures, Strange Owlchemy and Hollynock Hijinks. The former is a smooth and darkly comedic introduction to any campaign, taking characters from 1st to 3rd level, and the latter is a brisk (pun intended) Christmas-y adventure centered on the fictional holiday Hollynock and the mischief of an evil toymaker.

Cakewalk | Game of Scones

Game of Scones is an adventure for characters of 1st and 2nd level that introduces players to the Cakewalk campaign setting. With this adventure, For a Few Gumballs More, and Murder on the Gourmet Express, we've got a 1st-4th level campaign! This adventure took much more work than I initially expected (it's the longest so far), but I'm pretty happy with how it came out. I can't imagine a better way to introduce the setting than with the Red Velvet Wedding and the ev...

Late March Content!

It feels like every year the 1st of March sneaks up behind me and hits me with a blackjack. This year, I've spent most of February moving, so I have like three things for Patreon that are 80% done, but none of it ready to show off. I intend to get one of those projects prepped and out the door by the first week of March, however, so stay tuned! 

Valda's Illustrious Guestbook

I bring you the final stretch goal for our Valda’s Spire of Secrets campaign: a collection of ready-to-play NPCs called Valda’s Illustrious Guestbook. The Kickstarter backers will get this tomorrow -- you’re my guinea pigs.

In other Valda’s news: we’ve got the 1.1 version completed and we’ll be sending the PDF to Kickstarter backers AND select patrons tomorrow as well. To qualify, you must be at the Producer Tier and have a lifetime pledge amount of $60 or greater.<...

Cakewalk | Murder on the Gourmet Express

Behold, I’m back! The time has come to shrug off the winter hibernation and get back into releases, starting with more Cakewalk content. This time, we have an Agatha Christie-inspired murder mystery called Murder on the Gourmet Express. If you thought the last one had too many puns, you haven’t seen anything yet!

I held off on this one until after the holidays because our release order for Cakewalk has been weird so far. Right now, we’re sort of chewing on the book from a...

Hollynock Hijinks

‘Twas the first eve of Hollynock and all through the night,
The toymaker’s workshop was flooded with light.
The dolls he’s created like you’ve never seen—
The stuffies and puppets, so lifelike and keen!

But all is not well in this festival village,
Where toys become minions to purloin and pillage.
At midnight come whispers of sinister powers,
Of blizzards and Krampus, and cold that devours…

An early Christmas gift: a one shot adventu...

The World Ends in One Year

Following the sort of impromptu poll in last month's post, it seems that most folks would like to see more weird, experimental stuff. A near second was seeing Kickstarter books brought to Patreon when they're good and finished, which we'll also be doing, but Valda's will probably be next month (as there's some small changes I want to implement before locking it down for printing). 

So this is the start of some experimental stuff. To work through my thoughts on a very challenging ca...