Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Tyrant Philosophers to be a weird fantasy RPG from Handiwork Games
“He's taking a bit of a risk with us, to be honest, but I think it'll pay off.”
Only a few months ago, Rowan Rook & Decard announced that they were publishing an RPG based on critically-acclaimed writer Adrian Tchaikovsky’s books, and it looks like fans will get another bite of that juicy apple. Handiwork Games, publishers of Beowulf: Age of Heroes and a|state, have announced that they’re developing an RPG based on Tchaikovsky’s magnificently weird fantasy series The Tyrant Philosophers. Nominated for a Hugo award for Best Series in 2025, The Tyrant Philosophers currently consists of four books and a novella, with a fifth and potentially final novel out soon. The series doesn’t follow a single protagonist but instead slips and slides through the cracks and crevices of the fictional Palleseen empire, who conquer lands and snuff out cultures in their pursuit of “perfection”. Each book recruits a mostly new cast of characters, all of whom are breathing, fighting, compromising, living, and dying under the boot of the Palleseen.
Read the first installment in the series, City of Last Chances, set in Ilmar (which sounds not-so-coincidentally like Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar), and it’s obvious that it would make a great setting for a game. The city is a hive of factions, croaking and cawing at each other as well as their common enemy. It’s a powderkeg waiting to explode. Which is exactly what Handiwork Games and lead designer Morgan Davie wants to bring out in The Tyrant Philosophers RPG.
In an interview with Rascal News, Handiworks founder Jon Hodgson said that the team plans to combine their design around factions and community in the cyberpunk thriller a|state (on which Davie was the lead designer) as well as the framework around trust and conflicting agendas from espionage duology Cold City Hot War. Players will join various factions of the resistance and work towards potentially conflicting goals. These game rules, alongside a setting guide to Ilmar, which should work as a resource for building out other weird cities (like one on a giant, dead crab-god in the fourth book, Pretenders to the Throne of God), will make up the first in what is planned to be a new RPG line.
Future books will potentially expand on the world and the game, following in the footsteps of the novels. The second story in the series, House of Open Wounds, follows a M*A*S*H-style field medical unit and explores ideas of religion, pacifism, and the horrors of war. It’s far away from the urban intrigue of the first novel, so it’s challenging to imagine one game system doing justice to both genres.
Handiwork Games might be building this new project’s foundation on their past portfolio, but they don’t have anything close to a ‘house system’. They are, as per Hodgson, “a weird company”. In 2019, Hodgson started the company as a bit of an experiment in artist-owned publishing. Trained as a fine artist, he has been working as an illustrator and art director in games for more than 25 years, including credits on three editions of D&D, World of Warcraft TCG, Legend of the Five Rings, and Old School Essentials. He was also an art director at Cubicle7 for around a decade, working on the One Ring RPG and the Doctor Who RPG, and before he left that company, was the Deputy CEO.
Handiwork Games is built out of the art team that Hodgson led at Cubicle7. His two full-time colleagues, Scott Purdy and Paul Bourne, are also both artists and designers. “From my experience of being a freelancer, and how unstable that is as a means of making a living, I didn't want to do that,” said Hodgson. “[Art] is the expensive bit of making roleplaying games. So, you get those people secured with a livelihood and a wage, and then I think it lets us be quite flexible in what we do.” But what they do is hard to pin down. They’ve worked on games based on D&D 5e like Beowulf (which is designed for one player and one GM) as well as FiveEvil (which threatens to evoke the true terror of the swingy d20). They’ve also produced the superlatively weird art-project-plus-game Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland.
What they haven’t done is a licensed game of this kind. “I was very burned out on licensed games,” said Hodgson, adding that it was “the bread and butter at my former job” with Cubicle7. But when Tchaikovsky reached out to them based on their work on a|state, Hodgson was first surprised and then excited. “We're very small, and we do things in this weird way. So, I don't know if we're a brilliant fit for a sort of major license game, but we make really beautiful, well-made products that are really well considered and critically acclaimed,” he said. “So, I think he's taking a bit of a risk with us, to be honest, but I think it'll pay off.”
As a fan of the series himself, Hodgson is excited to bring a whole new fantasy world to life. The games will feature both an oil painting look as well as pen and ink-style drawings to evoke the historical feel of the novels. Outside of the covers for the novels by artist Joe Wilson, this will be the first time The Tyrant Philosophers’ world is visualized, but Hodgson has impeccable credentials here, having tackled a similar challenge for Tolkien’s Middle-earth. “I had great reticence about even agreeing to work on The One Ring… because locking down how I imagine Middle-earth — to a deadline, for money — you sort of go, is that what I want to do? And the first picture they say is, right, do Rivendell, go on!” he said. “And then later, in one afternoon, I had to paint Smaug attacking Erebor. And you've just got to get on with it, right? It's really good for you, I think, to be pushed [as an artist].”
The One Ring RPG is inspiring this project in more ways than one. Handiwork Games has roped in two consultants, Francisco Nepitello and Marco Maggi, who have a lot of experience adapting big fantasy worlds (like the One Ring RPG as well as other Lord of the Rings-based games). Hodgson said that the duo understand “what people want is not necessarily what's going to make them happy”. He continued, “Equally, you can't just go, well, I'm doing it, so you'll get what you're given. You've got to meet people halfway.”
(The game will be crowdfunded later this year.)
