Apologies for any inconvenience.

- Marsh & Jim

Plenty more of that coming in 2024!

1. Hello, you

2. LINKS!

3. Nope. There is no 3. this time, sorry.

Hello, you

Just a quick one, today!

First up, TEETH BACKERS, PLEASE CHECK YOUR KICKSTARTER MESSAGES. If you have not already seen, then you have TEETH: MORE TEETH in your inbox. This is a 100-page PDF which compiles the stretch goals from the Kickstarter: Mandeville’s Horrid Inventory, Hyper-Dimensional Goal-Break, Milk Of The Hogwoman, and a little twist on the idea of pre-rolled characters that Marsh has frankly gone the extra mile with. It’s quite the thing.

Anyone who didn’t back but wants to pick up the supplement can get it here.

BUT ALSO: if you have not claimed your main campaign physical book, please do so! The details for this are also in your Kickstarter messages. We will not be selling overprint remainder copies until this process is more or less complete, and there are still quite a few unclaimed! 

Of course many of you have been getting in touch as the books arrive and it’s been a delight to receive your responses. Thank you all so much for supporting this project. It perhaps sounds trite, but producing our own RPG book was one of those things which Marsh and I had always hoped to do, and to have it shipped and in people’s hands really does fulfil profound personal ambitions. This really is a big one for us.

And then there’s the road ahead. 2024 will see us, for the first time since the TEETH project began in 2020, looking to tackle some new material. What shape that will take isn’t yet totally clear, but we’ve been chatting with new collaborators and making some plans. We’ll be discussing them here once there’s something more tangible to talk about.

In the meantime, the Teeth Newsletter is not going anywhere, and we have a bunch of stuff lined up for the new year. I hope you will join us on this next part of the journey, because we’re very much looking forward to it.

We’ll be posting one more newsletter before the end of this year, discussing some Things Of The Year. We hope you head clickwards for that!

Love you,

-Marsh & Jim

—

Links!

• Very taken with the pitch for A Crown Of Salt & Shadow: “a bespoke set of skirmish rules, these are completely setting and miniature agnostic. It has a flavour of Necromunda, Mordheim, Saga and Warcry, with a focus on beating little models to a pulp, flinging folk from the sides of boats and that classic Rube Goldberg of misery that 28mm players just love.”

• How awesome is this old Keith Parkinson painting? Completely, I would say. It’s the cover of the old Greyhawk adventure, Castle Greyhawk, of which there have been a few, but only one with the best cover, which is this one.

• There’s obviously a maddening quagmire of riches to be obtained this weekend via various itch Creator’s Day sales, but I think it’s worth looking at Claymore’s F.I.S.T. stuff and Riley’s stuff, which includes this Trophy-based sci-fi project. Exciting!

• Look at this X-Files fanzine.

• This podcast based around talking to RPG folk from across the Globe (via Thomas!) is just a really nice thing that I am glad someone has take the time to do TTRPG is very global indeed.

• It turns out that I cannot stop researching the 18th century. That I have been listening to this lecture on 18th-century ghost stories is further evidence for that. I love the stuff about ghosts communicated by knocking, and people using this (scarcely credible even then) belief to set up “hauntings” for cash. If only we were so easily amused today.

—

More soon! x

1. Hello, you

2. LINKS!

3. What We Have Been Up To.

Hello, you

The TEETH books, zines, and maps have begun to arrive across the world, with confirmed deliveries in the UK, Europe, Australia and US! It’s an amazing thing to see this ending up in your hands, and we extend our profound thanks to everyone who has helped us on this journey.

If you backed the project but have not yet set your delivery in motion please do so! You will need to log into Kickstarter and check the link that you’ve been sent via direct message. All the information for fulfilment is in there.

If you have the book already then please do let us know! We’ve been overjoyed to hear and see evidence of these arriving in people’s hands.

If you missed the Kickstarter then please check in here regularly, as we overprinted a little and there will hopefully be books on sale after we have dealt with any lost or damaged items during the fulfilment phase!

Again, thank you all so much for supporting this project, it means the world to us. It is genuinely one off the Bucket List to have finally produced a TTRPG book of our own.

There is still one more thing to come, of course, which is the TEETH: MORE TEETH stretch goal PDF, including the three separate goals of a new adventure, weird magical items and their creator, as well as some surprising pre-generated characters and tips on how to play them. We did a little twist on those, which we think you’ll enjoy.

And then in 2024? Well, we have some plans. We’ll let you know. I for one (Jim) will be moving on from my current secret project day job work and into a place where, for a while at least, I will have rather more time for TTRPG-authoring activities. I am quite excited about that!

-Marsh & Jim

—

Links!

• Thing of The Week (sic) is not a difficult choice. If you have spent a little time with the preview PDF of Mythic Bastionland (or indeed the quickstart rules which are linked at the top of the Kickstarter page) then you will know what to expect of this mythic and extraordinary game of knights. “Each player is one of 72 Knights, with personal equipment, a unique ability, and a passion that fuels their spirit. As your glory grows, you might eventually embark on the legendary City Quest, an impossible challenge to find The City itself, a shining metropolis seen only in dreams.” That barely skims it. I didn’t take long to pledge for this one.

• And while we’re on the topic of people making psychedelic RPGs, I was captured by The Ultraviolet Grasslands And The Black City 2E. Get a load of this: “The Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City is a tabletop role-playing game book, half setting, half adventure, and half epic trip; inspired by psychedelic heavy metal, the Dying Earth genre, and classic Oregon Trail games. It leads a group of ‘heroes’ into the depths of a vast and mythic steppe filled with the detritus of time and space and fuzzy riffs.” My jam. My very marmalade.

• And staying on-topic for a third bullet-point, I obliged to point out that fantasy-as-a-genre essay collection Realms Of Imagination is worth picking up. The contributors are each and all excellent, including Chris Gardiner. More on him, later.

• Finally, very into these Doom Horns Of Antiquity. If you were going to topple the Roman Empire, this is the soundtrack you’d want to do it.

—

What We Have Been Up To

Mothership

Those of you whose predilections include space horror, horror in space, and horrible spaces, will no doubt already have been all over space horror TTRPG Mothership. That’s been super-true for Monday Night Dice Club, too, with a return two years on from our original outing.

(And, all that that said, the space horror locker is getting a little claustrophobic now with concerted competition via Death In Space or the Alien RPG, or even Extinction or This Ship Is No Mother. I feel like there was another one, too, but I can’t find the link.) 

Anyway! Back in the deep abyss of 2021 we played a bit of the original Mothership release (wincing and worming our way through the excellent Dead Planet scenario) before electing to wait it out for the boxed release of the Kickstarter. That still hasn’t materialised, although the images of the planned box are looking profoundly tantalising, and the Mothership PDFs have started cropping up in our inboxes. We decided we could wait no longer: it has been Time To Play. 

One of the things I have found fascinating about Mothership is the sheer reach of its appeal. Rarely does an indie TTRPG team find a niche relatively unoccupied and fill it so completely. The tearaway success of the Kickstarter is a measure of that, but on a more personal basis the intense enthusiasm my group has for this game has taken me somewhat by surprise. Which is not to say that I don’t understand the broad appeal, because that is obvious, it’s just that they really like this one in a way that I struggle to explain fully.

The Mothership ruleset does not seem to be the reason that my gang like it so much, it works fine, and is totally passable for most purposes — improved for this edition, even — but it does lack the inertial panache of Trophy or the interlocking systemic crunch of a good FiTD game. We had to house rule some stuff the first time around, too, which I found to be an irritant. Not all of that is gone in the latest edition.

What has worked particularly well, and this is a first for us, is the use of a character-holder app. We’ve not used anything like this before, but since the group has had to shift back and forth between remote and in-person sessions, much like the rest of life, it has employed to great effect: even allowing us to share the generated characters between instances of the app using a generation code. It does dice rolls and generally does a bunch towards makes it all convenient (equipment cost disparities aside). But I don’t think that explain the excitement, either.

I think the reason my group has connected actually comes down to this being the first game where they have really embraced character death. The start of the Dead Planet run was tentative in the extreme, and members of the group explicitly worried for the loss of their characters, but something about Mothership has broken that spell. When a character died in the last session, having dodged an alien eel monster, survived an exploding pressure door spinning through space, only to finally fling themselves injuriously into a pylon and be abandoned by the team (you don’t know, in Mothership if someone is actually dead* until another character checks on them, which I think is my favourite bit of the game) it was hailed with cheers and commiserations. It is in this spirit that our campaign continues, and I am starry with anticipation over the risks that will be taken and the consequences that will be borne in the coming sessions. 

*The android, Bionicus-1, would have been beyond saving, even if his crewmates had tried to save him.

Robert E Howard’s Conan: Adventures In An Age Undreamed Of

Tuesday nights has seen us flexing (or at least incrementally developing) our 2d20 muscles with a Conan campaign run by the excellent Chris Gardiner of Failbetter Games. 2d20 is, as I have mentioned elsewhere, a particularly interesting ruleset and I suspect I shall write about this one with more clarity at some point, because I am still just getting to grips with it. But if you do see someone talking about Modiphius’ Conan The Barbarian game then the chances are that what they are saying is extremely positive, because that’s been my experience of both playing it, and hearing other people talk about their experience with it. 

[Note: I haven’t linked Conan because a first-party page for this doesn’t seem to be available anymore, and it’s not on DriveThru, so I am going to cautious about linking to sites I don’t know. I am sure you could pick up the book somewhere though.]

This tendency to excellence is, I think, because the game scratches several gamer itches at once. The first itch is that of profocient systemic crunchiness, which Conan thrusts upon you with its numerous interlocking systems: the 2d20 itself, which is the basic roll, requiring you to make a number of successes against the relevant stat, as well as the ability to incur or spend “momentum” to add dice to the pool, as well as the GM having their own narrative currency (Doom) which they too can spend to increase the stakes of everything.

The other itch addressed by this Conan game is a worldly/immersion one. The sheer amount of world resource and sense of place that the material churns out is daunting. Now, this is partly down the GM, and I am not much of a Conan-ite, unlike Chris, who has long been familiar with the source material, but it has been a pleasure to become acquainted with a fantasy world upon which many other sword & sorcery experiences are already based, and in turn look at the places it has stolen from. One player is a thinly veiled Welsh archer embroiled in high-fantasy politics, another a thinly veiled Siberian shaman with a GM-invented demon-slave of a witchgod on speed-dial, while another a thinly-veiled Syrian warrior whose axe armour gets very Eighties Action Figure on the asses of our enemies, demon or mannish. All this combines to deliver a stronger motif than perhaps it appears now that I am writing it down: let me just say that I am always a sucker for blending genres, and here a fantasy world blends many different periods of antiquity across one fantasy world, stealing liberally and weaving confidently. And I really like am enjoying the result. We’re even playing as pirates, which seems from another era entirely. And yet it works. It has also been a relief that Modiphius have been so adept at handling what we might call a rather “of its time” worldview, in the original stories. Many yikes are incurred by those reading the original tales for inspiration.

So yes. If this Conan campaign has issue, it is that the constituent players are all tired and busy men in their forties, whose family lives and need to make rent mean that we can’t always manage to meet for the session. We have been faced with the age old games-on-a-table problem: what to do if someone can’t make it? Monday Night Dice Club defaults to some card games, more often that not. But for the Tuesday gang Mr Gardiner had another ingenious solution.

Starforged

Now, we’ve only run the world/character creation and then a single session of Starforged, which turned out to be an exploratory sort of enterprise with myself and Comrade Gillen stumbling our way through the rules (Gillen had, thankfully, played Ironsworn, on which the science-fiction variant here is based) but we have so far witnessed the makings of a lovely time. More importantly: we (sort of) proved that can play it regardless of who turns up.

Yes, this sort of game might just be a remedy to the issue of someone not making it to the game which can’t coherently continue without them. Especially when that person is the GM. The reason for this is that Ironsworn (and by extension Starforged, the science variant we are indulged with) is constructed to be played solo, as a journalling-type game, but is set up to be extended to co-operative play and, even further extentendly, it can be GM’d backed to full fat Old Fashioned RPG again.

The reason for this is that like, say, a journalling game, Starforged itself does lots of the heavy lifting. Tables for all manner things to scaffold the experience rapidly make themselves available from the outset. A world is constructed, and with quests falling out all over the place. NPCs pop into existence with a few dice rolls (or clicks on supporting online generators) and even choices that players create for themselves can be answered by consulting one the game’s many tables or “oracles”. It’s by no means a self-playing RPG, but it’s as close as one can come, I suspect.

And while it lifts and enables, it also resists! The dice rolls of the action system are there to make sure you are not just unspooling a pleasant story for yur space friends, and the way the dice incur peril means the moves you make will result in unforeseen consequences. We quickly found ourselves struggling to overcome our own story. I have to say that I don’t usually gravitate towards GMless stuff, as we have explored in previous newsletters, but I can really see how this could cure of me that, too.

I’ll let you know how this Starforged experiment goes, because it feels like we found an answer to the conundrum posed upthread. What do we play on an off week? This. That’s assuming, of course, that we actually get a few more evenings with a man down. Given that it’ll soon be flu and snots season, I expect we will. I am just praying that man isn’t me.

—

More soon x

1. Hello, you

2. LINKS!

3. Discourse

Hello, you

And HELLO BOOKS.

Yes, there has been an arrival (and, as we shall see, a homecoming). We finally got our hands on the printed versions of TEETH. 

LOOK AT THESE! 

That’s the main TEETH book, bound in black linen and detailed in silver foil. 

The three zines, in a very high quality softback print. 

And that full colour double-sided map. Marsh has done just an incredible job of getting all this designed and made, the big wizard.

We don’t have a firm date for fulfilment kicking off, as the US copies are still in a cargo container somewhere, but they are on the right continent and on their way to the warehouse, so that’s good. We will be sending out updates via Kickstarter to remind you to check for the relevant emails! We will remind everyone. You won’t miss it!

Soon!

Love you!

- Marsh & Jim

—

Links!

• As Comrade Gillen points out, this is a very good title for, well, anything really. Top marks for It Takes A Child To Raze A Village, where “you play as cultists gathering ritual components for a petulant and demanding Dark Messiah.” As a long-suffering parent of my own tyrannical spawn, I sympathise.

• Dicebreaker's tabletop awards are open to nominations, please nominate us, it would mean the world if TEETH got a little critical recognition.

• My regular group has begun their much-delayed Mothership campaign, and it was off to a tremendous start, with a critical failure for the first roll, and only one death by the end of the first episode. All of which makes it extremely difficult to avoid backing the Outer-Rim Uprising Kickstarter. I am not going to be able to resist one of these extraordinary packages.

• The other thing that arrived this week is something I was disappointed to miss out on last time, but came back into print: Guy Pradel’s Archol. A collection of architectural fantasies, with a little pull out map. It is so delightful I do a little coo and a hoot each time I pick it up. There are still a few in stock. (Guy’s own images, below.) I am not sure I will ever employ it in any RPG-sense, but I don’t think that’s the point, really. It’s just a tremendous vision all by itself. A zine exploring an idea, and showcasing Pradel’s enormous talent. I love it.

  

  

  —

The Homecoming

So I mentioned that something else had happened, too. A while back I talked about how much teenage me had loved Palladium’s genre-lasagna, Rifts. I also mentioned that my teenage friend, Tim, had had the books for over a twenty years now. I hadn’t seen either Tim or the books in a similarly yawning chasm of time. And yet… guess who turned up on the doorstep yesterday! I hugged the man and then later, privately, I hugged the books.

Here they are.

I am still missing a couple, most notably the books which expanded the Phase World setting, which was a weird sort of pocket (and yet much larger) dimension of the core setting. So I guess Tim wasn’t the only person I loaned these to when I had no capacity or desire for hauling around towers of RPG books in my early 20s. It might have to look to Ebay to complete the set.

I particularly loved the Phase World setting, and I might write a little more about that in another newsletter. That they took the Rifts setting and then built an entire space opera “Three Galaxies” stuff inside it, effectively a sprawling multi-book sci-fi sub-RPG within the main RPG, remains one of the most remarkable feats of scenario expansion world-building. It wasn’t even barrel scraping. It was like reaching the bottom of the barrel only to realise there was a shipping container underneath. Hell, perhaps they went all the way down.

Anyway, I am, as you might imagine, plunging into a vortex of nostalgia with these, and I will doubtless write more when I have had time to collect my feelings.

In the meantime, a few highlights.

—

More soon! x

1. Hello, you

2. LINKS!

3. Marsh Davies

Hello, you.

I had been putting off writing this because I was hoping I would have something very special to share, but it hasn’t quite come to pass, so we’ll have to save that for a future edition.

Instead we have a collection of links which we suspect you are going to find vital in the coming months. More importantly we — I*, not Marsh too, because that would be weird — also have a lengthy chat with Marsh, whose efforts as an author and illustrator are the reasons TEETH exists at all. We hold our beards most thoughtfully and wax about the solace to be found in being erased from history by the immensity of geological time, the formative childhood event of pretending to be an absurdly flamboyant duke, as well as the way we swing on RPG morality, and whether digital games took the wrong lesson from tabletop RPGs.

Also: it was lovely to notice via Twitter that Wandering Monster played Night Of The Hogmen over the weekend! But at the same time we have to be very clear that we’re largely withdrawing from the Twittersphere, for quite obvious reasons.

Rebuilding all the TTRPG communities that relied on the bird site has been, and will continue to be, a splintering and fragmentary effort that has been choked by a number of factors, and Marsh and I are mostly on Bluesky for the social media now. That is, of course, absolutely no use for people who can’t get on Bluesky, but I have faith that will change in the coming months. The community is growing rapidly and with any luck we hope to see you all on there before too long.

[Tangentially, but relatedly, I have taking any excuse at all to share this “Internet Of Beefs” article. There are some incredible sentences in this analysis of our Very Online world.]

More pertinently to this mailing list, we’ll be throwing the net of this newsletter a little wider in coming months, not least because we will have new stuff to share, and also — perhaps more significantly — because our day job concerns will be less punishing. Having more time for RPG stuff will be a blessing for us all.

Much, much more soon,

-jim

—

LINKS!

• Thing Of The Week is Daniel’s Sell’s twin wizard-tower dungeon book, Slate & Chalcedony, which in addition to be an exquisite name for a thing and is one of the best presented indie-RPG books I have encountered of late, and there’s been a lot of competition in the department! Look at that. It arrived just yesterday.

• Thing of the month, however is Interzone 295. It’s been absolutely years, decades in fact, since I subscribed to a short story magazine, and I really do not regret doing so again now. It’s just lovely and it’s packed with superb shorts that are all illustrated by superb artists.

  

• There’s an expansion coming for the excellent solo-journalling bounty hunter game Notorious, which we talked about earlier in the year.

• This list of names from Old Weird Scotland is proof that TEETH is a documentary of sorts, and not just total fantasy invented by Marsh and myself.

• I don’t know how I have not previously encountered the fantasy maps of Marc Moureau. Holy shit!

• Look at these Jacob Hendrik Pierneef woodcuts.

• Our kid Kieron Gillen has been doing the rounds, appearing on a podcast about video games hosted by the most handsome man, Simon Parkin, and also over on Wyrd Science to talk about TTRPGs. It goes about as you might expect: “Well, people say Orson Welles career went wrong when he did the Transformers movie. And I say the opposite. That was a suitable climax to a full-on career.”

• Research this month has been packed, but highlights includes Sattler’s Panorama of Salzburg, and also The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, which, it turns out, was not “wonderfull” at all for the witches in question. The famous story of the Pendle Witches in 1612 is particularly sad because the extraordinarily-named Alizon Device even seems to have been convinced of her own powers, an attitude which led to nothing good at all.

• I can’t remember/can’t be bothered to trawl the backlog to check, but if we haven’t mentioned that Evil Hat are publishing Riley Daniel’s fantastic Forged In The Dark adaptation of Victorian Martian invasion, As The Sun Forever Sets, then we really should have done. Extremely excited about this! This is a the very top of the Forged stuff to be thralled in anticipation of.

—

An Interview With Marsh Davies

So indulge us, because here’s the thing: while you are doubtless by-and-large used to hearing most of these updates and newsletters and things in my authorial voice*, TEETH as an ongoing project, and as a Promethean act of creation, must be identified with the voice and creative energies of another: my friend and handsomely devilish co-creator, Marsh Davies. 

*that is to say me, one of the internet’s rare Jim Rossignols.

Marsh is the very progenitor of TEETH. While it’s fair to say that it was our collaborative effort that produced the vital organs of the book — we both laboured to sew together its arms, legs, some of the intestines, and to attach some of its shoes — Marsh provided the lightning. He conceived and wrote the best parts. He gave it life. The list of English names? Marsh. The cursed pies? Marsh. The encounter tables and mutations and lunatic weather conditions? All Marsh. And what about the ideas for Night Of The Hogmen, or Blood Cotillion, or our unexpected adventure, Stranger & Stranger? You know who.

But there is more to this. It was Marsh, who, locked away in his storm-raked tower, not only authored, but illustrated and designed the entire book. A labour of month-upon-month! Yes, he laid out every page, from cover to stern. He drew the maps and floorplans, came up with the best names and created all the threads of narrative that weave the book together into a wondrous whole. And while I dragged in some raw pages, dripping wet from the cold night outside, he edited them all and threw away the maggoty bits into the fire.

I have been, in a very real sense, Igor to Marsh’s Dr Frankenstein. Marsh Davies is a writer, designer, and illustrator of just exceptional accomplishment, and he stands, like legend-made-flesh, over the misty valleys that we intend to explore in the future.

But despite all this, questions remain. Questions of identity, motivation, and inspiration.

While some of you may know Marsh’s writing from his tenure on Edge magazine and PCGamer, or his incredible contributions to little-known internet journal Rock, Paper, Shotgun, or his stint as Head of Creative Writing at Minecraft developers Mojang, or perhaps you recognise his pleasantly-throated voice on the wholesome and erudite popular podcast The Crate And Crowbar, we still must ask:

JR: Marsh, when the tales are told, long after this time of tech-bros and influencers passes into legend, how will you be known or explained to children?

MD: You know, one of my favourite things I've read in recent years was a splenetic article trashing the idea of the anthropocene - a newly coined term for a geological epoch in which human activity has indelibly marked the planet. The contention of the article was that this was abject bollocks of a wildly vain kind - geology is a field of almost unfathomably enormous time-scales, in which dating a rock produces error bars that would engulf the span of human history 50 times over. If humanity blew itself up tomorrow, which seems not unlikely, all evidence of our existence would be completely erased by the epic abrasive churn of rock, ice and water. At the timescale in which lake beds can become mountains, nothing would remain of us: "Not plastic birthday balloons, not piles of denuded chicken bones, not Charlton Heston shaking his fist at some littoral colossus." 

What about dinosaurs, you go, don't we have plenty of evidence for them? No - we have evidence for very few dinosaurs given that they existed across a period of 179,500,000 years. There are many gaping holes, each comprising tens of millions of years, in which we have no archaeological record whatsoever. Our entire industrial civilisation would disappear completely into one of those holes. Indeed, if some breed of dinosaurs before us had achieved space-flight and iPads and needlessly complicated tax systems before wiping themselves out, we might never know. Even the satellites they'd plopped into geo-stationary orbit would have eventually wandered off into the darkness - as will ours.

Anyway, I find the idea of complete and total erasure very calming, and I want for nothing from the future but to be wholly obliviated by a glacier. 

JR: But Sir, this is an RPG newsletter. Tell me about the RPGs of your youth. What did they mean? How did they write you?

MD: My first encounter with any roleplaying game was LARPing at some sort of summer school. It was a kind of murder mystery evening, set in a fantasy inn: we all pulled characters out of a hat, each with an objective to fulfil across the course of the evening - someone to kill, something to steal, that sort of thing - and the web of our backstories and intents told some larger story, if players managed to piece it together without being merked. 

I was 8 or 9 at the time, the youngest kid there by several years, and not especially outgoing, but the character I was given was an absurdly flamboyant duke. Somehow, the atmosphere and structure of the event gave me the permission and the confidence to really go hard in-character, in a way which was, in retrospect, extraordinarily annoying. But, for reasons unknown, nobody bog-washed me and I've carried that euphoric memory in my back pocket for the rest of my life - that certain circumstances, people and social rules can unlock an exhilarating collective creativity that is normally forbidden, especially for adults. 

After that, the first RPG I got into was Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. I don't really remember the system, probably because I never learnt it properly, because once again it was more of a way of gaining permission to extend imaginative play into later childhood - but also, because I was GM, it introduced me to creating an entire world for my friends to play in. I'm sure it was a very bad, stupid world, but the idea that the GM is a curator of a collaborative fiction and custodian of the player's fun, and not just someone who tells people what dice to roll, has remained important to me. For me, RPG rules continue to be a framework to help make something larger, but as soon as they're an obstacle rather than an aid to that goal, I'm happy for the GM to quietly break them. Is that how you feel? 

JR: I think there’s a degree to which you must play within the spirit of the rules, if not to letter, if you are going to avoid breaking the game and not experiencing it as intended. That’s why I think making clear what the GM is supposed to be doing and what the players are supposed to be doing is so vital. That said, we have often house-ruled things as we’ve played, and ignored things that haven’t worked. Or, misunderstood rules and got them wrong, and had a great time anyway.

MD: I was talking to a chum about Baldur's Gate 3 - which is great, incidentally - and I said that its recreation of D&D was a bit weird because, while it's a great expression of D&D's rules, the game frequently employs them without consideration of whether it will instantly kill you and force a reload, which is something completely alien to D&D - because what GM would allow players to stumble into a difficult spike and wipe the party? My friend said, nah, that's exactly how his GM approaches their games of D&D - a stickler for the rules, come what may. Oh, you turned left? Too bad, campaign over! That sounds absolutely horrible to me! A bit of friction or fear is good, but if the dice effectively shut down your collaborative storytelling, then that's antithetical to the entire experience - or at least the experience I personally want.

JR: And then, just under 10 years ago, when we hardly knew each other, we began to play D&D.

MD: That was a terrific time! I was a tiefling cleric who'd betrayed his god in order to resurrect another, and become a wide-eyed, frothing zealot - an adherent of Jack of Rags, no less, a creation of yours who has found their way into TEETH as well. 

I don't think I fully enjoy roleplay unless my character is deeply awful in one way or another. My character in our Blades campaign was a rightly-disgraced militiaman and angry, self-hating drunk; in Symbaroum I was a disgusting goblin who couldn't stop his hands from strangling people. This is peculiar because when I play videogame RPGs I feel compelled to Lawful Good my way through every dialogue choice. I can't account for this. Do you gravitate towards particular kinds of morality? Is it different when you play videogames?

JR: I think it’s always a systems-driven thing for me. If the systems are interesting in a certain direction for me, then I will go that way. Good or bad are, in the repercussion-free universes of the computer game, a matter of which is less boring. I was playing the board game Scythe and I was unable to not take the mission cards which reduced your popularity, because they were more interesting! Despite that being critical to your score. Who designed it like that?! (Perhaps I just got unlucky.) But anyway there’s something else here, isn’t there. One of the best bits of the book is your guide to the reality of living in the 18th century. Are you not, in fact A HISTORIAN? Tell me about your historianness.

MD: I am in no way a real historian! I'm a fraud! My only claim to academic historianitude is that I did a masters in medieval literature. I ended up studying Arthurian myth (in part because my grandad had been obsessed with it), using its many different stories to chart changing medieval beliefs - like how cool it is with God to murder a shitty king. Given the number of shitty kings who got murdered (not enough, imo), it's a delicate topic for medieval writers, who needed to make sure that they themselves remained unmurdered by whoever then claimed the throne.

So, despite being a literature course, my approach to it was more historical than literary, really. But the inverse was also true: coming to medievalism through its literature helped me realise what excited me about history in general, which was not the grim procession of dates and facts we'd been drilled on in school, but a way to unlock the passions, obsessions, experiences, sights, smells, thoughts, dreams and terrors of lives long since lived. 

JR: You should go to the Jorvik Viking Centre.

MD: Haha! I have! And the memory of its potent odour has lingered with me throughout my life. Meanwhile, I was never interested in the 18th century growing up because the way it was taught to me was all about enhanced crop yields and advancements in textile manufacturing. It was a weird, bloodless angle to take upon a period that bore witness to the most seismic change in the way people lived their daily lives since the development of agrarian society, the thrill and terror of a world completely and forever altered, the wonder of the new and the tragedy of those chewed up in the name of progress, the ubiquitous cruelty of empire and the rare heroism of those who challenged it. And discovering this stuff in later life is what has made me an avid consumer of the kind of history I care about: the kind that has mud on its boots.

JR: One-hundred percent agree on this one. How did younger me miss what an extraordinary period of history this was? Just rampant change beyond imagining.

MD: I'm sure that the very partial version we imbibed at school was due to a national unwillingness to accept fault - not just in terms of Britain's imperial aspirations, which were glossed as a sort of inevitability, divorced from any moral argument whatsoever - but also in the way that power operated within Britain itself, with its class stratification and a parasitic ruling elite whose undeserving, inbred families can be traced all the way back to the Domesday book. Yet the way things were can't be challenged in classrooms, because it might make us challenge the way things are: so history in school ends up as this passive-voice list of events, rather than this thrilling thing that threads together all the people who've ever lived.

Sorry, you asked me about history and instead I've basically told you why the Coronation annoyed me so much. But the two are kind of related. And to TTRPG design, too: I think a lot of what I like about history is holding the big picture in your mind - all the connections, the context, the grand sweeping motion of it - while imagining what it'd be like to walk through it, taking in the sights and textures of a place and time. And connecting those two scales of human experience is what a lot of TTRPG worldbuilding is.

JR: Let’s get into TEETH itself. You wrote, illustrated, designed (both in the sense of game design and the actual layout of the pages) and edited the entire book, as well as the three huge adventures that we produced beforehand. And this was your first go at making RPG books! What have you learned?

MD: Adobe’s InDesign is a fucker. There's that. Also: making a book is literally a million times harder than releasing a PDF, and had I realised that at the start I think I would have laid down and instantly decomposed. It was only my immense ignorance that got us to where we are now! 

JR: Hooray!

MD: In terms of the game design, I think we got better and better at thinking about the rules and how to express them - though this was maybe outstripped by the increasing complexity of the rules we were expressing with each subsequent release. Having arrived at the end of it all, I'm not convinced I'd make the same decision again to scale up from the stripped-back rules of our one-shots, to the full-fat rules of TEETH proper - which is comparable in complexity to Blades in the Dark. In fact, I'm not even sure we made a conscious decision; I think we just assumed that was the goal and didn't question it until it was too late. But all that additional crunchy detail, from having more granular Actions and Attributes and so forth - I think (hope) it all works, but I'm not sure that's what I want from TTRPGs at this point. What about you? Will you gravitate to looser, lighter rulesets in the future, do you think?

JR: I don’t actually know. I think what I am finding most interesting are the rulesets which are light, but also have very substantial influence on how the game is experienced and why. Sort of emergent rulesets, which set up the starting parameters in such a powerful way that they define the experience perfectly. I am thinking of Trophy, of course. And there are rules-y experiences which we have got a lot out of, and I think of the 2D20 campaign I am playing with Gillen and Gardiner at the moment, and in a different but ultimately comparable way the AGON campaign which turned us into Greek Legends in mere moments. They have both been a huge influence on me... But I meander! Why do you think RPGs are so interesting right now? Are they more interesting right now?

MD: In a sense they're as interesting as they ever were, in that the limiting factor has always been the people playing them, but certainly there's just a wild diversification of settings, rulesets and even purposes to RPGs. Obviously D&D is still the big daddy, and you might accuse it of being one of the least interesting out of the box, in that its setting trades in very established fantasy tropes and its mechanics tend toward a relatively constrained spectrum of behaviours, rigidly defined through dice rolls, with a focus on walloping things. But even that, with its use as a framework for performance on Youtube and podcasts, has become looser and weirder than ever before, while promoting it as something that young, attractive people might do, rather than being solely the provence of lamentable, now-ancient nerds such as ourselves.

And partly because it has been rehabilitated and thus absorbed the attention of a lot of young, plastic brains, there is this ever-widening spectrum of acceptable play, from structured to unstructured, from party game to board game, where the social creative space can be turned and tweaked and twisted to explore different ideas. Itch.io's library of one-shots is just an extraordinarily fertile space to experiment.

JR: I think we have both realised that TTRPGs have much to trade with the digital games we have made careers working on. What are your thoughts on that matter?

MD: For a long time I think videogames have taken the wrong lessons from TTRPGs. The very fact that RPG has become a by-word in digital games for a certain kind of granular stats-based advancement system demonstrates a kind of myopia. Not that I dislike granular stats-based advancement systems, but to me the value of TTRPGs is broader than that - the way a GM can integrate story threads within an environment is a very applicable skill, for example; the way you can design systems that reinforce theme, that impress upon players the stressors and factors that shape the world and the characters in it. The infinite freedom of outcome is a cool thing about TTRPGs, but I also think that's an obsession that videogames have taken up at the cost of other things the TTRPG had to offer: being able to pick between three different conversation options isn't as important to me as making a single option feel like a true expression of the character I'm embodying. That's roleplaying! 

You interviewed Gareth Damian Martin a while back, who made the TTRPG-inspired videogame Citizen Sleeper — soon to be an actual TTRPG as well — and that prunes from TTRPGs exactly the things it needs and does not allow itself to be distracted by the rest: everything works towards the goal of evoking a particular role. And the players can shape that role, and change its course, but the game's power comes from how it uses its systems to echo the narrative pressures that inform the player-character's identity. It's a masterwork.

I'm not sure we managed anything as high-minded with TEETH, but we do have more fart jokes!

JR: God, we really do. 

—

1. Hello, you.

2. LINKS!

3. A Little Bit Of The Ol’ TTRPG Discourse.

—

Hello, you

The fulfilment process for the TEETH Kickstarter continues via the opaque and paperwork-hungry medium of global logistics. We can confirm that everything has been printed (although we haven’t yet seen any of it ourselves), and some of it is even in place in the correct warehouses! It will nevertheless be some weeks before it’s all in place to be shipped to you, the wonderful End Users of TEETH: A ROLE-PLAYING GAME. If you are expecting physical rewards then please be patient as this does take some time to organise and we have - we’re not boasting! - got it all done as quickly as possible. (That Marsh had almost finished the book design by the time we did the Kickstarter certainly sped the process up somewhat, but it will still be a few weeks before you are likely to receive your emails from our friends at Soulmuppet, who are handling the distribution. Remain vigilant for these communications!)

As for the stretch goal materials - these are to be shared as PDFs as soon as we’ve completed them! - well, they’re all well underway, with Jim putting the finishing-finishing touches to MANDEVILLE’S HORRID INVENTORY this weekend and both of us poised to get busy on the pre-made character roster. This character roster has a little twist which amuses us greatly, and I trust you will enjoy them in the same way. 

Generally, though, it will be a little while before Marsh has everything designed and illustrated, of course, as that’s still a labour-intensive process. Marsh wanted to share this image, however, as a little taste of what’s ahead.

More teeth, you see.

-Marsh & Jim

—

Links!

This one is heavy on the Stuff We And Our Compatriots Found On Wikipedia (I forget who sent us a couple of these links, apologies if it was you!) and filed away for future reference.

• Like Hounds & Jackals, which I am sort of stunned that I had never heard of before: “Hounds and jackals, also known as 58 holes, is a well-known Bronze Age board game which was invented in Ancient Egypt 4,000 years ago.”

• Very TEETH, this one: “John Elwes was a member of parliament in Great Britain for Berkshire and an eccentric miser, suggested to be an inspiration for the character of Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Dickens made reference to Elwes in "Bleak House" - along with another notable 18th century miser, Daniel Dancer." I love the idea of "notable misers."

• And this too, about highwayman James Allen, could find its way into TEETH pages, and God damn: “While in Charlestown, Allen became deathly ill. He spoke openly to the warden, confessing many crimes but denying any involvement with the burning of the tavern in Dedham. The warden wrote down much of what Allen told him and published it as "the Narrative of the Life of James Allen, alias Jonas Pierce, alias James H. York, alias Burley Grove, the Highwayman, Being His Death-bed Confession to the Warden of the Massachusetts State Prison." Allen said that Fenno was the only brave man he ever met. He asked that a copy of the book be bound in his own skin and given to Fenno. After his death, a large patch of skin was removed from his back and tanned. On the cover was written "Hic Liber Waltonis Cute Compatus Est," or "Here is the book Walton made of his own skin." The book was given to Fenno, and his family kept it for many years. When Fenno's children and grandchildren misbehaved, they were paddled with the book.” What the fuck, History.

• David Hood dazzles us with the nominative determinism of Edward Pine Coffin, who despite his name (or perhaps because of it) ended up in charge of famine relief in Limerick during the Great Hunger.

• The Bonnacon will be my next submission to the great bestiary: “In Asia an animal is found which men call bonnacon. It has the head of a bull, and thereafter its whole body is of the size of a bull's with the maned neck of a horse. Its horns are convoluted, curling back on themselves in such a way that if anyone comes up against it, he is not harmed. But the protection which its forehead denies this monster is furnished by its bowels. For when it turns to flee, it discharges fumes from the excrement of its belly over a distance of three acres, the heat of which sets fire to anything it touches. In this way, it drives off its pursuers with its harmful excrement.”

  

• And I really do need to set a scenario in a burning city, with an NPC called Thomas Dagger.

—

A Little Bit Of The Ol’ TTRPG Discourse

We’ve largely spent the northern hemisphere summer as hunched grotesques, pummelling words out of our keyboards, extracting research elements from the glitchy coalface of the internet, and avoiding discourse of any kind. However, this bit got through, and not in a bad way!

Designer David J Prokopetz posted “The Gremlin Game Designer's Creed” on his Tumblr, and there have been a few responses to it, not least on Thomas Manuel’s reliably excellent newsletter (which is where we saw it, via Gillen). It’s worth reading and thinking about, because the claims in there are all interesting and/or provocative. By reading it you can find out if you, yes YOU, are a Gremlin Game Designer. A sort of TTRPG-approach quiz.

I think I agree with a lot of what Prokopetz proposes, particularly the parts about players not needing permission to depart from the rules (although I also think that there are occasions when departing from the rules breaks the game and malignly wrecks the intent of the thing even if the breaking is okay and fun), randomness and lookup tables being your friend, and crunch being good. BUT I am definitely not full gremlin. For a start I don’t exactly agree with the big initial claim that “rules are toys”, not least because I think there’s a big old philosophical abyss to stare into when it comes to break up game, play, and toys, and how rules relate to that stuff.* 

That wasn’t really the bit I cared about, though, and what I wanted to wax on was: “9. If your game has a default setting, explain it as little as possible, but always let the rules and presentation reflect it. Seeing an entry for "poorly made dwarf" in a table of player character backgrounds will fire a group's imagination more strongly in three words than a chapter stuffed with worldbuilding lore could in ten thousand.”

I absolutely agree with this, I love not explaining stuff! I love having stuff not explained to me. Doing Less is, as this paragraph notes with its reference to Troika’s brilliant minimalist character archetypes, incredibly powerful stuff when it comes to firing everyone’s imaginations. In my narrative design day job I often find myself arguing for positions that mean we remove lore, story, dialogue, explanation, and world-building in favour of letting the the player fill in the details. Hell, I agree with M John Harrison’s diagnosis of the world-building impulse that “worldbuilding is not technically neccessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there”. (I even sometimes wonder if I could publish just a book of the endless collections prompts and notes and phrases that I collect when writing, and perhaps that would be a better book overall.)

However, I am also aware that a very large part of the appeal of both reading and writing TTRPG material (and material for games more broadly) is precisely the voluminous filling out of fictional worlds. I know I love this, and I know others love this too. We want to sit down with a giant slab of world, and leaf through its made up history. We love atlases of Middle Earth and timelines which explain how Elminster got to where he is today. Look at the sheer scale of the 40k world-building, or the sheer number of D&D supplements. As a player and a creator of games I love “Poorly Made Dwarf” and I am inspired by it, and yet also revel in sinking into the ten thousand words someone bashed out on on an invented culture, or indeed writing those ten thousand words myself.

In this sense I suspect both positions are true, neither are true. It’s a horrible contradiction that I both want games to be little more than brilliant prompts to organic imaginative creativity, and also be meticulously wrought atlases of other universes. Perhaps it is fine: this brand of cognitive dissonance is something we deal with all the time. (And there are approaches to making one game do both, as we have tried to do in TEETH.)

Ultimately, I often argue that just as Warhammer is three distinct hobbies — collecting, playing, and painting/modelling — so TTRPG is three distinct hobbies: playing, collecting those lovely books, and actually reading 10,000 words of lore about Goat-Elves Who Wish To Be King. It’s fine for it to be both, and also for us to be both.

We can be both gremlins and we can be ivory-tower ficto-academics with long, flowing manscripts. We can do it all.

More soon! x

*Having been non-committally paddling through Bernard Suits’ bizarre 1978 text on games, The Grasshopper — I love Frank Lantz’ description of him as a “funky math beatnik” and he looks exactly how you would imagine an technical academic writing philosophico-poetic theory books about games in the 1970s would look — I have found myself thinking about games as a category as more as a part of the spectrum of all practical activities that have rules connected to them (cooking, driving etiquette, crossing the road would all be part of this) than simply as part of “play” as a behaviour or art as a slice of culture. Games, by Suits’ definition are activities we indulge in when we don’t have to worry about what we are doing, like much of culture, but they also have the shared characteristics of containing difficulties or obstacles that we agree to take on, entirely unnecessarily. Games are challenges that are unecessary, to ends that don’t matter. We don’t really care about putting the King in checkmate, and it doesn’t matter if we did so, but we will participate in the difficulties created by the rules of chess for doing so, simply in order to play the game with Uncle Stan. Which DOES bring it back to being inside the auspices of play, but anyway, I haven’t read the whole book.

1. Hello, You

2. LINKS!

3. Reading Matters

Hello, You

This month we have been BUSY. And not just in our day job as game development bees placing the honey of our labour in the wax-capped hexagons of capital, but as independent publishers and writers extraordinaire. We have been creating the additional digital materials that will come with any tier of TEETH from the Kickstarter, and Marsh has been arranging the printing and shipping of our materials. We’ve even finished printing the zines based on Blood Cotillion, Night Of The Hogmen and Stranger & Stranger! Only - oh God no! - to find the couriers had savagely wrecked a great chunk of them and delivered the mess to our US fulfilment friends unexpectedly, leaving us with a significant problem to sort out. Forgive us any tardiness while we get that resolved. What a horrible thing to happen!

Also, we are trying to make sure that we have a way to exit the orbit of the X-Twitter ecosystem, since that has been poisoned and despoiled to the point of being a Boschian nazi-thugscape, and as such we can be found on Bluesky here and here, or on Mastodon here and here. Which of these will become our predominant mode isn’t yet clear, but exact Twitter clone Bluesky does seem to be getting more of our attention, even if Mastodon is far better for news-gathering and community (not to mention the obvious issue of Bluesky not yet being freely open to sign ups!)

Anyway, stick with us right here for the bulk of the communication, as the TEETH letter will remain the centre of our activities in the future, whatever that may hold.

Onwards!

-Marsh & Jim

—

LINKS!

• Previously mentioned mountain-mining dwarf FiTD title Mountain Home has been getting a bunch of attention lately, with it reaching a mature phase in development and tantalising us with its dwarven possibilities. People have, unsurprisingly, begun asking about a print version, and creator Karl Scheer has so far demurred on the potential double-charging issue of the crowd-fund, while observing that print-on-demand costs are also now prohibitively high. No physical option would certainly be a shame, because we desperately want a thje book of this game! We’ll have to wait and see what happens. Whatever that might be, it seems inevitable that one of my regular groups will run a campaign of this, because of dwarves and of Risky Standards. Oh my goodness, this one is drawing us in like delving too deep for precious metals.

• The Ink That Bleeds sound super interesting, courtesy of this piece over at Cannibal Halfling. As far as I understand it this is a journaling game that links together a number of different games with the same character, while also being a sort of exercise in how to play journaling games. I feel obliged to take a look.

• This discussion of workshopping and how it related to running at RPGs, and how RPG-running skills are transferrable, was a stimulating read. The best part, to my mind was the identification of specific skills from specific gaming systems, such as listening and interpreting from the PBTA way of doing things. “[U]nlike many other games where a roll means a success or failure, in PBTA games, most rolls create situations that must be interpreted. For instance, if a player says they hot wire a car and drive off, and rolls a mixed success (the most common outcome in the game) the GM must decide what that means. Maybe they drive off and then realize there’s a baby in the car. Maybe the car loudly backfires and draws attention. But it boils down to “OK, you said this, so therefore, that.” This is very similar to workshopping when people are following the procedures of exercises and sharing their thoughts. It’s not enough to just record the thoughts, they must be interpreted and built upon. But most importantly, a good facilitator is always, always listening to what the participants say, and pulling out the bits that need to be unpacked and built upon.”

• A couple of people shared Jay Dragon’s The Storyteller Technique with us this month, and they’re right that it is one of those simple and brilliant observations, basically “find the voice in your fiction”, that does a huge amount of work for you. I have even applied it to something I am working in the background which had stalled a bit. Here’s the key passage, but please read it all if this is useful to you: “One of the first pieces of advice I give for anyone when I’ve been brought on to consult on a project is to imagine the game as an artifact of the world which itself creates. A game in a cyberpunk future might be an illegally-downloaded .exe file or a corporate memo passed down from on high. A fantasy game might be found within a wizard’s spellbook, the prayer-chants of a barbarian, or the research notes of an inventor. Imagining the relationship the game-text would have with the world it depicts will inform every aspect of the project, from art and layout to writing and design. Once you know where the game is in the world, imagine the writer or storyteller teaching it to you. Are they a grizzled veteran of a thousand wars, or a bright-faced researcher imagining a glorious world that she’s never been to? If you were in this world, and you were documenting this game as instructed to you by the people in it, how would they speak to you? What would that be like?”

• Another piece of veteran thinking that came to our attention this month was Monte Cook talking about the difference between experiencing the story and creating the story in games. This is something of a pet topic of my own, and I might write an essay riffing off this, but for now, take a read and Cook’s always-insightful discussion: “Metaphorically speaking, in the immersion approach, the characters are standing in the street and the story is a speeding car coming right for them. They can react in any way they wish, but the story is extraneous to them. It is happening to them. But in the participation approach, that same story racing down the street is, at least in part, driven by the players. The story is just as interesting and exciting, but it’s not extraneous to the players because they’re helping to steer. It’s still happening to the characters, but not the players. These two approaches don’t rely on what the GM does. The GM can run the game however they wish—carefully crafted story, character-focused events, all randomly generated locations and obstacles, etc.—in either style. The difference is what is expected of the players.” All of which links to my next thing.

—

THING OF THE WEEK: Barkeep On The Borderlands

Prismatic Wasteland’s Barkeep On The Borderlands is quite the thing, and produced by a meteoric cast. And, I mean, just look at it.

“Barkeep on the Borderlands is a barhopping, fantasy adventure amidst Mardi Gras-like festivities, including 20 detailed pubs and dynamic drinking rules.”

And what detail!

Very much recommended.

I can’t remember whether I mentioned this previously, but a few years ago I ran a long campaign of D&D for my wife and her friends, which was my last outing into that game and a pleasant one. It spluttered out, as these things do, when one of the key players left for London. Now that he has returned a new campaign is on the table and I have begun my prep. A lurid and caricatured fantasy world is definitely the thing, but instead of rolling my own it’s time to deploy the many, many adventures and OSR settings I have collected in the intervening years.

I do not, I should mention, intend to run D&D this time, because the overhead was too great before, and it will be far too much this time, especially as this is a group who definitely prefer the Experiencing role that Cook was talking about in the link upthread.

Nevertheless D&D, or as close a facsimile as I can manage, is what they will be expecting. And so it will be time to introduce that group - unfamiliar with anything outside of the Hasbro circle - to an OSR ruleset with the vibe and icon thematics that these folks will be familiar with.

Given the nature of this particular gang of habitual festival-going drinkers, I cannot imagine a better opening salvo to the campaign than this, a system-agnostic fantasy pub crawl: why start your campaign in a tavern, it asks, when you could start it by getting hammered across twenty taverns?

I’ll let you know how we get on.

Cheers!

-jim

—

More soon! x

1. Hello, you

2. LINKS!

3. Some Things We Have Acquired

Hello, you

It’s been a busy old month, which always — to my mind — seems to be the specific flavour of June. Perhaps it’s something to do with the long days, but June always seems like a crescendo of activity around our way.

And so it was! Last week we fulfilled the first batch of materials from the TEETH Kickstarter over on itch.io, so if you backed the Kickstarter please check your email (it’s the one you signed up to Kickstarter with!) and you should have a link to the files at the bottom of that, which will allow you to associate your downloads with an itch.io account. Let us know if you have any problems and we can send you the link again privately!

This first batch includes the full core PDF as well as the playbooks and maps (which are actually free to download for all, check out the inaccurately-named “Demo” section at the bottom of the Teeth page). The first round of feedback and responses to this have been incredibly kind and generous, and we are thankful that so many people have been struck by the chord of the game. As we have said before all the stretch goal documents will be added to your itch.io accounts as we complete them!

Then, of course, there is the printing of the books. Since the Kickstarter was more of a success than we had initially anticipated we have had to change our printing plans a little. This is also the first time we have ever done anything like this, so Marsh has had to spend a lot of time learning about setting up PDFs for printing and all that stuff. He’s been negotiating with printers, too, and I think we now have a plan to go forward with that. We’ll keep you all updated as we go, both here and over on the Kickstarter update pages.

Thanks again, everyone!

Marsh & Jim

—

LINKS!

• Oh my goodness, Koriko by Jack Harrison is just beautiful. The themes it plays with may be familiar to you, a liker of 21st-century culture: “This is a game for one player, designed for contemplative solo play. It’s a bubbling cauldron of simple rules and writing prompts, stirred together to produce the story of a teenage witch spending a year away from home in an unfamiliar city called Koriko.”

• If there was ever a Forged In The Dark game that we were destined to play, it is surely 40k variant Blades Of The Inquisition, which is freely available (for obvious reasons) and has a new recent update. (I think? Maybe not, but it found its way into my file recently anyway.) Go take a look!

• We are (sort of) a Forged In The Dark fan-newsletter over here, so please forgive a second link to a FitD game, because I suspect those of you with a whiff of interest in such things will be very interested in Alterity. There’s some great writing in here, and it just brims with atmosphere: “ALTERITY is a Forged in the Dark game about the delvers of an Aetheric Order, a radical guild or cell whose members scour glooms across the ruins of Alteris in search of the multiversal aether they need to fuel their power, prestige, and protection.”

• I am in love with this fantasy-architecture book  by Guy Pradel (it’s in French, but that just adds to the charm) and consequently I am facing a tragic heartbreak, since the printed zine is out of stock. (But there is a PDF!) It’s worth browsing Pradel’s other work.

• Speaking of architectural space, I have been meaning to link to this Unwinnable article about Inside and Gorogoa for weeks. Mostly because it reminds me of when I used to write about videogames and architecture.

—

Some Things We Have Acquired

Thing #1: Atma

A couple of weeks ago the boxes for “role-playing card game” Atma I & II, by Meromorph Games, arrived. Atma has been around for a while, but it’s completely new to me and it’s been fascinating to take a look at.

The principle of the game is that it works like — and explicitly credits — the Powered By The Apocalypse games, which, if you are not familiar with their general motif, are games which handle player actions via “moves”. These are actions that when resolved with dice are played out narratively as success, partial success, or failure (an evolution for which was seen again in Blades, of course).

Atma does this by your characters being a set of cards (narrative on one side and rules on the other), but it sets up everything else with cards too. This is interesting because it plays out in a limited sort of time frame: the GM has to steer the players through three scenes with a goal in mind, which is then added to via character, prop, and twist cards.

The intention here, as I understand from Meromorph’s own descriptions of their game, is to make things zero-prep. The game generates a scenario in their science-fantasy world, introduces the characters and antagonists and goals, all within a few minutes. An ideal way, I think, to introduce people to a rather more narrative way of role-playing, especially if they are a GM who has little or no experience with improvisation: the cards deal you the content to play and there’s no need to invent on the fly because you are simply given the next thing.

That said, from what I have played so far (one game with my kids, to be fair) I am not sure it actually *does* make improvisation any easier. I found myself grasping inexpertly for how to include the things that came off the deck. And even though you are encouraged to peek and what’s coming up, I didn’t always find a very plausible path from one item to the next.

Perhaps this is because I am so used to improvising and just making stuff on the fly that the cards actually interrupted and derailed my usual free-associating, or perhaps it’s because actually doing some prep IS necessary to really make Atma sing, in a way that isn’t really intended.

Either way, I am smitten with the cards, their beautiful art and (weird as this sounds) the incredible packaging. I am not sure I have ever seen a role-playing game (Invisible Sun excepted from this, obviously) with such aspirational packaging. We’re talking magnet-closers in the card box flap. (I know!)

Thing #2

My own safari through TTRPG-land initially failed to register Black Sword Hack by Alexandre ‘Kobayashi’ Jeannette until Comrade Gardiner brought it to my attention by running a game a few weeks past. I’ve already mentioned that it has pitch-perfect art by the sterling Goran Gligovic, whose work summons an alternature future/past stylisation from the 70s (a sort of ode in art to Elric-or-Viriconium* meets the Bakshi/Frazetta axis as well as Euro influences) and could not be more pefect for the law vs chaos dark fantasy tradition that it appeals to, but it also comes with some fantastic tricks of design and writing.

Based on the redoubtable The Black Hack by David Black, the game generates a world “to destroy” and throws in some mechanics that evoke the setting admirably. My favourite of these is the “Doom Die”, which is an additional dice held by each player, which msut be tested for certain rolls and drops in size (d6 to d4 to example) on failure. A push-your-luck mechanic intended to “push the envelope of traditional OSR lethality – at the risk of going too far and becoming doomed.”

I am a sucker for stuff like this, and not just because I really like saying “I roll the Doom Die” in play.

The consequence of this is the Black Sword Hack ends up feeling more-70s-than-70s, a fantasy more an Old School Fantasy than (m)any of the games of the period. It is one of those neat creative tricks of nostalgia where a book/movie/song takes the tropes of the time and pushes them through a perceived idea of how things were or might have been, while at the same time using modern conceits to deliver the final experience.

Admittedly my absolute immersion in FitD and narrative-y games over the past couple of years has left me wide open to OSR colonisation, but this really hit a chord.

Thing #3

I am not sure I know how to explain Moebius’ Lazlo Parker (it’s a book of abstract art by the comic book master, Lazlo Parker being the pseudonym and alter-ego for the work) and it has nothing much to do with TTRPGs, but I now look at it every single day. It’s beautiful on its own, but also provocative.

What would an RPG with art like this be about? How would it play? (There’s a thread here about what RPGs aliens would play; games the rules of which are incompatible with being human.)

Gosh, that’s a lot of francophonic aspiration.

—

*Speaking of Viriconium, I have been reading Harrison’s “anti-memoir”, which is just a very odd and at-least-partially-brilliant book about writing and being a writer. Not sure it has any relevance to this newsletter, but it might when it’s had time to stew.

—

More soon! x

1. Hello, you

2. LINKS!

3. No interview this week, but more in the pipe for next time!

—

Hello, you

And so it happened. The TEETH Kickstarter was a fine, delightful, and relieving success! We now find ourselves in the midst of the final-final_FINAL (1).pdf things which must be done in order to fulfil our promises to you: a book! Many digital PDFs! Maps! Booklets of adventures! It is a myriad of excitement, spreadsheets, ink choices, and quotes for printing costs.

A number of people have asked if they can order the book even though they failed to back the Kickstarter, and if you are wondering this then the answer to your question is: yes, most probably! We are now planning to print more significantly books than we needed to fulfil the Kickstarter, and so this pleasing excess of pages will be available to order later on in the year. Precise details on this arrangement will be announced once the books exist and are in a warehouse somewhere. We will let you know on here and elsewhere, of course.

As for us, well! We’ve spent the past couple of weeks making some final adjustments to the game’s many assets, tweaking and proofing, while also negotiating with printers. It’s our first time doing this, so please bear with us! The core book PDF and other digital components will be released as soon as we are 100% happy with their quality, which should be, yep, soon™. (Useful word that.) We’ll be fascinated to see what you make of it!

We’re also cracking on with the additional materials unlocked by our stretch goals, and Jim is headlong into Mandeville’s Horrid Inventory: a supplement to furnish your Teeth game (or any game, really) with some truly cursed objects.

The stretch goals for you lovely backers, which will come as additional PDFs with all tiers, include:

Hyperdimensional Gaol-Break, which is our expansion of a scenario already suggested in the book, with maps, character biographies, monsters and the usual Teethy grotesquery.

One of the things that the standalone adventures did best was to provide pre-made characters with their own names, skills, and inventories. The Pre-made Character Roster will be taking up the same role, with a bunch of unique playbooks. As those who have played our previous adventures will already know, we revel in creating some excellent pre-made characters named characters, own weird agenda, unique items and pungent diseases.

There is also the delightful unpleasantness of Milk of the Hogwoman, which provides an additional adventure scenario, introducing new characters, locations, challenges and monsters from The Vale. This will be illustrated by Marsh and authored by a special guest (and noted Teeth playtester—Jamie Brittain, known for his writing on landmark TV shows, Skins and Breeders. 

Finally, Mandeville's Horrid Inventory will be a lovely tome of cursed items, some of them created by the unpleasant master blacksmith, Cork Mandeville, and others imported from "outside" by his worrying business partners. This additional document will, of course, be illustrated by Marsh Davies and written by Jim Rossignol. Largely a compendium of unexpected objects, Mandeville's Horrid Inventory will provide detailed descriptions of some of the most intensely-cursed items in the Vale, because we know how you love thinking taxidermy and the people who live beyond mirrors.

It’s being written! And illustrated!

Thanks again for your assistance, your backing, and your patience. It’s been a fantastic experience.

- Marsh & Jim

—

LINKS!

• Regular readers will recall how much we enjoyed playing Trophy Gold. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I played in one campaign and ran another! So it is with some trepidations that I link to the deeply silly Trophy Golf. It is what it seems to be.

• The Zines for miniature-painting competition Slug Wizards are one of the coolest things I have lately seen and appreciated with my own eyes, revelling in a deeply early-80s hobby magazine vibe. I won’t spoil it by posting anything else, but don’t miss them, fantastic stuff.

• I was interested to read this interview about Girl By Moonlight, a FiTD-based game from Evil Hat which is currently funding on BackerKit.

• The Moth Is Never Ok. Cats and truth.

• Cezar Capacle knows what to do, and that’s why I am extremely interested in Insurgent, a solo or group GMless RPG “in which you'll become a member of a group of rebels fighting against oppressive forces, with each mission potentially turning the tide in your favor. As you embark on daring adventures, you'll create your own unique setting, deciding whether to battle in a fantastical realm, a modern city, or futuristic landscapes.”

• Wow, look at Bruno Prosaiko’s character sheet design for Metamorphosis BX. Wizardry!

• Those of you who enjoy some fine art should keep an eye on the Mileships hashtag on your social medias. Just saying.

• In research this week I learned of The Legend of Captain Pouch, which sounds like I made it up on the spot, but which is in fact the story of one of the first Levellers (one of the earliest radical movements in England). The captain’s real name was John Reynolds, and he was a tinker from Northamptonshire whose popular handle arose from his habit of carrying a mysterious pouch or perhaps leather satchel. Captain Pouch assured the safety of his fellow rebels by insisting that the pouch contained "sufficient matter to defend them against all", and claimed God would allow him to destroy “enclosures”, which were an act of theft of common land by our overlords at the time (a political horror which still shapes ownership of land in the UK today). Confidence in the pouch seems to have been a contributing factor in the Midland Revolt against enclosure, which, in the end, did not go well for Reynolds, who was hanged. The pouch was opened and found to contain a piece of green cheese. It is, surely, this green cheese for which we must blame all the misfortune Britain has suffered in the centuries that followed.

  

—

Interviews and Essays resume in the next newsletter!

More soon! x

1. Hello, you

2. LINKS!

3. An Interview With Gareth Damian Martin

—

Hello, you

At the time of writing the TEETH Kickstarter has just passed £30,000! I am sure it was obvious to everyone watching that we weren’t exactly anticipating that kind of success, but it can still go higher! To support us please send a link to a TTRPG-loving friend, or use the gentle, healing power of social media to bring our work to the masses.

If you are a regular reader and haven’t backed us yet then you just have just over two days to do so!

And a very toothy thank you, everyone, for being so supportive, for reading our work here, and in the games and in supporting the book itself. It means the world to us and seeing our first ever book being funded so emphatically has been hugely rewarding.

The newsletter will, of course, continue as normal.

-Marsh & Jim

LINKS!

• Podcast of the week (or ever, maybe - have we recommended a podcast before?) is The Maniculum Podcast! Run by Mac Boyle and Zoe Franznick, it’s a podcast about turning medieval stories into TTRPG adventures. Mac and Zoe explain: “In each episode, we explore a new medieval manuscript, its connections to modern TTRPGs, and teach you how to adapt these tales into compelling campaigns and amazing adventures. Whether you’re looking to recreate the noble Arthurian tales or incorporate weird and wacky medieval monsters into your campaign, the Maniculum Podcast has you covered.” Amazing!

• While we’re on podcasts, Marsh is also very keen on Pontifacts, in which ranks popes in order of something or other. Popeness? Nothing to do with TTRPGs, of course, but nonetheless everything to do with the kind of material we like to see in this newsletter.

• Moderately less tenuous RPG link: I am playing the Conan RPG tomorrow, and so I read through all of this thread about the red-haired character in the movie. Red Hair, he is called.

• Actual RPG link! “The year is 1943. You are a crack squad of vampire commandos with a single mission: drink all of Hitler's blood”.

• Speaking of supernatural commandos, I think I previously skipped over FIST due to it looking like a dude-with-gun game, but it turns out it is MUCH more interesting than that: “The paranormal secrets of the Cold War are your bread and butter, and you fight for your life to make ends meet alongside others like you: stopping disastrous science experiments, infiltrating occult compounds, neutralizing eldritch horrors—all in a day's work for FIST. Players are typically outnumbered, easily killed, and disliked or hunted by most sources of authority. You don't have tons of money and gadgets backing you up, just your wits and a few tools. War is hell, and you're one of the little guys. FIST is inspired by Metal Gear Solid, The A-Team, and Doom Patrol. It's mechanically descended from John Harper's World of Dungeons, Ben Milton's Maze Rats, and Offworlders, by Chris P. Wolf and Olivia Gulin.” I’ve heard good things from reputable sources, and it sounds RAD.

—

An Interview With Gareth Damian Martin

Who is this person? Why, it’s Gareth Damian Martin, the writer, game designer and artist that some of you will doubtless recognise from Citizen Sleeper, a game that could hardly blend our interests any more concretely: inspired by the dice-pooling magic of Blades In The Dark’s role-playing systems and combining these sleights of dicery with the satisfying solo crunch of the digital game. Not played it yet? Then do so, right after, or perhaps even before, reading this. We talk to Gareth about the connection between tabletop RPGs and digital games and their - inevitable? - slide back towards an RPG of their own, Cycles Of The Eye.

Jim: Can you tell us a little about your personal history with TTRPGs — what do they mean to you, and why? What are you playing at the moment, and why?

Gareth: So I actually came to TTRPGs late, thanks to some tedious experiences with a Dungeons & Dragons board game in my childhood that put me off the idea for a while. (Although the concept of a +2 Mace became a running joke between me and my brothers for a reason I can't remember). It was only during the development of my first game, In Other Waters, that I found myself listening to the excellent "actual play" podcast Friends at the Table and immediately fell in love with Blades in the Dark through their Marielda arc. From that point on I listened to hours and hours of actual play and even managed to run some games and then a campaign of it, though only for one person. I think the improvisational, unpredictable nature of Blades, when combined with the city full of narrative hooks and factions was what really drew me into Blades and got me to understand what TTRPGs could be. I loved it so much that my second game, Citizen Sleeper, was focused around bringing Blades-style TTRPG elements to a video game. It seemed obvious to me that videogames were missing a trick by ignoring this wealth of mechanics and ideas I had discovered! These days I run a weekly group with a couple of friends (we are playing a Heart: The City Beneath campaign) and listen to or watch actual play almost daily. I find TTRPGs an amazing place to test out narrative ideas, and to come up with new ones, and the thrill of inventing a story on the fly for the players is something I find very addictive! 

Jim: Tell us about your experiences with Blades In The Dark.

Gareth: Blades is very special to me, perhaps because it was my entry-point to tabletop games, and I find myself thinking about its structures and qualities on a regular basis. I like the way play is a kind of negotiation between the player and the GM, with the devil's bargains and discussions of position and effect, that often allow the player to express a lot of intent and direction. Meanwhile, through the faction system, clocks, engagement rolls, the game also makes it easy for the GM to respond to that sense of freedom the player has. The player can point at a place on a map and say they'd like to infiltrate it, and the GM can easily build something that works in response almost immediately. There's a flow, an escalation that means as a GM you are often being taken along for the ride just like the player, having to deal with the accrued weight of the improvised consequences as you go on, making this unwieldy mess that all collapses beautifully in the end. These days I am trying to branch out a little more and run things outside of this comfort zone, but I have to admit I always feel Blades beckoning me back.

Jim: And now you are playing Heart: how has that been for your group? What's your take on that system?

Gareth: Heart has been an interesting system to get to grips with. I was originally attracted by the domain system and the loot-focused gameplay, as well as the world that allows for the invention of an incredible breadth of weird settings and creatures (as I prefer to improvise or create my own material within broad systems and settings rather than using premade material). But I have found that what works really well is the idea of "delves" as having "stress", and exploration being a kind of combat where you deal stress to a dungeon or location by exploring it and facing challenges. It is very easy to prepare and run, and makes dungeon creation a less onerous experience for GMs. It's a strange system though, one I am never sure I am running correctly because it seems a little contradictory. For example, much of the design is focused around a short, eight session campaign, but then many of the skills or "beats" (the progression mechanic, like a Blades "drive") don't make sense in such a short structure. One of my players has specced themselves almost entirely around building a network of places, and revisiting them, so in the end I have built a kind of Dark Souls-esque looping map of delves around a central hub, and that has worked out nicely. I have made a map which is the central tool for the players, and they can consult it in order to make plans and play freely. The whole process has actually got me thinking about how the domain system and delves could be used to create a very interesting text-based dungeon crawler, but then that's a predictable line of thought for me!

Jim: Can you tell us a bit about how tabletop games have influenced you as a digital game developer?

Gareth: As I have already mentioned, Citizen Sleeper has been an experiment in bringing some of the exciting work I was seeing in the TTRPG space into videogames. It has been a massively successful experiment, and so I think it is likely to become my calling card as a developer, at least for a while. I think there's an idea that it is impossible to emulate a TTRPG in a videogame, and while that's partially true, I actually think we've moved way past the idea of "complete freedom" being the thing that defines TTRPGS and more towards the idea that distinctive, abstracted design is the key feature of a tabletop game. That kind of abstraction (dice representing luck or energy, clocks representing progress or damage or well, anything really!) is very powerful in videogames, both because it means you can have a massive variety of content with just a few mechanics, but also for its non illusionistic nature. The game isn't trying to be "real" it is a representation that we collectively make real. I love that slightly ungraspable quality, and I think now that it has got into my blood it is likely to influence all my videogames going forward. So I think the influence is something I am actively fostering now, and I hope to continue working in this space for a while.

Jim: Do you think there was a significant difference between the responses of people who understood the tabletop influence of Citizen Sleeper and those who did not? Or did most people "get" it?

Gareth: I actually don't think there was. Early in development I was thinking about making the dice "energy cores" or something because I was afraid people would be put off by the gameiness of it. But after a while I felt like actually the near-universal quality of an object like dice means I should be explicit about what they are. As far as I can tell everyone got the game I was playing here, the conceit of dice as energy, and the associations with ideas of luck and fate. Perhaps TTRPG players might be more eager to roleplay their sleeper, playing the game differently, but the feedback we got from players was often that they "don't usually like games like this, but loved this one" which suggests to me the balance was right.

Jim: Why do you think the TTRPG space has become so interesting in the past few years?

Gareth: I might not be the best to ask, as I have only been part of it for the past few years! I suppose for the reasons I have become part of it. There is a huge amount of interesting work being done, and there is an openness to the scene that wasn't there before (in my view). I think also actual play has had a huge effect, I love watching and listening to people play, discovering the story at the same time they do, it has a quality that few other mediums share and i think that has really boosted the number of people coming into TTRPGs and wanting to play or make them. Which, in the end, is how things get interesting!

Jim: Do you want to talk about your own plans in the TTRPG space? (I wasn't sure whether this was a thing you were talking about yet, so take or leave!)

Gareth: There's lot of work to be done on Cycles of the Eye, the solo tabletop adaptation of Citizen Sleeper and so that will be the focus of my TTRPG work for a while. After that I am very sure I will be planning another tabletop project. I like existing in this crossover space between games and tabletop games, and that's something I'd like to foster as much as possible. Tidebreak (the mothership supplement I have done set in the world of my first game, In Other Waters) was my first taste of it, and since then I have had a lot of other ideas for crossovers and original projects, it's just about finding the time! So watch this space.

Jim: Which games would you urge the readers of this newsletter to take a look at if they haven't already?

Gareth: I've been doing a lot of digging into solo TTRPGs as prep for making Cycles of the Eye, and so now have a ton of those I like to recommend. 1000 Year Old Vampire is a great starting point, as it is so simple but generates some lovely situations, and is very pleasant to pick away at night after night for a long period. I have also been enjoying some more crunchy solo games, where the focus is on a light layer of fiction and some more developed mechanical bits. Apothecaria is a really fun potion brewing game with a little exploration, and Notorious is an excellent solo bounty-hunting game that I have already been daydreaming how to make into a videogame! I also have a special love for A Visit to San Sabilia, which is a journaling game about visiting a strange city. It is very simple but incredibly evocative, like exploring an Italo Calvino story. Finally I should also mention the work of Alfred Valley, my collaborator on Cycles of the Eye and an excellent solo tabletop designer. His post-apocalyptic wandering healer RPG Lay on Hands is a magical little ritual of a game, and I can strongly recommend exploring it and its unusual "oracle".

Jim: Thanks for your time.

—

More soon! x

1. Hello, you

2. LINKS!

3. An Imaginary Atlas Of Imagined Atlases

Hello, you

Ah, what a pleasant vista this is!

The TEETH Kickstarter is half way along its journey. As we noted last time, the project was funded almost immediately, and continued to pile on the pledges. There are 684 backers at the time of writing, and we’re amazed by the generosity of everyone involved. Thank you, so much!

We’ve been cracking on with the additional materials promised by the stretch goals, and Marsh has already begun the task of illustrating the new words, with a delightful portrait of Tattler Pickfat, the mutated magistrate…

And a view of Ebith College, one of the locations from the book that we’ll be delving into in more detail.

I, meanwhile, have been grubbing about in a world of cursed objects as I begin to describe Mandeville’s Cursed Inventory. It should certain raise an eyebrow/smile once it’s done.

If you are still somehow ravening for more, there’s been some lovely coverage of the Kickstarter, with an interview over on Bloody Disgusting, and a chat with Jim coming up in the next Wyrd Science newsletter, so keep an eye out for that.

Oh and I forgot to link the special Jim & Marsh Crate & Crowbar podcast last time, so here it is.

-jim

--

LINKS!

• A couple of people asked me if we intended to do more on solo-RPGs and the answer is nooooooooo… well, maaaaybe. Maybe. BUT perhaps there is no reason for us to do so! As Patrick Buechner’s The Soloist now exists. This handsome newsletter has a whole bunch of coverage of solo and single-player RPG stuff, and I am very impressed with the whole vibe so far. Go sign up!

• I like the look of Psykers.

• Prisoners Of The Elf King explores what might happen when a bunch of dwarves escape imprisonment by a cranky elf king. Nothing good, by the sounds of it.

• Not sure how I previously missed out on twin card game Desperation, but it now has my full attention. “Gothic storytelling experiences steeped in actual history, Dead House and The Isabel are dark, lyrical games about people pushed far past their limits.” With beautiful art! 

• I rather enjoyed this group of CRPG designers at GDC — Josh Sawyer, Mike Laidlaw, Strix Beltran, Paweł Sasko, and Lis Moberly — that PC Gamer corralled together to talk about their craft. It’s one of the things that trad media like PCG still manage to orchestrate with aplomb, long may it continue.

• Cosplay and RPGs go hand in hand, of course, but some of them could be said to be getting /out of hand/ so to speak. Because look at this! Costume creator Isa provides detailed tutorials on how she creates her stuff, but this one is really going to blow some minds, as it has mine. Incredible work.

• Oh gosh, we’ve gone a bit digital in this newsletter, sorry, but we expect some of you might get some mileage out of If On A Winter’s Night, Four Travellers. And it’s free! (Somehow.)

• In research this week I’ve been reading about Pier Gerlofs Donia, a vengeful 16th century pirate who apparently wielded a 7-foot great sword with which he could dispatch heads from multiple enemies in a single blow.

—

An Imaginary Atlas Of Imagined Atlases

I own a surprising number of atlases. Some are straightforward atlases. You know the sort: large-format hardback books containing maps of the world. Others, like The Times Atlas Of World History, which I somehow own multiple editions of, are also grand acts of generalised erudition: formidable slabs of publishing achievement that have been iterated over decades of republishing to explain something with maps. In this case, the general history of the human race.

Hell, I would say those inky buggers give more life and meaning to most accounts of our real and actual history than half the books I’ve read or lessons sat through. There is a degree to which I regard these as essential tomes: foundation stones of reading which you should solemnly hand to your son or daughter only to have them roll their eyes and turn back to watching makeup tutorials on Youtube. 

Other atlases in my collection are more quirky, such as The Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will, which delivers very much what the title describes, or the unforgettably meta The Atlas Of Atlases. If humankind produces enough of these and it will be atlases all the way down.

Some atlases are not entirely about accuracy or eruditon, of course. The Phantom Atlas is about the times in history when people just made up what the world looked like and whacked it in a map. I really love this book: the idea of a medieval cartographer being tasked with providing a map of Africa and managing the map-equivalent of those medieval artists to tried to draw elephants without ever having seen one.

Of course, the majority of the atlases I own, somewhat less surprisingly, perhaps, are depictions of entirely imaginary places. 

It is fair to say that, as a teenager, I was, from the moment that the incoming wave of D&D broke over the Sword Coast of my imagination, awash in fantasy maps. I was the kind of nerd who not only pinned up the large maps of the Forgotten Realms that came with the box set, but even had the big, multipart Waterdeep map.

And, let me tell you, the ceiling of my teenage bedroom was too low to get that pointlessly huge motherfucker on the wall, and I have never forgiven that wall, or the universe which created it. The image here is the best I could find, as my own version was sadly lost or destroyed, via Wayne’s Books. Please forgive me for this borrowing, Wayne. Readers: please visit Wayne’s site and admire his many books. Oh shit, I have just noticed he HAS the damned Waterdeep box set for $109 dollars… I HAVE $109 DOLLARS! (Not for long! - Ed.)

Anyway, I have said a good number of things about fantasy maps over the years, but I happened to pick up The Atlas Of Pern the other day, and while I have no significant love for the Pern series (Yeah, I read them, but they all seemed a bit 70s prog rock to a 1990s Jim Rossignol) I nevertheless was inspired to write this note on fantasy atlases, which really serves as eulogy for the book’s author, Karen Wynn Fonstad, the peerless titan of fantasy atlas creation. 

I mean, look at this.

Wynn Fonstad’s books were, in a sense, The Times Atlas Of World History of these fantasy universes. They mapped the places, but also the events of various books. The events of Lord Of The Rings were meticulously mapped, scene by scene, in a way that is basically unneccessary in any reasonable sense of the word, and must therefore be understood as an act of love.

Of course they were invaluable sourcebooks for RPGing, too, and my copy of her The Atlas Of The Forgotten Realms was so beloved by me as a D&Ding DM that it now looks like it has been through a war.

Thinking back: I remember the extent to which my D&Ding as a youth was improvisational and based on not much more than having this atlas and a Monster Manual to hand, and let the players wander. They simply explored the maps, heading for unfamiliar forests and deserts. And wow, I suddenly feel deeply motivated to do that again. Perhaps I shall.

On this final note: while writing this I was picking through the incredible atlas of Numenera, Maps Of The Ninth World, and noted that every single regional map has both annotated and bare versions.

This is absolutely how to do it! It allows the players explore, lets them place their discoveries on the map, to have a sense of where they want to go while allowing for adventure and discovery. Modern VTTs are absolutely amazing for this, too! Hell, I almost want to run a pure exploration Numenera game just to use these maps.

Anyway. I am simply rambling now.

Did I mention there are loads of maps in our new book? It’s being Kickstarted, you know.

--

More soon! x

1. Hello, you

2. LINKS!

3. Otherlands is not an RPG book.

Hello, you

Well well, how toothsome this is!

The TEETH Kickstarter launched! It funded almost immediately, and continued to pile on the pledges. 465 backers at the time of writing, which is making me and Marsh grin amiably and share the odd high five (although via video chat between different continents/time zones, so the effect is somewhat disconnected/lessened.)

Anyway! Thank you so much for backing us! If you haven’t but still intend to back then we absolutely thank you in advance. If you aren’t backing the book then thank you for continuing to support and read the newsletter. Please do consider sharing it with folks who might enjoy what we do. It really matters. We are so pleased to read about people who have found us via the TEETH games, have followed along here, and are now backing the full book. The loop is complete. All is well with the universe.

(For now.)

--

LINKS!

• I’ve had a note here in our newsletter document which says “go back to the Dragon magazine collection” for some time now. And I have a whole bunch of Dragons, from physical copies from 1989 to 1992 to a DVD compilation of issues from 1988 to 1993. I really should delve in this archive for more treasure, and I shall. However in the meantime I wanted to link to this image which cropped up on the excellent VintageRPG tumblr. Look at that for a magazine cover. Nevermind the composition and astounding rendering of Larry Elmore’s cover, set aside the sheer fact of paintings like this being created for magazine covers, look at the cover as a thing in itself. The lack of screaming cover flashes, the austerity of the image, the issue title “Healers and Holy Warriors” and the masthead being enough. Oh my goodness. So much grace. Talk about a golden age.

• The lifecycle of the cockatrice.

• I love pretty much everything Feral Indie do, and that looks like it will extend to Vyrmhack (even if I have seen the word hack used too much this year). “Vyrmhack is a small-scale wargame with role-playing elements. Players take on the role of a single or band of characters who explore, fight, and survive in a dark fantastical land. It is meant to be compatible with most old-school game modules and  wargame-style scenarios.”

• Speaking of which, the kindly Mr Gardiner ran us a game of Black Sword Hack this week. I might talk about that in a bit more detail next week, because it has some interesting bits and made me think more about OSR rules, but for now I just want to acknowledge that Goran Gligovic artwork. Pretty much perfection.

• Did we mention Stoneburner? I can’t be bothered to check, but regardless you must check out this for a pitch: “A Solo-Friendly TTRPG of Demon Hunting and Community Building in a Dwarven Asteroid Mine.”

• Excuse the video games-related link, but some of you might get something out of Kunzelman’s The World Is Born From Zero. “Cameron Kunzelman argues that the video game medium is centered on the evaluation and production of possible futures by following video game studies, media philosophy, and science fiction studies to their furthest reaches. Claiming that the best way to understand games is through rigorous formal analysis of their aesthetic strategies and the cultural context those strategies emerge from, Kunzelman investigates a diverse array of games like The Last of Us, VA-11 Hall-A, and Civilization VI in order to explore what science fiction video games can tell us about their genres, their ways of speculating, and how the medium of the video game does (or does not) direct us down experiential pathways that are both oppressive and liberatory.”

—

Otherlands is not an RPG book

Although it most assuredly sounds like an RPG the PDF for which would be $20 in itch.io, Otherlands by Thomas Halliday is a book of palaeobiology, rather than a science fantasy sourcebook. And the book’s poetic, emotional dive into deep time, leaping back tens, sometimes hundreds of millions of years in a chapter, has been one of the places where I have found myself immediately longing to build new games out of the games contained therein. Perhaps not for the reasons that might immediately seem to spring to mind. 

Obviously I would recommend, for any game designer of any stripe, to have a broad intellectual palate and to read diverse and unexpected books, but this really is a tome that gives your normal thinking a kicking and provides a generalised and beautiful perspective change that I think is healthy and useful for everyone. While I am writing this from the clompingly nerdy point of view of someone who has spent the past few decades with their head in a cloud of game design, this is a general recommendation. You should all read this book, just for the perspective on existence that it provides. 

Halliday’s work challenges our perception of time to become one of continents moving about like toys floating in a bath, and animals not as these static, eternal and iconic beings, but as single frames in a flip book of iteration and mutation going back for billions of years. I found the section on the primitive mammals that lived in the aftermath of the dinosaur-erasing meteor impact oddly affecting. They were my ancestors. They were our ancestors. Rewind far enough and they are us. Our families. And those of horses. And bats. And pangolins.

Then there are the bifurcations and dead ends: coelacanths being more closely related to humans than they are to modern fish is one such loop of evolution which I find breathtaking. 

The worlds that we conjure in our fictions often lean on ideas that we imagine universal, and yet Otherlands conjures alien existences out of our own world, often with a few lines of text which are confounding or wondrous, and shows that things we might imagine universal are ephemeral on a long enough time scale.

It is filled with mesmerising passages about creatures that survived the crossing from Africa to South America on trees washed into the sea, only to start new chains of life. The tale of grass, that most ubiquitous family of plants, and how it only appeared in the past few tens of millions of years, only to change the planet into what we recognise it as today, as well as the animals in it. There is a depiction of Antarctica when the world was warm enough for it to be a giant forest, that was nevertheless totally dark for many months of the year, and populated with giant penguins taller than most people.

The book is filled with astonishing images from geological time: islands where rabbits and sheep were the same size, the entire mediterranean filling up again from Gibraltar over several years, a Gorgon (not a dinosaur, but another even more ancient mega-reptile) limping with injury in the time before death; the planet wet and seething with plants, but silent, for it is a time before animals or birdsong or even flowers.

All of which is not to say that I intend to write a TTRPG about deep time, or even some excursionary fantasy that features Adam Driver visiting dino-land with a gun, but that the perspective of this book, and the alien-but-recognisable landscapes it describes, will all percolate. I suspect that some of the most profound influences are often not the ones which you sit down to immediately write thinly-veiled fanfiction for, or even the ones which provide the flavour and context for your original works, but the ones which provide foundational, tectonic change. These influences are those which deliver a deeper meaning. I came away from Otherlands feeling oddly moved, and in a way relieved. Life on Earth has survived at least five unimaginably vast and rapid catastrophes. It has hundreds of millions of years awaiting it in the immense marches of the future. We cannot know what the future of life looks like. It won’t be human. And I found that quite inspiring.

—

More soon! x

Back the Kickstarter!

The book that Marsh and I started working on three years ago, a project which spawned this newsletter and three standalone adventures and an interactive fiction, has now landed on crowd-funding platform Kickstarter. Please back it at whatever level works best for you.

And take a look at this amazing animated pitch video!

TEETH is a setting and ruleset, written by Jim Rossignol and Marsh Davies, and bound into a fat book of 320 pages. Within you will find 180-ish pages describing the places, people and beasts of the Vale of the Deluth—including many maps and illustrations. It's a meaty setting, carefully threaded with intrigues for players to follow, and peppered with prompts for the GM.

The rules rejig and refit the Creative Commons-licensed Forged in the Dark framework to emphasise investigating occult incursions, hunting unspeakable monstrosities across a benighted wilderness, developing revolting mutations, fomenting insurrection and more. There are lots of tables for you to generate weather conditions, names, encounters, artefacts, viscera and, of course, cursed pies.

The whole thing is heavily illustrated in Marsh's striking black-and-white style, partly inspired by etchings and wood-cuts of the period, but mostly just his own, weird thing.

Have a closer look at some sample spreads! Here! Here! Here! And also here!

The book's nine maps and other diagrams are also supplied separately in full colour as high resolution downloadables, along with a pdf version of the book itself, and other digital resources, like editable spreadsheet editions of the Playbooks.

The book is written, designed, finished, and ready to print. We think you’ll like it.

LINKS!

• Just one external link this week: Mishaps of the Extra—Planar Interiors of Infinite Storage Boxes. Because even though it’s Kickstater week, how could we not link something with that title?

• Please back TEETH!

—

Thanks for all your support! It has got us all the way to this momentous day.

love,

Jim & Marsh

—

More soon! x

The TEETH Kickstarter is but days away! You can register interest and be notified of the launch by signing up on this page.

We’re quite excited!

You are reading the TEETH newsletter, written and compiled by haunted log Jim Rossignol and rickety fence Marsh Davies. This is a newsletter about table-top role-playing games: our own—that we’re publishing over here and also here —as well as interviews, links, and general noodling. Want us to see your work? Get in touch!

1. Hello, You

2. Links!

3. Marsh on Landscapes and TEETH

4. Jim on Landscapes and TEETH

—

Hello, You

We just want to say thank you profoundly for coming on this journey with us! The TEETH project has expanded to be more than we knew or planned for, and it has been distinctly rewarding to undertake. One suspects that it might just be a beginning. But we shall see.

In the meantime you can read more of our thoughts on the game we are making, below!

—

Links!

• Connie Chang’s GODKILLER RPG for two players, a GM and a player, is quite the thing: “GODKILLER: First Blood Edition is a holypunk PbtA (Powered by the Apocalypse) game for one player, the Godkiller, and one Game Master, the god of gods. Together, the two of you will weave a mythic, violent, and transformative tale about the only mortal in existence with the power to slay a god, rising against the challenges of the divine. Which gods will you kill to shape the realm — and which gods will you spare?” Oddly enough we’ve been discussing the notion of two player RPGs - one player and one GM - lately around TEETH parts, and it’s a topic that interests me. Specifically with regards to Handiwork Games’ Beowulf RPG, which consists a 5e game which hosts just two players. Much of what I GM’d as a young lad was me and one friend, so it’s a format that intrigues me as a grown up!

• Wait up, there must be something in the air. “WHO KILLED GOD? is a solo journaling game of divine catastrophe and small-town suspicion in a Weird West setting. This book has prompts and mechanics to help guide you, but it is up to you to follow the clues to wherever they lead, whether that's to redemption or ruin.”

• Richard Kadrey’s short fiction was enormously influential on me as a young man, and he has a new collecting coming.

• Wikipedia’s List Of Fictional Swords is far longer than I had anticipated. It led me to the tale of this real-life sword maker, and the stories that surrounded him. "In popular culture, Muramasa swords have been often depicted as cursed swords with demonic powers. Oscar Ratti and Adele Westbrook said that Muramasa "was a most skillful smith but a violent and ill-balanced mind verging on madness, that was supposed to have passed into his blades. ""

• I also couldn’t help sharing this other Wikipedia article on Solomon’s Shamir, which is described in this extraordinary and enigmatic way: “the shamir is a worm or a substance that had the power to cut through or disintegrate stone, iron and diamond. King Solomon is said to have used it in the building of the First Temple in Jerusalem in the place of cutting tools.” As Marsh points out, “Worm or Substance” would be an excellent quiz round, if you were ever stumped for an esoteric terminology topic.

—

Marsh on Landscapes and TEETH

The landscape is one of the most important parts of TEETH. It's a game set in a part of the world Jim and I love - or, really, several parts, smushed together - a sodden English amalgam of biomes that draws from the rocky fells and glacier-carved uplands of the Lake District, the brooding, rounded tors of the Peak District, its hidden gullies and sudden forests, the expansive sky-born wilderness of the Yorkshire moors and the borderland slopes of the Cheviot hills. We've even thrown a bit of the Southwest in there too, with its trio of stark, plashy moors: Dartmoor, Exmoor and Bodmin. 

These are places of deep cultural resonance which offer us a connection to a past, less populated, more fearsome and feral Britain. They still claim the lives of a few ill-fated hikers every year, which is a difficult thing to do in a country this small, where falling off a mountain-top invariably lands you in someone's back garden. But these remain the few places you can find an unlucky, lonely demise - and they exude a morbid and awesome potential, even as they are beautiful and majestic to behold. 

In TEETH, this landscape takes a darker turn still: our setting is a cursed place, contaminated by an alchemical Chernobyl. It's important therefore that the landscape be a big character here, and for travel through it to feel significant and often hard. While we want to keep a breezy pace to the game, travel is nonetheless something to be planned for and budgeted for, with players building a dice pool that will determine the nature of their journey. These dice represent not just haste, but caution and prudence; a good roll means that the players foresee and avoid danger and distraction. The GM then plucks dice back out of the pool dependent on the season, the distance they are travelling, and if they have chosen to venture into the darkness of the Great Voidal Forest. 

The resulting number prompts the GM and players to assemble a narrative together, drawing from tables of description for landscape and weather if they choose, and describing how well or poorly they fare against these conditions. 

Less than stellar rolls will result in diversionary episodes we call Wilderness Encounters. These are not necessarily punishments - the Vale is a diverse place, full of terror and opportunity in equal measure! We have 84 suggested scenarios in the book, which the GM can expand at their discretion: an impatient group may just use them as passing background colour before arriving at their goal; the GM might use them to check the players' power or progress, wounding them mentally or physically, or indeed buff them, giving players the opportunity to reduce their occult contamination or find the very tools they may need for tasks ahead. Some Encounters offer the possibility of escalating narratives that can be expanded into fulsome lines of opportunity across the course of many journeys: early sightings of Hogmen, snuffling through the brush could build to an almighty porkish peril that demands greater action.

The point, as ever with TEETH's mechanical contrivances, is not necessarily to stick to the rules with religious commitment - we are ourselves unapologetic vandals when it comes to rules - but to hack them into a shape your group feels comfortable with, using the vast amount of material we provide as fodder - not fiats. The important thing is that the group vividly experiences the landscape through the act of travel through it.

Jim on Landscapes and TEETH

It hasn’t escaped our attention that for a second time I am venturing to Kickstarter with a project inspired by the British landscape. The first was, of course, the prototypical survival game, Sir, You Are Being Hunted, beaten to the pip of founding a new genre only by the behemoth that was DayZ. Instead of an Eastern European wasteland, however - the real one often walked by the developers of the Arma games and a direct inspiration for those games - it featured an invented British landscape, inspired by my own walks through the British landscape, most often accompanied by the game’s expert woodsman/lead designer, James Carey.

So it is fair to say that the peculiar spook-laden weirdness of the British landscape, made all the more intense not by isolation so much as by the very populated hauntedness that it invokes, which has become one of my key obsessions over the years. I attribute this directly to the influence of my grandfather, a very fine and beloved gentleman who loved to walk in the Cotswolds with a much smaller me (and sometimes further abroad) and whose ghostly tales of the landscape and his experiences in the war lingered with me for a lifetime.

I suppose one thing I have valued significantly over the years are friends who share these kinds of obsessions, and I often link to this article on the Eeriness Of The British Landscape by the author Robert Macfarlane, as a sort of baseline summary of how myself and others are so affected by these spaces. 

the eerie: that form of fear that is felt first as unease, then as dread, and which is incited by glimpses and tremors rather than outright attack. Horror specialises in confrontation and aggression; the eerie in intimation and aggregation. Its physical consequences tend to be gradual and compound: swarming in the stomach’s pit, the tell-tale prickle of the skin.

I think what I find most rewarding about the British landscape - perhaps European landscape as a whole - is how these experiences can be found anywhere, and not only in the bleaker tracts of hills and mountainscapes. One of my favourite places is a nearby location to my house, a basin near the Mendips called - like an invented MMORPG location - Hollow Marsh, which regularly floods and fills itself with weird ground fog in the early hours. Walking with Macfarlane himself we discussed how readily we found a sense of eeriness even in these quotidian tracts of British farmland. The great flat locations around Cambridge are just as ghostly in the way as the peaks of Scotland. (The man is a trove of wonder-filled and yet pragmatic anecdotes about the things he has seen and experienced in both locations.)

…engaging with the eerie emphatically doesn’t mean believing in ghosts. Few of the practitioners named here would endorse earth mysteries or ectoplasm. What is under way, across a broad spectrum of culture, is an attempt to account for the turbulence of England in the era of late capitalism. The supernatural and paranormal have always been means of figuring powers that cannot otherwise find visible expression. Contemporary anxieties and dissents are here being reassembled and re-presented as spectres, shadows or monsters: our noun monster, indeed, shares an etymology with our verb to demonstrate, meaning to show or reveal…

Marsh - the illustrator and designer, not the environmental feature - is another of these friends, and I cannot help thinking that we couldn’t help but long for the immersion in the landscapes we love at that moment when, in the year of Covid, we all had to be inside. I’ve said that TEETH was sort of inevitable, and so it seemed to be.

I hope that we have been able to articulate some of the feeling that we associate with these landscapes in the tone and systems of TEETH. I think we have, but it was not straightforward to each that destination. Perhaps, as in our passage through those landscapes, it’s the journey that counts in the end.

—

More soon! x

The TEETH Kickstarter looms! You can register interest and be notified of the precise moment of launch by signing up on this page.

As a very special treat, we’re doing an early reveal of the Kickstarter pitch video for you, our beloved newsletter readers:

Please do sign up and share the page.

And there’s more! (Below.)

--

You are reading the TEETH newsletter, written and compiled by the notorious fabulist Jim Rossignol and erudite fantasist Marsh Davies. This is a newsletter about table-top role-playing games: our own—that we’re publishing over here and also here —as well as interviews, links, and general noodling. Want us to see your work? Get in touch!

1. A Taste Of Teeth: An Interactive Fiction

2. Links!

3. Please Be Excited For The TEETH Kickstarter

Those of you follow us on itch.io may have noticed a little experimental sojourn from Marsh, who has created an interactive fiction of the starting locations of the TEETH campaign, freely playable in your browser. It mirrors our suggested starting adventure within the setting, and comes with all the usual conceits.

As Marsh disclaims in his blurb, this is just him learning the Inky scripting tool, and as such isn’t a fully-fledged attempt, but is nevertheless a fun and colourful introduction to the world we have been build, at tremendous length, in the 320-page book which we will be Kickstarting in April.

Links!

• Thing Of The Week (it’s been a long week, hasn’t it?) is without doubt A Collection Of Improving Exercises, which Marsh and I have been marvelling over. Author Tim Hutchings’ - who you might have taken note of via the tremendous and acclaimed journaling game Thousand Year Old Vampire - says: “It is just a perspective drawing manual. No really.” And that is what it is. But it is also, of course, a little more than that, too. Go take a look. I insist.

• Hellpiecers: Harrowing Tactical Action. “In HELLPIERCERS, you and 2-5 of your closest friends play as divine humanity clad in the corpses of angels storming the gates of hell.” Hell yeah.

• This (via Gillen) is absolutely incredible. It’s 800 pages of highly inventive generative space RPG. There’s so much of it! Well worth $10.

• A tale (almost) as old as tabletop boardgames: “In January 1977, the French Situationist Guy Debord founded the company "Strategic and Historical Games." This company had an immediate goal: to produce the "Kriegspiel," a "game of war" that Debord had already designed in his head years before… "The surprises of this Kriegspiel seem to be inexhaustible," he confessed later in his book Panegyric. "I fear it could be the only one of my works that anyone will dare to recognize as having some value.”" Oh mate.

• S.T.A.L.K.E.R., much beloved of this newsletter’s founders, is getting a boardgame.

• Appropos of nothing at all: the tagline on the Ravenloft module Castles Forlorn, “Deluxe Adventure Set for Characters Levels 4 to 6”, is the best tagline a D&D module can have, because those levels are the optimum chapter of that game’s progression. The module itself - which was one I desired but never obtained during the AD&D 2nd Ed era - featured a castle which behaved a bit like the Dishonored 2 time-travel level, A Crack In The Slab, with the player characters shifting between three different time periods at the castle as they adventured, with prompts and advice for GMs handling paradoxes and time-shifting consequences. Ripe for a reboot, I would say.

• Research this week was into Brotherhood Of The Wolf, which inevitably led me to the Beast of Gévaudan, upon which the movie is based (and within that to a story in which “an unrelated series of attacks occurred near the commune of Soissons, northeast of Paris, when an individual wolf killed at least four people over a period of two days before being tracked and killed by a man armed with a pitchfork.”) Let’s have the movie of that guy! He deserves to be remembered. Horrifically, Wikipedia also keeps a list of wolf attacks, which led me to the tale of Courtaud, a wolf which led a pack of forty others to hunt people within Paris itself during the Hundred Years War, until the pack were reportedly lured into Notre Dame cathedral, where they were slain with rocks, spears, and arrows. It really doesn’t get much more medieval than that.

• Comrade Gardiner adds to the reading pile last-minute by linking us to this account of 17th century blood transfusions: “Beginning in the spring of 1667, public opinion in Paris was rocked by a remarkable affair involving domesticated animals: the first practical experiments to transfuse animal blood into humans for therapeutic purposes. The experiments that came to be known as the “Transfusion Affair” were shrouded in the competing claims of a highly public controversy in which consensus and truth, alongside the animal subjects themselves, were the first victims.”

—

Dearest Newsletter Persons, Please Be Excited And Anticipatory For The TEETH Kickstarter

The journey that Marsh and I began some three years ago is reaching its culmination in the Kickstarter for the book which we will launch in April. We are both positively vibrating with expectation.

In case you somehow missed, it you can sign up for a notification on launch over here.

The book - all 320 pages of it - has been laid out and illustrated single-handedly by Marsh, and he has put in just an astonishing amount of his talent and vision for the project. The document itself I am enormously pleased it: it’s funny, the design works encouragingly well and people have had a riot during playtesting. And despite all the excruciation we went through trying to rework things this way and that and all the grinding thinky-face with had to do to bend an existing ruleset to our own ends, it feels amazing to have achieved this much with so much distinction.

I’m not sure there’s really anything else like it in tone or setting, although it is very traditionally tropey - monster hunting! - and leans on a proven system that we love for the mechanics, that of Forged In The Dark, which runs our beloved Blades In The Dark, by Jon Harper. It is, as if often the way with these things, a child of our obsessions, and a hymn to the things that have significance to us.

For Marsh and I it has been an experience unlike the others we’ve collected over the years: we’ve both worked on magazines, books, websites and videogames for many years, but the TTRPG exists in a space of its own, with its own challenges (getting a group to playtest your new tabletop RPG is quite different to getting someone to read a draft of your latest script or article!) and with an astonishing array of abstract problems and practical concerns to consider and to chew upon.

Like all game design, TTRPG design is fascinating to me because of the numerous moving parts involved, and all the more rewarding for its immediacy and social currency. More than that, though, TEETH is one off the bucket list for me, since I had longed to write RPGs since I first started to run games as a kid back in 1989, and I have finally - thanks to Marsh’s astonishing ability, dedication, and patience - been able to reach that goal.

I hope you’ll all support us with when the Kickstarter unveils its offerings in April, but whatever happens, it’s been a privilege to return to the subject of the eerie English countryside and, once again, to carve a game out of it.

thanks,

-Jim

—

More soon! x

This is a newsletter about table-top role-playing games: our own—that we’re publishing over here and also here —as well as interviews, links, and general noodling. Want us to see your work? Get in touch!

1. Hello you.

2. Links!

3. Big TEETH is coming! Here’s some discussion of the rules and stuff with Handsome Marsh and Clever Jim.

—

Hello, you.

This week Marsh and I had an extensive catch-up on what we’ve done with Forged In The Dark rules to make TEETH’s main campaign book work, and why we did that. That’s never the full story, of course, because things evolve in play and get lost along the way. We’re super pleased with how it has turned out, however, and the detailed feedback from our beta-testers has allowed us to make some last minute refinements that we’re super pleased with.

Here’s are a couple of previews of Marsh’s incredible design and art!

To celebrate, I’ve also put the second and third TEETH games, Stranger & Stranger and Blood Cotillion, on sale for the week. If you are reading this and haven’t delved, now’s a convenient chance.

—

LINKS!

• Not that I want to do anyone’s marketing for them, but I have read two 2d20 books in the past year and been extremely impressed with the system. I hope to play/run one soon. (Mr Gardiner has been threatening Conan!) More specifically, I had somehow missed that the Dishonored RPG uses that system, too! My heart. All this and Xd20 more on Bundle Of Holding.

• Extremely impressed by procedural space-station explorer One Breath Left.

• I was very into Thomas Manuel’s “Games For GMs” comments here, but later ended up wondering whether or not a game being for a GM just depends on the type of GM they are? I know a few who love reading slab-sized adventure modules. It’s good to see Thomas has found his type, anyway. (He’s still right that something should always happen on a miss, eh?)

• I have just learned of Appendix N: The Eldritch Roots of Dungeons and Dragons and the premise of a compendium of the stories that might have caused the Dragon came to come to pass fascinates: “Drawing upon the original list of “inspirational reading” provided by Gary Gygax in the first Dungeon Master's Guide, published in 1979, as well as hobbyist magazines and gaming periodicals that helped to define the modern role-playing game, Appendix N offers a collection of short fiction and resonant fragments that reveal the literary influences that shaped Dungeons & Dragons, the world's most popular RPG. Appendix N also explores and contextualizes the ambitious lyrical excursions that helped set the adventurous tone and dank, dungeon-crawling atmospheres of fantasy roleplay as we know it today.”

• Random book recommendation of the week (which is nothing directly to do with TTRPGs, but is just really good) Otherlands by Thomas Halliday. I mean, some sort of Deep Time RPG is probably a cool thing, but even putting our obsessions aside this is an incredible book, and maybe the most poetic work of paleontology anyone is going to write this decade.

• Research this week led us to a medieval Italian soldier named Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta. If that wasn’t impressive enough, there’s also this: “In a unique ceremony, he was canonized into Hell with the curse, "No mortal heretofore has descended into Hell with the ceremony of canonization. Sigi shall be the first deemed worthy of such honor." Blimey, Sigi, you have been a bad man.

—

The Fictional Pig-Pen: Rooting Through The Muck In TEETH’s Beta-Testing and Rules Wangle

TEETH is finally grinding to completion! We actually had the full text down by early October of last year but we felt we really needed to find GMs beyond regular group of goblin-fanciers and trick, bribe or bully them into playtesting TEETH for us. 

It's been great, partly because feedback has generally been either positive or constructive and we are vain little men who require constant flattery to be remotely productive, but mostly because it was extraordinarily fun to see other people muck about in the fictional pig-pen we've created and emerge with their own, largely disgusting, stories. Much thanks is due for the extremely detailed and thrilling accounts of Tom Lando (whose Compare & Campaign podcast is a fab listen for tabletop aficionados) and Jamie Brittain (who I hope will accept some stretch goal money to transform his group's tale of narcotic hog-milk into an official TEETH supplement).

The playtests have picked up typos, forced us into greater clarity, initiated some minor rebalancing and helped refine some of the larger ideas in TEETH. It also made us look again at some of the rules we borrowed from the Forged in the Dark ruleset which underpins TEETH and wonder whether they were right for us. Maybe they never were, we whispered, lips hidden behind hands.

Let's chat about it, Jim! 

Jim: Well-

Marsh: Sh! I'm going first. Me, Jim. ME. I want to talk about the Action roll. It's how players do anything that tests a skill, and it's the very core rule of both our game and Blades in the Dark, upon which our rules are based. John Harper, the creator of Blades in the Dark, recently reappraised the language around it: clearly he feels like people were looking at their character sheets as a list of verbs, picking one, and deciding how to apply it. Instead, he emphasises that the player should specify a general intent first, then the GM decides whether that's sufficiently difficult to warrant a roll, they suggest what challenges the player might face in approaching the task, and then the player selects the Action which best describes how they perform their task. I do agree with that up to a point. And that point is that, for a decent amount of the time, you kinda know you are going to want to do (e.g.) a Persuade roll—because you want to persuade someone! And sure, you could instead say, "I want the housekeeper to tell me about Lord Batchley's unsavoury predilection for ham," and then um and ah about whether that could be a Persuade or a Command roll—but sometimes you might well know how you want to play it from the outset and the back and forth with the GM becomes a weird rules kayfabe. Basically, there's a certain procedural stodginess implied by Harper that I think works against Blades' snappy, improvisational style. Do you agree?

Jim: I read it the other way, I think: my understanding from both this and the original text is that Harper is trying to exaggerate Blades' improv aspects by removing the "check a stat" or "call for dice roll" impulses of those trained in the trad RPGs. He wants what you want to do to come first, and not what you could do, and definitely not what amount of dice you want to roll. I look at this way: the list of verbs going to be a thing which essentially limits your imaginative space, and so the idea behind this clarification, to my mind, is to formalise the story-telling and the character-driven experience—the intent—and suggest that the dice roll, both check of personal ability and chaotic capricious interventions of complication, should be how to make the Forged In The Dark system be freeform and chaotic. And actually we do play it like that! People will just come up with something and then figure out an action or series of actions to get there, often getting lost in the chaotic repercussions along the way. I often find myself saying, "What do you hope to achieve there?" and then immediately, "Do you think that's an action roll?" However, the flipside of this entire approach is that there is so much freedom—and I have heard this complaint from a number of players we've run these systems for—that actually they aren't sure what to do. Another way of looking at any game that has a character sheet is that for many players the sheet acts as a prompt: "This is what I can do", and so looking at that list of actions and then using one as a springboard for what your character intends to do gives everyone an advantage and a signpost, especially when improv is not their talent. Not only that but looking at your sheet and remembering that "ah yes, I use muscle to solve my problems" means that you continue to act in character. Most of the time, anyway.

Marsh: The other part of it is that, according to Harper, the GM pretty much enshrines the possible consequences for failure in discussion with the player before the roll. And again, I see how bringing the player into that is sometimes fun. But equally fun as a player is being surprised. You are particularly good at this, Jim, and I feel like always foreshadowing repercussions would rob our games of a particular spontaneous pleasure. Obviously, the heavy lifting for that spontaneity falls on your GM shoulders though, so maybe you feel differently?

Jim: I do a bit! I love surprising players with hairy consequences in all the games we play and I have got good at it.  But actually what you're talking about is an inconsistency on my part as a GM. With our core FiTD group we always seem to have a very good idea about what could go wrong and I don't always explicitly open that aspect of the game up to the group. Consequently we are often pretty fast and loose and informal on how we apply this stuff, which makes for fun and relaxed games. But getting consequences nailed down is definitely a key part of the FiTD system (I mean look at Devil's Bargains: a complication has to be agreed upon for that. Also, as a further parenthesis, there's a uniquely odd aspect to this rule set, which is that players are supposed to decide on what the consequences, good or bad, of an action they have to roll for is before it happens, but not for one they don't roll for, which I think has some interesting implications for the way we played the game.) Anyway, returning to your point: one habit we got into was to run a lot of scores or missions via heavy use of Clocks, which I overused massively when we were running Blades: the consequence of action failure was always a tick on that clock or other, no need for discussion. It made the process faster. And I think actually in most of our scores adding a tick to a Clock or risking Harm ended up being the key complications! Which isn't at all improvisational, and clearly not at all what Harper intended for FiTD. We have moved out of this habit over the years, but I think it lingers. I was thinking about this as we played Trophy Gold, because in that we were being much more consistent about making sure everyone contributed to the complications discussion, rather than me, the GM, saying, "This is what goes wrong!" Mr Harper's rules clarifications here remind me I should just be better at it and open our games up to very clearly decided escalations or calamities that don't all come out of my GM's reading of the situation.

Marsh: One rule from Blades we've binned off entirely is Special Armour. Armour in general is an intuitive way to transfer the normal cost of avoiding an injury to another resource pool. So, instead of taking Stress (the game's narrative currency) to evade a snapping maw or cleaving blow, you can just scribble off an armour point to reduce the harm you take—but armour eats into your equipment load in a big way. It's a neat trade-off. Special Armour is slightly different. Players use it when activating a special skill they've unlocked which allows them to boost a roll in an area of their character class's particular expertise or automatically resist its consequences. For me, that never quite joined up. I totally see how armour has the qualities of being protective and heavy, but as a resource you optionally use to, I dunno, do a really cool ninja jump or something, it felt a little abstract. Plus, it's basically a tiny bespoke resource pool for just one special skill, which is itself hogs a spot in each class's sheet that could be used for something more thrillingly asymmetric. I can see its application, but for me that doesn't outweigh the fussiness of its very existence.

Jim: I think the critical thing is that we just didn't have any abilities that made any use of it. If we had developed special power usages from the outset we might even have used it more! Blades use of it does seem vestigial in that sense, but then it's often the little esoteric elements that people like in a system. It makes little difference to TEETH in the end, though, I agree. We also had to resist the temptation of replacing it with something or adding too many of our own new boxes and tick and resources to track. So easily done when you are tinkering with a system!

Marsh: So, Blades hangovers aside, the thorniest—perhaps even unresolvable—issue we face is one of pacing. TEETH is a game with an ending (most likely a horrible one). Players enter this cursed corner of England in the guise of monster hunters, invited by His Majesty to maintain some manner of order and ensure the vital trade in occult items continues unimpeded. But they also possess a secret agenda—revenge, revolution, resurrection or worse—which they must seek to fulfil across the course of a year. Stay too long in this corrupted place and the Royal Commission they possess will expire and they will be judged too contaminated to leave. They might yet still remain, attempting to complete their mission at ever deadlier cost, but this framework creates a natural time pressure which the GM tracks by advancing the Season Clock at suitable intervals or as a result of some massive player fuck-up. Making sure that time advances such that the players feel the urgency but still have a chance at victory, is essential, right? 

Jim: Oh no, I have just realised this is me over-using Clocks again! I'm obsessed. (But in all seriousness, yes, the sense of building urgency, the idea that you only have a few moves left before this thing blows up is absolutely how I have run FiTD games and I wanted to provide even greater formality for it here.) 

Marsh: I think we've hit an acceptable balance now, but we had to tweak down using advancing time as punishment: it was too easy to blow through a quarter of the calendar in a single disastrous mission. We've also made one fail state elective, potentially even attractive: players who attempt to reduce Stress during downtime—by sinking pints of cursed cider, gambling on eel jousting, spending a night rolling around with the Hog Lady, etc—risk overindulging. One of several possible consequences the player can choose from is that their character simply goes AWOL for some time, advancing the Season Clock. This was too harsh a penalty for the entire group to suffer on one player's bad roll, and it was unlikely anyone but extremely dedicated roleplayers or antisocial trolls would go for it—so, based on feedback, we let the remaining players conduct another round of useful downtime activities while they wait. In certain circumstances that could even affray the cost of advancing time, letting the group finish off an important research project, for example.

Jim: It sounded like a weird solution, but it's oddly thematically coherent: waiting around in the cold and darkened rooms of 18th century England, experimenting with pickled monster organs while your fellows recover from a bout of madness or melancholy. That's the stuff.

Marsh: The other thing about the Season Clock is that it's hard to reliably translate into actual time around the table for different groups. At the rate the our Dice Club plays, we might seek a contract to hunt a creature, travel to the hamlet it has perverted, perform an investigation to pinpoint its lair, confront the beast, marry it in a grim and polygamous ritual, betray our paymasters, sacrifice them at the command of an unborn god that screeches to us from a pewter tin, and have time to kick back afterwards with a pipe of toad venom—all within one session or two. Other groups can spend the same amount of table time choosing their equipment load. And here's the thing: they aren't wrong. It's their game to play as they please! But it does mean that our estimates for how long a campaign is will be kind of meaningless. 

Jim: Yes, that's one of the things I have found most interesting when watching or hearing reports of how different groups play these games. Some, like ourselves, crash through at breakneck speed, making wild decisions and dice rolls, while others are much elongated discussions, with single missions taking several sessions and many hours to complete. And that means that both the sense of urgency we are talking about and the time pressure we are applying will feel very different. But I don't think any two groups really play TTRPGs in quite the same way: they're always a function of the group, and the mediation of house and rules and personal style.

Marsh: What else was controversial? Not everyone liked having the setting first and the rules after. "But how do I play?" is a reasonable question, and I think if you are haunted by that you'll just have to skip to the rules section straight away. For me, though, the setting is the key motivation to play a thing—but even if it weren't, having the rules in the second half (and then bookended by the opening scenario, GM resources, tables and Playbooks) makes it much easier to quickly reference the things you need without leapfrogging reams of worldbuilding or burying important stuff in the centre. 

Jim: Yes, I've found that some folks regard it as a convention to have the rules at the front? I mean, is that because in D&D you would buy the rule books first and then buy the sourcebooks for settings and adventures after? My own experience has, naturally, been the reverse: when I was twelve I awaited the 2nd Edition AD&D books for my birthday, and wasn't allowed to have them and read them before then. But, months early, and in anticipation of those gifts, I had bought and read (and stuck maps on my wall) of the Forgotten Realms box set. I didn't know what the stats meant, and didn't care! I just knew that my players had to face devils in the Ruins of Myth Drannor.

Marsh: I guess another thing that will be broadly divisive is the use of quite structured phases that offer quite game-y ways to perform and measure the completion of tasks such as investigating the scene of a macabre crime. I like them, but Blades purists may well ask why this isn't all just freeform roleplay.

Jim: Yeah, I think you’re right there, but then again what we’re doing is based loosely on the formalism that Blades provides via stuff like the Downtime phase. That’s built for roleplay, but the actions being taken are very clear and very structured. Like, it’s a distinct thing that shapes the rest of the experience, which is what we’ve aimed to do with our own phases of play. I feel like there’s a degree to which that’s the lesson we took from Blades, as well as other games like Harper’s also-incredible Agon, which is that making the experience feel like a game of the subject matter really does require you to have a scaffold of process and system which shapes it in distinct ways. No, you can’t just expect a generic system to support amazing heists or detective work or dalliances with Greek god-powered heroics, you have to build the systems for it.

Marsh: A bit of a classic FitD adaptation blunder this, but we found one of our Actions was too narrowly defined: Shoot. It sounds extremely Picard-head-smack.gif obvious now that this would be limiting, but I think we were tempted at one stage to have a deeper acknowledgement of guns as elaborate contraptions that took time and effort to prepare and fire a single shot—quite apart from the challenge of actually hitting anything with them. However, it turns out this is really quite fucking boring. And, while we had stretched the rulebook's definition of Shoot to include notions of precision beyond combat—who were we kidding? It just wasn't intuitive. So it's Aim now. The dickhead pedant in me regrets that a GM might let a player whip out a revolver and fan-fire it, but these are matters best left to the Anachronism Police. How do you feel about our verbs, Jim?

Jim: I feel great about them! Just look at that list of words. So handsome, so ready to be employed in unexpected ways. My favourite is Evoke, which we explicitly invite people to make use of as a magic-related action, but one which I think actually could be used in a few other ways, like Evoking social station. As I mentioned elsewhere in this conversations, I do sort of see Actions as tantamount to prompts, and so perhaps the critical bit is that the actions we’ve decided upon (which, to be fair, do mirror and shadow Blades’ own) are faithful to the monster-hunting possibilities we’re alluding to in the rest of the book. The critical thing is that we made actions that are evocative of our setting. See like evoking. A joke there, of sorts. I’m quite tired.

Marsh: We also have an optional ruleset for magic which makes it more situational, in line with other player Actions. What I mean by that is in a freeform ruleset, where Actions are not specific in the way a D&D spell is, it's easy for magic to become an attractive solution to any problem. Obviously, one way of handling that would be to let players just do whatever they like, but have the GM curtail its effectiveness or punish excess through consequence. However, that feels a bit like telling the player "no" while also not encouraging them to think outside the box. We've suggested a different system, whereby players select magical disciplines in which to specialise, like elementalism or transmogrification magic, and then a method by which their magic is applied, say by directly touching something or by concocting potions. More disciplines and methods can be learnt over time. The idea is that this retains the power of magic while also forcing players to think about where, how and if they can apply it. So instead of simply saying, "I make the magistrate's head explode with my mind," and the GM wearily setting a low effect and desperate situation, the player now has to improvise a solution out of the verbs, nouns and prepositions at their disposal. Maybe their method requires a memento of the subject, so they have to flashback to stealing his wig. Maybe the method requires luring him into a circle of salt, so a player has to seduce him dressed as a hot nun. Does the player fire a mesmerising beam from a desiccated monkey head to overload the magistrate's neocortex with thoughts of detonation? Does the player spike the magistrate's gin with a potion that transmogrifies his brain into a mass of bees that erupt in an irate cloud from his nose and ears? 

All this finds an even more excessive expression in the Ritual Flashbacks players are able to perform: multi-stage group actions that escalate in horror and silliness. Playtests were a riot, with one group of players gobbling earthworms and drinking corpse-blood before puking up an entire spiral staircase made of magic vomit. I can't claim that this is a specific outcome we had in mind, but it is exactly the sort of nonsense we desire and applaud. Is it well-balanced? Could that ever be the point?

Jim: I think the point is here that we made magical worm vomit happen, Marsh, and nothing else could be a finer legacy for two awful English gentlemen like ourselves. I raise a glass of unpoisoned brandy to you! Let us enjoy what people make with what we made, and the consequences (and complications) be damned.

—

More soon! x

1. Hello, You

2. Links!

3. Notoriously Alone With My Guilt

Hello, you.

Teeth news is that Marsh has neeeeaaaarly finished designing, illustrating, and laying out the book! He’s like a wizard!

We’re going to talk about some of the challenges involved in that within the next newsletter, but I have to say that most of the challenges were Marsh’s, because he had to do all the drawing and fiddle formatting stuff, work which is beyond my rough spade-like hands and gentle poet’s mind.

Most importantly this means that the book itself should land in this near half of this year, and we’ll be excited to share it with you! Thanks to everyone who contributed to the beta testing, you are a credit yourselves and your people.

LINKS!

• I am fascinated by the prolific Lucas Rolim’s work, and Mini Kingdom is no exception. It is a “non-violent” or “conversation starting” RPG session, in which combat is definitely not the answer. The mini part is quite literal, by the way.

• This is actually several years old now, but having been Googling some stuff around Mörk Borg, I have to say that “Mörk Borg’s Putrescence Regnant is a grim ‘bog crawl’ adventure releasing as a vinyl music album” is the best Mörk Borg headline I have ever seen.

• Why was I Googling around Mörk Borg stuff? We were looking at the Bare Bones Edition, which is certainly bare bones in the sense that the punk rock layout and black metal art stylings are missing, but it still manages to fill countless pages with grimdark psalms as flavour text. They can’t help themselves!

• Imposter Kings is very pretty. (Thanks to Glowfriend Adam Pearce for this link!)

• Is Jeeyon Shim’s Patreon where all the best material is to be found? It seems that way. “Catfish is a solo game about a human who uses their charm to bait unsuspecting victims for their monster friend. Use your own real life dating app messages to lure in your friend’s next meal.”

• Research this week led us to 15th century depictions of duels between men and women, where men are buried up to their waist in a pit.

Notoriously Alone With My Guilt

So, reader, an admission: this is the first time I have tried out a solo journaling game. You’d think, as a writer who likes to believe that I write just for my own amusement, I might have gone down this route before, and yet it’s a blank. And I now have some thoughts on that.

Notorious (Jason Price) is a fine piece of work. The inspirations are obvious and stated clearly (Star Wars, Mandalorian, and the cultural influences of those works) and the intention is very clear. Torben Bökemeyer’s superb art manages to make a caricature of the source material, and yet provide the thing with its own identity, but without losing that vital genetic material which made the inspirations so special, and so compelling. Combined, the package is deeply convincing. (I picked up the ring-bound book from the Kickstarter, and I recommended picking up that physical copy if you can.)

Yet the reason I ended up backing the project wasn’t simply down to presentation or references, but because the very specific nerd-fantasy is one that I will always be interested in, Star Wars or otherwise. Bounty Hunter is so clearly one of the compelling fantasies of the popular science fiction franchises, and yet it is rarely (if ever!) satisfactorily addressed in any format, and particularly in games: and I believe that extends across game types, from TTRPGs to digital games. Of course there are plenty of games which have bounty hunters in, and even some which star these kinds of characters, but they almost never manage to articulate what I want from the experience in a systemic sense, game-design sense. Game systems address specific desires for tackling a kind of experience, which I think is broadly missing when it comes to the Bounty Hunter. There is so much there in terms of how systems could work to address that role: how your character selects a contract, how they hunt the target, how the target evades or fights back, how your decisions might deal with the client and secure payment. So many rich and interesting spaces for design and game systems to live and do things! (If Disney wants to hear my pitch, then I am ready to go.)

Notorious, by the way, does manage to systematise all this, and does so in a way that, with a little effort and some dice rolls, generates a satisfying story. It is one of the closest pieces of work to addressing the itch I am trying to scratch here, and after so many years doing that, it’s really saying something. The characters are exactly the cross-section of tropes that I want to pick from, and the prompts and tables for everything from character personalities to the showdown moments with your mark (“You find them in the ruins of a gigantic crashed starship, searching for something”) are tonally bang on. The Hunt was good, and took about an hour and a half — that perfect for a movie or time spent playing a game.

Anyway, as I sat in my fur-collared dressing gown and read/played through this satisfying work, reacting to the prompts and making my decisions, I found myself simultaneously engrossed and… guilty. What is that? A pervasive sense of discomfiture in my leisure time? Can I not just relax and be happy?

So here’s the thing: solo-journaling in a game like this feels like GM prep. And yet it wasn’t. Perhaps that’s just me, and perhaps I’ll get over it, but one of my regular and favourite pastimes is already about reading sourcebooks, making notes, working out how I will use the prompts, ideas, and fictions that other people have made in a tabletop scenario. And here I am doing basically that without any reference to anyone other than myself! This is time I could, indeed, should spend preparing for a group of real, other people. How selfish of me. How mortifyingly self-centred!

And — forgive me — there’s nothing here that reflects poorly on Notorious in any way. When I identified and put those feelings aside, I had what should have been a great time. But I also think it was a little psychoanalytical: we’re getting to the root of why I haven’t played a journaling game before. Hell, it’s why I never really spend enough time with all the Fighting Fantasy books I collected as a kid. I’d rather plan a new Rifts campaign than doing something for myself.

The Notorious story I created was an entertaining one indeed: I set out as an “Uncanny” bounty-hunter, (or Nomad, as the book has it) born into an oppressive Mystic Order cult, but abandoning that way of life to explore the galaxy. A solemn, insectoid character, J’Oh (ha!) took a contract to hunt Chedo Robas, a Ghul who had fled to the ice planet of Utov to escape the wrath of the Red Moon, whose shipments he had sold to the Tharg Cartel. But he couldn’t escape me, could he? No he—

Argh! Can I psychologically file this as research? Perhaps I reuse my experiences here to introduce a bounty-hunting theme to our forthcoming Mothership campaign, and this can be an excuse for that? Honestly, I have to think of it this way. There has to be an ulterior motive. Oh no. Too many years being a GM has broken me. And I only have myself to apologise to!

Sorry, me.

[You can pick up Notorious here, and you should!]

[[Also while writing this, this tweet came up in my timeline. Hmmm. Thinky emoji indeed, my friends.]]

—

More soon! x

Welcome.

You are reading the TEETH newsletter, written and compiled by the guiding light Jim Rossignol and shrouding darkness Marsh Davies. This is a newsletter about table-top role-playing games: our own—that we’re publishing over here and also here —as well as interviews, links, and general noodling. Want us to see your work? Get in touch!

1. Hello, You

2. Links!

3. An interview with the creator of the Trophy games

Hello, you.

A fresh year has come along for us to despoil and poison, and so it shall be on all vectors of Earth and Heaven, with each of us condemned alone in the dark corners of the universe! Tremble ye.

Too much? Okay fine, I didn’t actually mean to get all biblical there. I just wasn’t sure how to start this intro blurb. It’s totally alright! It’s fine.

Nothing cosmic will happen.

Not yet.

LINKS!

• I am not actually going to link to any of the Wizards’ OGL discussion, because if you have seen it you have seen it, and you have certainly seen it; and nothing seems definitive, except, perhaps a concerned email from my mum. If even she’s aware of it, then Wizards are definitely in trouble.

• With Mothership 1E now an omnious blip on everyone’s motion detector, there are lots of fun materials coming out, for example little things this and and adventures like this. Or wow, whole new Panic Engine games like this. It’s also worth following Sean McCoy’s mailing list if you are not already.

• Oh and speaking of Panic Engine stuff, Marsh and I have both been reading horrible biblical medieval fantasy novel Between Two Fires, and by sheer coincidence Ruination Pilgrimage is an extremely similar setting: “The Ruination Pilgrimage system is based on the mechanics of the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG. It uses a percentile roll, aka d100, for tests and saves, and runs on the Panic Engine. The setting is a medieval time period in a place similar to historical Earth with a lot of horrific situations like disease, demons, and debauchery.” Horrible! (Thanks to Chris Gardiner for this.)

• Remember my nostalgia thread including old Play By Mail games such as It’s A Crime? Well, It’s A Crime is still a thing after all these years. (Thanks to Gillen for this!)

• You might, like me, have first encountered the story of The Potsdam Giants in an Usborne book about giants, but it was interesting to find them again and read their sad story. Giant sigh.

An Interview with Jesse Ross

This time we speak to Jesse Ross, who was the creator of one of our favourite experiences in the past year, Trophy Gold, which in turn is builds on Ross’ success with the horror one-shots of Trophy Dark. Go back and have a read if you want some context for what all the fuss is about. Or better still, play a few games of the Trophy games, I am fairly certain you won’t regret it.

Anyway, here’s a (very slightly edited) transcript of the correspondence between myself and Mr Ross. (And we’re now very excited about The Piper’s Call…)

Rossignol: The Trophy books have been arriving in people's hands in the week prior to me writing this, and there's a fair bit of excitement: how does that moment feel to you?

Ross: It's been incredibly exciting! Trophy got its start in the spring of 2018, and I had dreams of the rules ending up in a beautiful hardcover form early on. To be here, just under five years later and with three (!) hardcover books in the hands of folks all over the world, feels great. One of my good friends called creating and publishing my own hardcover RPG a true "bucket list item" and he wasn't wrong.

Rossignol: I'm particularly interested in the creative journey that led to Trophy Gold. What were the starting conditions? What inspired it along the way? And to what extent do you feel like you are making games in order to create the kinds of experiences you want to have when playing games?

Ross: It's funny you bring that up, because Trophy Gold was literally the result of me wanting to play all the great old-school modules that were out there, but not wanting to use any of the default D&D-like systems. So I made a list of what my ideal old-school-feeling fantasy mechanics would be.

Here's the list I wrote, verbatim:

================== 

Wants:

 - only d6s

 - player-facing rolls

 - level-less spells

 - conditions over HP

 - no levels

 - no rolling for damage

================== 

I looked at a bunch of games to see if there was already something that could work, but nothing was close enough to what I wanted. Then I thought, "well, I already have a game that does a bunch of that... could I just adapt Trophy?" Recall that at that point, Trophy Dark was still just called Trophy, since Trophy Gold was what prompted the renaming of Trophy to Trophy Dark.

So I took that chassis, then tried to make sure the mechanics reinforced that old-school feel. I grew up playing AD&D 2e, which is arguably old-school, but the way we played was always more "heroic fantasy" than "dirty and dangerous", so I didn't have that nostalgic frame of reference to fall back on. 

Instead, I took to heart the thoughts in "Principia Apocrypha" (a collection of old-school advice from Ben Milton, Steven Lumpkin, and David Perry) and "A Quick Primer on Old School Gaming" by Matt Finch. And, of course, I had already read and played and run a ton of old-school games: Old School Essentials, Maze Rats, Knave, Whitehack, Black Hack, Swords & Wizardry, Whitebox, Basic Fantasy, and on and on.

Throughout it all, I just tried to keep the idea of "desperation" top of mind, and lean hard into the idea that if these characters were constantly pushing their luck, then the players should be doing that throughout the game as well.

Rossignol: As a related point to the above, I am obviously heavily into the Forged In The Dark games and consequently I see the Trophy games through a Forged In The Dark lens, but I can see that's highly subjective, so did they really have that much influence? Were there other games which were a more profound inspiration?

Ross: The precursor game to Trophy only took the 1–3 / 4–5 / 6 success tiers from Blades in the Dark—mechanically, the rest of it was Cthulhu Dark, and the setting was the dark forest that features prominently in the game Symbaroum. I love the setting of Symbaroum, but I never felt like the mechanics matched the "forest as cosmic horror" idea that I felt like Symbaroum was trying to sell. Cthulhu Dark, a game which I have loved for a long time, does cosmic horror and the downward spiral of doomed characters so elegantly, so it felt like a natural fit.

I played a bunch of sessions of that Cthulhu Dark-in-Symbaroum game, and with each game I shifted it further and further in its own direction, creating my own dark forest and characters, and it eventually became Trophy Dark.

As I playtested it, I kept feeling like something was missing. Thematically, Trophy Dark is about hubris, but there weren't a lot of mechanical opportunities for the players to opt themselves into bad choices. I decided to try importing Devil’s Bargains, which is one of my favorite mechanics from Blades. In the original Trophy, Risk Rolls always started with 1 light die, no matter what. By replacing that with the Devil’s Bargain, I found that it met my initial goal, but had the side effect of making the game much more collaborative, which is something I love and has become a key selling point of the game.

Rossignol: What influenced you that wasn't an RPG? Any other books, movies, or experiences you would want to mention?

Ross: Prior to working on Trophy, I was never a huge fan of horror. But one horror film that got deep into my psyche was The Blair Witch Project. That idea of a small group of people thinking they could reason their way through a haunted forest, only for it to make them turn against one another... well, that’s the plot of a game of Trophy, isn’t it?

Rossignol: Can you tell me about the Hunt roll and, beyond that, the Hunt token? I don't think I have ever really seen anything quite like it in an RPG. A random encounter roll meets perception/exploration (except not really) that is also tied into a sort of narrative currency! Can you tell me about how it came to be? How do you feel about your implementation now?

Ross: The Hunt Roll exists because I am just terrible at tracking time in old-school games! I don't want the ticking of a clock to be something that I manage—I want the actions of the players to drive the pace of encounters.

The actual mechanics of the Hunt Roll came out of my experiences with Jason Cordova’s Labyrinth Move for Dungeon World and Brendan Strejcek’s Overloaded Encounter Die for old-school D&D. 

Powered by the Apocalypse games (of which Dungeon World is one) have the idea of "hold", which is typically a bonus you get to future rolls. In Jason’s Labyrinth Move, you collect hold on your roll, but use them as a currency. You can spend 1 hold to find a treasure, or spend 3 hold and find the center of a dungeon or other maze. I always turn hold into tangible tokens when I play, so when I made the Hunt Roll, I just formalized using actual tokens.

So with the Labyrinth Move, we have a roll for navigating and finding treasure—my twist was to use that for any kind of exploration or  information gathering, tie it to additional dangers/encounters (a la the overloaded encounter die), and generalize it so that instead of seeking the center of a maze, it could be used to achieve narrative goals, including overcoming Set Goals.

Rossignol: Can you talk a bit about the Set/Prop structure of an Incursion? It's quite sort of writerly and theatrical to my mind, how intentional is that? (The players knowing the goal strikes me as a fascinating position to take, as if everyone is in on the plot and it's the details that matter?)

Ross: Yep, it's very theatrical! That's why I use those terms! When I think about RPGs, I often think about them like a TV show: which actor is playing that character, or what is the big set piece that the producers are spending this week’s budget on? I like the term Set because it tells you that it's not just a location, but it's a *meaningful* location *where the action happens*. We're seeing the characters in this spot because they're on stage and doing something worth watching (which is often related to what the Set Goal is). And Props are just all the things the characters can interact with that help *drive that action*.

To your point about Set Goals and knowing the plot, that comes directly from my experience with Lady Blackbird (by John Harper, creator of Blades in the Dark). In that game, there is a destination outlined in the very beginning of the game (to get the Lady to her lost love), and having that north star helps all the players orient play to that goal, even when their characters aren't supposed to know about the lost love or the Lady's backstory). It's explicitly meta game knowledge, and I find that most players enjoy living in that tension between what they know and what their characters know.

TTRPGs are so special for their ability to let us be both performer and audience member in the same moment. The dramatic irony of meta knowledge is one of the ways we can tap into that unique feature of this art form. And, as a practical matter, Trophy Gold’s Set Goals streamline play and helps minimize some of the meandering that I sometimes find happens in other systems.

Rossignol: How much have people used the Trophy games - to your knowledge - to navigate social settings? (I was struck by how what you encounter definitely doesn't have to be a monster or a trap in the traditional sense, couldn't it be embarrassment in a social setting? The Ruin you suffer to your standing and personality?)

Ross: I think that happens a fair amount! I know Tom McGrenery’s game The Merit of All Things (which is based on Trophy), allows for a fair amount of social drama, and social challenges directly impact Ruin. By using an expansive definition of Ruin (it’s not just hit points!), the system—and the GM and players—can be flexible.

Rossignol: Do you have much time to run anything other than Trophy? Are you in or running a regular game of anything?

Ross: I do! My biweekly home group typically cycles through 2–4 session campaigns of different game systems so I get to play a lot of different things, though I am currently running Vampire the Masquerade with them. We also have a game of Masks for when the whole group can't make it.

And then I have my game of a B/X variant I've been playing with my youngest daughter off and on since the pandemic started.

Rossignol: Which games are you most excited about in 2023?

Of my own projects, I've got a few irons in the fire that should come out this year:

• R’lyehwatch, a campy rules-light mash-up of Baywatch and the Cthulhu Mythos.

• An eco-horror anthology of Trophy games each co-created by a game designer and a climate-focused academic.

• The Piper’s Call, a new Trophy game answering the question "What if Robin Hood’s merry band of outlaws made their home in a haunted version of Sherwood Forest?"

Of others’ games, I'm really looking forward to:

• Dolmenwood by Necrotic Gnome

• The Silt Verses RPG by Gabriel Robinson and The Gauntlet

• The new version of Swords & Wizardry by Mythmere Games

• Arkham Herald by Oli Jeffery and The Gauntlet

• And I hear there is this cool game called TEETH coming out soon?!

Rossignol: Aha, yes. And also, while we are doing regular questions for creators, what do you want others to play? What would you thrust into the Internet's hands and say "play this!"?

Ross: I absolutely adore Lady Blackbird and think everyone should play it a few times. It's such a lovely system for both beginners and veteran players!

Rossignol: Finally, and this is for personal interest as much as any interview stakes: we're obviously about embark on our own Kickstarted book journey with TEETH, what advice would you offer to people heading into that territory for the first time?

Ross: Have a solid email list [that you, if you’re reading this - Ed], finish your book before the Kickstarter (something I'll do for all my future campaigns), always have a back-up printer option (I've had to switch printers on both of my Kickstarter campaigns!), and don't get swept up in stretch goal fever.

Rossignol: Thanks for your time.

—

More soon! x

1. Hello, You

2. Links!

3. THINGS OF THE YEAR

Hello, you.

It’s that time again: we loom in the depths of winter as the northern hemisphere leans away from the sun in an attempt to get some goddamned sleep. I celebrated this cosmic shift in coherent style by purchasing the massive Rifts Bundle(s) Of Holding, which contains many of the books I lost in the great chaos of my early twenties, and many which I did not own in the first place. The highlight so far, as pointed out to me by a person that I actually played many of those Rifts games with in the mid 90s, musician and goatkeeper Andy Holbrook, was this line from Rifts England: "A Splugorth Highlord and ten Overlords are permanent residents of Margate. The Splugorth like their attitude." Those who know, etc.

I talked about my terrible love of Rifts earlier this year, and I might return to that theme now that I am scrolling back through these PDFs. Was it just youthful love, or was there really something to Palladium’s reckless genre-pulping? I suppose the question really is: would I ever run a Rifts game ever again? Not with that system, certainly, but there are alternatives in these latter days.

I feel like picking up these PDFs speaks to the fact that TTRPGs are two, or perhaps three, separate hobbies. I increasingly believe that the hobby of purchasing or collecting TTRPG books (or any books, really) is effectively unrelated to the reading or playing thereof. I could go into detail about this theory, but I will not. (Although for this audience I would say that it has an analogy in Warhammer being the two barely-related hobbies of buying miniatures and actually playing a tabletop combat game with them.)

Editorial note: I said last time I was going to document a playthrough of Jason Price’s delightful solo-zine Notorious, but having gone through the PDF I am going to wait for the print version, which is apparently imminent! So bear with us on that count.

Right, anyway, what now? I am going to do a little roundup of the year, which you can read after some links.

LINKS!

Just a couple of things of interest before the year closes out!

• If you type “osr-rpg.com” in a browser, this is the page you go to. It stands for Outcast Silver Raiders! A little double entrendre, there. And it looks good! “Outcast Silver Raiders is what the televangelists, the hack investigative journalists, and the grasping Hollywood producers imagined when they caused a satanic panic around RPGs in the eighties. Daemons. Darkness. Sacrifice. Blood spilling over cracked altars in desecrated chapels.” To be fair I think there’s quite a lot of competition in that particular sector, currently, but OSR looks really strong!

• We’ve posted elsewhere about Jeeyon Shim’s fantastic current work, but Marsh notes that Have I Been Good, from a little while back, is very much our sort of thing: “This is an epistolary game for two players, one of whom is a dog. Within the construct of this game dogs think of humans as ageless, near-immortal, untouched by sickness or death except in rare confluences of time. You know this is not true; but it does not matter.”

• The Crash at Crush intentional trainwreck. Probably a metaphor for something.

• Jim is on Mastodon.

THINGS OF THE YEAR

This year has been a fascinating one for me personally as it has seen me go on something of a journey in terms of my understanding of making RPGs, and also what it is that I want from RPGs. It’s a journey that we started back in 2017, when we started playing Blades In The Dark. That was the first new (to me) system that I had played in many years and, although I have never shared the propensity to fear learning new systems that many folks who came in with the Dragon game carried in their hearts, I had not really expected that playing Blades would initiate a journey into so many other games. The past few years have been one of browsing and exploration. A tasting menu of dice and character ledgers.

During this time I have come full circle from a complete lack of desire to run a long and entrenched campaign and a wish only to explore and dabble across many systems and scenarios, right back to a desire for another big campaign. We just twelve sessions of Trophy, mind you, so that was a started. And, that said, I suspect there will be more dabbling in the new year, and the Things of This Year will likely be among the dabbled.

Forged In The Dark Things Of The Year (Joint Winners)

Having created a series of Forged In The Dark games with my beloved friend Marsh Davies, I am sort of amazed that the ruleset has ended up being just so popular for general use - it is, after all, a remarkably tailored and arcane system to have been chosen as a general-use SRD, but I am glad of the excitement it has aroused in people, because it has turned up gems such as these.

Slugblaster by Wilkie’s Candy Lab: a Forged RPG about “teenagehood, giant bugs, circuit-bent rayguns, and trying to be cool”. Slugblaster is a masterpiece of repurposed rulesets, with wonderfully colourfully design throughout. And I mean literally colourful as well as how it delivers the game. Honestly just pick this up.

As The Sun Forever Sets is on my schedule to run next year (we had a lot of downtime this year, or I would have squeezed it in) because the premise and presentation — ordinary Victorian people trying to survive in the context of HG Wells’ War Of The Worlds — could not possibly be more appealing to a brain like mine. It’s also a sort of diametric opposite to Slugblaster, which demonstrates how far the poles of the FitD community have been dragged. A beautiful horizon.

Not Forged In The Dark But Actually Genetically Related Thing Of The Year

I am not sure that we’re going to have this category turn up every year in our annual awards ceremony, but you know, maybe. Trophy Gold’s dice pools and things happening on a 6, and complications happening on anything less than a six means it bears a strong family resemblance to the Forged games that we generally orbit around, without actually being anything like those games at all. Comrade Gillen, who ran one of the campaigns I played in, observed that people outside the hobby might wonder what all the fuss was about, since it might look similar to the other games, but as I explained at length, the game has a power and identity like nothing else. (Interview with creator Jesse Ross coming soon!)

Thing That My Friends Did Thing Of The Year

We talked to Kieron earlier in the year about the Kickstarter of his DIE RPG: an RPG which is based on a comic about a group of people getting sucked into an RPG in a very literal sense, which has turned out to be the most meta-thing that Gillen has ever attempted in a career of really quite-meta-indeed accomplishments. Gillen describes DIE as “goth Jumanji”, which I think actually undersells the enormity of the thing, which, as one friend put it “is like a shared-hallucination therapy session for these characters you only just made up”. It’s also just one of the most interesting things I have encountered, based on a heavily-researched understanding of RPGs as a whole.

Boardgame Experience of The Year, Forty Years After Its Release Thing Of The Year

I had never previously played the original 1970s version of Dune, which was created by the folks behind my favourite ever boardgame, Cosmic Encounter. It was, we discovered, an insane and sprawling masterpiece that delivered, over the course of several hours, intense high drama. Unforgettable, and I am nervous about trying it again.

Thing That Marsh Gave Me Thing Of The Year

Finally, look at these items from Marsh’s own childhood collection which he gifted to me for Christmas! Perhaps I am just looking after them for him as he goes off to live all around the world, but either way, it’s amazing to have that Warhammer cover on my shelf. Look at it! (The D&D one is quite good too - and it has somer glorious hex-maps in the back, we might dig into those later…)

—

And that’s it from us. See you in — holy gods! — 2023.

X

1. Hello, You

2. Links!

3. Anyway

Hello, you.

What’s been going on? Well, we’ve been playing some Trophy Gold, as we detailed last time, and it remains a delight. So far so satisfying, in fact, that both my current groups, Monday Night Dice and the The Catfail Club, are playing it at the same time (but on different nights, obviously), and we’ve managed to both play entirely different scenarios but with, confusingly, characters with the same names (chosen from the presets). I am just glad I am not GMing both.

Still, seeing how different people engage with a system is fascination itself, and some of the post-match analysis has been really satisfyingly chewy. I do love RPG system conversation. Really, how did it make you feel? What can we learn? Edifying as hell, my friends.

Anyway, the backlog is piling up now, with PDFs from the new edition of CBR+PNK, Mothership, and DIE all stacking up like aeroplanes demanding a landing slot in the busy airfield of our attention. We’ll get to those soon enough. And we have Teeth testing to do!

None of that has stopped me idly flicking through completely unrelated things in search of inspiration, of course, because mining the literary potential of everything for word-resources is the point of the job, as we shall look at in a moment.

Meanwhile, The Great Embarrassment is continuing over at Twitter, which looks like it will result in Nothing Good. We’ve recently tucked ourselves safely into the Tumblr-like pouch of Cohost, if you fancy a breakout. 

Also the PDF for solo-play bounty-hunter RPG Notorious turned up this week and it’s as delightful as I had hoped. It will be my first single-player RPG playthrough! Tune in next time to find out how I got on.

LINKS!

• Bloodclotte is “a tabletop RPG about doctors in a world of Gothic horror, where alchemy, reanimation and medical astronomy are used to save lives every day.” I love this idea very much, with the action revolving around treating people in a spooky castle, while a chaotic supernatural war rages beyond.

• “Moorcockian” is a descriptor that doesn’t get applied to enough RPGs, and here’s this one being all Forged In The Dark and everything. Pacts & Blades is worth a look.

• Monstrous is easily one of the most interesting projects on our radar. It’s about telling better stories through monsters, and provides GMs with a bunch of material to do just that. Click through for their preview PDF, it’s a lovely looking thing.

• A new edition of our beloved The Vast In The Dark.

• Also in new edition news this week is word of a new edition of beserk science-fantasy Troika! - a game which we got a lot of use out of last year, and which remains one of my favourite RPG books. It’s such a wild singularity that I am sort of surprised that it’s getting a new version, but I will buy it nonetheless with gusto.

Anyway

I’ve been doing some research for a thing. I found my head empty and decided to fill it up with things to be processed and turned back into ideas. One of the things I irregularly dig up are these comedy D&D spells, published long ago in a copy of Dragon magazine. One of the few benefits of being an older hoarder is that I can dig through these and other articles from the ancient times, seeking inspiration and other gold.

While I have only once deployed any of these in a D&D campaign (yes, it was Speak With Mud) some ideas from this era have lodged with me, and I have used them for great dramatic effect over the years. I often think about the D&D spells, and how they are a little creative essay in themselves, with references to rules, eacg effectively doing their own thing. And now that I think about it, I would propose that spells are at their most interesting at levels 5-7, because they have to be fairly powerful, but also come with very clear and hard limitations, so that they don’t impinge too much on the world changing realms of levels 8-9. Sorry to talk D&D spells, it’s just how things get around here sometimes.

So yeah, prising these old clips out of the photo archive and reminded how, because Dragon only covered TSR games, but sold advertising to the rest of the industry, I would most often learn about other games solely via the adverts in there. This era was, perhaps, the one during which adverts were most effective on me, having sold most of the Palladium line and filling my teenage years with Rifts.

But there were plenty of ads that remain a mystery to (almost) this day. Let’s have a look at this one.

Now, these days you could just look up on the internet what TORG is, and probably order it, too. But as a twelve year old kid I did not have access to such things. I just had this advert’s imagery and copy. Look at that illustration! Some dude calling lightning down onto an unsafe looking bridge leading into a cloud furnace? The Possibility Wars! I only found out what TORG was recently, and now I am not sure whether the unknowing was actually better.

Speaking of which, this ad was the coolest thing you, I, or anyone could imagine in 1990. I had no idea what any of it meant. RENEGADE LEGION. That sounds amazing on its own. But then it had that readout of the spaceship! “Yield: UNKNOWN - Roughly equal to 150 hell rounds.” 150 hell rounds! That was a lot of hell rounds, I knew.

“A 16 page book of forms.”

Okay, that sounded a little less exciting, I admit, but the rest of it was pretty strong.

In retrospect I could have ordered this from the games shop in Canterbury instead of just expecting to find it one day, like really cool treasure. Reader, I never did.

Then there was this.

Crime! Needless to say, I really wanted to play this. My mum, though, suspected it was, somehow, related to actual crime. By signing up to this there was no way I wasn’t going to become a gangster forever, in the crime pits. In Blackpool.

As time went on it became clear that I was never going to be allowed to mail off anything to anywhere. Which is a shame, because some of the small ads for play-by-mail stuff really promised something special.

Lead your planet’s inhabitants! (CorGaSyl?)

Become a starship captain!

Uh.

Maybe not Xenophobe.

Nevermind, twelve year old me. Multiplayer computer games are coming! You will be able to remotely interact with humans without exchanging a postal address. In fact, unknown to me at the time, it turns they were already here. I remember not understanding this ad at the time.

And now… is this… is this an ad for a free-to-play sniper game on CompuServe in 1989?! Wow.

‘Endure’ doesn’t seem like a word you should include in your ad.

Also: “Just call 800-848-8199, ask for Representative 94 and request a free introductory membership…”

I never did call Representative 94 to find out what this was about. Beginning to wonder whether they are still there, now. Waiting. In an abandoned call facility, under a flickering strip light. Representative 94 is waiting for your call…

Not sure what this was about, either.

Anyway.

More soon!

x