A Bald Ode To The 1990s

Transgressive and absurd.

Hello there! You are reading the TEETH newsletter, written and compiled by cold potato Jim Rossignol and warm salad Marsh Davies. This is a newsletter about table-top role-playing games: our own—that we’re publishing over here—and some by other lovely people whom we link below. Want us to see your work? Get in touch!

AN INFORMATIVE PLUG FOR OUR THRILLING TRIO OF STANDALONE, LOW-PREP/HIGH ENTERTAINMENT ADVENTURES SET IN THE TEETH UNIVERSE:

STRANGER & STRANGER, a 63-page, campaign-length adventure in which a group of hapless bumpkins attempt to save their village from abomination, while undergoing a series of grimly amusing mutations.

BLOOD COTILLION, a 45-page one-shot in which assassins dress-up in fluttering petticoats, attempt to infiltrate a society ball and murder the cultists therein. Think: Pride & Terminate with Extreme Prejudice. 

NIGHT OF THE HOGMEN, a 23-page one-shot in which an assortment of travellers are forced to flee a massive horde of monstrous pig-creatures. It's name-your-own-price, so you can dive in without onerous financial risk!

They're all low prep, rules-lite and easy to get into. Hogmen is particularly ideal for newcomers! Please do check them out, and, if you are interested in supporting our exploits, please do buy a copy!

Good day to you. And warmest apologies for the two week hiatus in communications from Teeth Towers. Illness was upon us, and the burden was great. These dark times have mostly now passed, however, and normal service shall be resumed, if this is indeed a service that has a normal state.

The past couple of weeks have, unwellness permitting, been focused on more Big Teeth work. The main document now standing at something like 45,000 words, with a big pile of rules, lore, maps, and monsters spilling out all over our Google Drive folders. Playtesting has provided many new avenues and questions, however, and this process is ongoing. More news on that when we have it.

My Palladium Secret

Picking through my chaotic collection of RPG PDFs last night, I found myself in the midst of RIFTS, the 1990 cross-genre RPG by Palladium Books.

Wow. Yeah. That’s some cover art.

Ah, I chuckled to myself. If there was one system it would be impossible to get any of the people I play games with 2022 to run, it would be this. We’re more likely to pick up an old edition of D&D than we would be to commit to a game of the mega-damage RPG. It is just so ‘90s, and such a grimly contrived, stat-driven beast, that I feel like it is unimaginable today. More than anything, what struck me about reading through the original manual was the sheer maddening density of it. Look at this.

That is one quarter of one of the two-column layout pages. It has asterisks for additional rules for specific parts of a robot armour which themselves have sub-notes. The stats and rules for that specific armour (the iconic Glitter Boy) runs to over four pages on its own. This is absolutely emblematic of a system that was a particularly over-complicated d20 system in the first place: it utterly heaves with stats, and there were additional layers added to make Rifts even more complicated. Every book was a content-bonanza, with new character classes, weapons, and their bespoke additional rules.

Yet if there is one thing that would really explain my existence as a tabletop RPG person it is not to be found in the copies of Star Frontiers and AD&D that doting, baffled parents bought me in for Christmas 1989. No, the real reason that RPGs took root in my brain, even over and above the videogames I played in the era, is down to Rifts. From the moment I saw Kevin Long’s cartoony sci-fi art for Rifts in the full-page adverts run in Dragon magazine, I knew this was the game I wanted to play. Wizards and power-armour, Lovecraftian elder gods and mexican vampires: anything goes, in the most maximalist melting pot imaginable. It made Warhammer 40k look austere and sensible. In truth, the point of Rifts was take all the tropes and put them into one game. Nothing has ever appealed to me quite so powerfully. As a kid, who had understood the world of fiction through genre-boundaries up to that point, it felt transgressive and absurd. I didn’t want to play anything else.

In part, even my approach as a game designer can be found rooted in my response to these ultra-dense pages of stats and numbers: I simplified them. I ignored them.

Everything of Rifts that we played in the 90s was seat-of-the-pants and improvised. The game was stripped down and minimalised. We threw out entire systems and boiled it down to the simplest possible tally of hit points and difficulties. Later, my teenage comrade on nerdery, Tim Donovan (who i believe has my collection of original Rifts books even now) published an early website converting Rifts to a much simplified and streamlined d20 system. We were that dedicated to the cause.

And the reason for all this was because we couldn’t resist the anything-goes worldbuilding. It was absolutely the best thing imaginable to my teenage self to pit mediaeval gargoyles against German mecha. And the idea that the battles would be a two hour stat-mire was not acceptable. What mattered to our games was injecting as much of the lurid colour the books provided as possible. Interdimensional arms traders, Lovecraftian slave traders, North American fascists in fortress cities (weirdly prescient), anti-monster cyborgs made from humans grafted with enchanted biomechanical devices. It was high-speed a soup. A terrible, wonderful, monstrous smoothie, whipped together for high speed imagining. And without even realising that was what we were doing, we played Rifts as a no-brakes narrative RPG.

If I make an original RPG ruleset one day, then I suspect this experience will be the root of it. Something unbounded and delirious.

All of which is to say, reader, that my wedding ring is, secretly, made from the rare metal, palladium. A direct ode to my most beloved of RPGs, and their creators at Palladium Books. 

It’s probably for the best if no one tells my wife.

Links!

LINKS

• What would the logistical arm of supporting a Warhammer 40k army actually look like? A gentleman who knows has done some working out over in this Twitter thread.

• This is "just" a bestiary but has already been funded to the tune of half a million dollars… Is that because it is such a lush production, with great illustrations and miniatures too boot, or are those enticements possible because 5E guarantees an audience large enough to make such elaborate reward tiers feasible?

• AJCostello3: "In the last campaign I ran, I had the players all meet each other while wintering in town before the campaign officially started. For Session Zero, I had every player create 3 rumors about their PC: 2 that were true and 1 that was false & share them with everyone w/o them knowing" This is a fun idea. I like the idea of beginning a session with the players imagining what rumours their own actions in the previous session might have engendered. As @aGhostofeli says in the Tweet that instigated the thread above: it "Gets them thinking about their influence in the setting".

• Dark Souls, the TTRPG, has been announced by Steamforged Games, and to the dismay of indie-roleplaying Twitter, it's 5E compatible. On the one hand, it's a predictable choice for a tie-in to seek out the largest audience, and one that doesn't necessarily put the appropriateness of the system first. On the other… is D&D actually a bad fit for Dark Souls? It's a game which is very much about crunchy, numbers-go-up, whomp-'em-good combat. If anything Dark Souls is a distillation of the very sorts of systems that D&D simulates with dice, so why not? However, if you aren't convinced a bespoke ruleset wouldn't serve it better, you might take a look at Runecairn instead, which riffs on some of Dark Souls ideas like bonfire resurrections, summons and invasions, while shifting to a Norse fantasy world reeling from the aftershocks of Ragnarok. Also it's five bucks and due an expanded deluxe hardback version, subtitled Wardensage, this year. It should hit the spot if the official adaptation leaves you feeling a little Hollow. (Quite evidently they should have used Forged In The Dark, so that it could have been called Dark Souls In The Dark.)

• Or, for even more Soulslike TTRPGs, there's this itch.io collection compiled by Jason at Pretendo Games.

• There was a Rocky & Bulwinkle RPG?!?

• Not sure how I missed the launch of Senet magazine, a lavishly-illustrated print periodical all about boardgames. It looks absolutely gorgeous. In fact, having some idea of the economics of print publishing, I'm not sure how they can afford to make it as gorgeous as it is. The latest edition has interviews with Antoine Bauza, creator of 7 Wonders and Hanabi, and the astonishing fantasy cartography of Francesca Baerald, among much else.

• Wolfspell is a TTRPG printed as tri-fold LP liner notes. Honestly just a very cool object.

• Speaking of very cool trifold objects, check out Heroes Of Cerulea’s gorgeous presentation!

• Those Wretched Kids! is another Wretched & Alone solo journaling RPG, and check out this pitch: “In Those Wretched Kids! you play a brilliant if somewhat unsuccessful entrepreneur that has developed a vaguely nefarious plan centered around an old abandoned amusement park. In order to have your plans go off without a hitch, you have to balance the artificial legend you created to scare off interlopers, develop your main scheme, reflect on your career that keeps getting labeled as "villainous" for some reason and stop Those Wretched Kids! from interfering!”

• Jeeyon Shim is collecting notification sign-ups for her forthcoming fundraise for The Snow Queen, an RPG which uses chess as its key mechanism.

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More soon! x