Dinosaurs and thinly-veiled fan fiction

Giant penguins taller than most people.

Welcome there! You are reading the TEETH newsletter, written and compiled by the wizened apple Jim Rossignol and crusty loaf 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. 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.)

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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.”

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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.

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More soon! x

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