Hello & DIE: Kieron Gillen on that RPG of his.
The D12 being isomorphic seems perfect.
Hello there! You are reading the TEETH newsletter, written and compiled by wistful ogre Jim Rossignol and remote harpy Marsh Davies. This is a newsletter about table-top role-playing games: our own—that we’re publishing over here or and also here —with writing about work by some other lovely people whom we link to below. Want us to see your work? Get in touch!
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Hello, yes, the TEETH games aren’t just on itch.io now, they’re also on the mighty DriveThruRPG, so if that’s your portal of choice then you can collect our games over there!
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 buy on itch, or now on DriveThruRPG!
WORDS
Hello, you.
Apologies, we’ve been a bit quieter than we’d like. It’s been a busy few weeks since last we spoke, with things outside the TTRPG field ballooning up to take most of our time. I still can’t talk about the day job, and probably won’t be able to even after the game is announced, because Corporate Reasons, but that’s been taking up a large part of my mind, anyway. Marsh meanwhile is forging a new life across the ocean. A volcano base? A stilt palace on a haunted swamp? He cannot reveal his secrets. I am sure you understand.
Our usual RPG group has also been on medium-term hiatus due to various life things, during which we have found ourselves playing the F2P online version of the deck-builder Dominion. That now has me thinking about a TTRPG where you roleplay competing feudal economies. Could we squeeze Forged In The Dark actions out of economic policies? Oh, maybe. If not advisably.
Anyway, that final (maybe) TEETH edit has been going on between myself and Marsh, and while there’s some feedback to incorporate and some restructuring to do, it’s very tidy and quite complete. Writing it has been a joy, and we hope to pass that joy on to you very soon.
In the meantime, we have been doing the usual scouring of the internet for clues as to what we will play next, and we had a little chat with Kieron Gillen, long-time comrade in righteousness and the creator of DIE, which you can read below.
LINKS
We missed pointing you towards the Brindlewood Bay Kickstarter, but it’s worth us pointing to anyway, if just to note that an RPG about a group of elderly women enjoying their retirement made nearly half a million dollars on Kickstarter. Yes, there’s more to it than that, with a clever mystery system, cosmic horror bits, and a “play to find out what happens” mechanism, which will surprise even the GM. If you missed backing it then it will doubtless be available commercially in the coming months. I am sure that we will be one of many, many tables putting this to the test later in the year.
Also going absolutely nuclear on the crowd-funding platform is DIE, the RPG of the comic invented by Kieron Gillen. Gillen ran a group for our Monday night lockdown group some time back, which I recounted over here. I also talk to him below.
Those are both small-fry compared to Monte Cook’s Old Gods Of Appalachia, naturally, but the genre bestriding Cook needs no assistance from the likes of us. Although I note you can make a “late pledge” - is that really a thing now?
I like “paranormal mercenary” game FIST because it has exploded cut away diagrams of things in there, and nothing is not improved by the inclusion of such things.
Also have a nose at the ludicrous Lumen-driven vibrancy of Infinite Revolution. The creator explains: “In Infinite Revolution, you play as a Revolver—a human whose spirit burns so hot, quick, and bright it would reduce their atoms to ash if for not an implanted turbine called a Revolver Drive. A race of entropic predators called the Veil has swallowed most of your system, and now it's time to take it back—for yourself, for your friends, and for everyone back on Earth.” And so forth!
Not a TTRPG, but I absolutely love the concept of My Father’s Work, a generational boardgame where players carry out mad scientist research across three generations. #Goals, eh lads?
I’m too lazy to figure out if we mentioned FiTD game Songs For The Dusk before now, but I don’t think we did, and that’s good enough for me! It’s doing some stuff: “The world is littered with ancient machines running haywire, strange and exotic new life forms, and petty tyrants big and small vying for power. But for once we have a chance here: a chance, for once, to build something good, something better than all the human flaws and oppressive structures of the old world. And this is how we do it.” There’s some really inventive reworkings of the FiTD structure here, and a focus on compassionate, community-building positivity which feels very much on-message for my recent spate of solarpunk optimism. (Yes, I did read A Psalm For The Wind Built.)
Research this week led us to Archives Of The Planet, which was an extraordinary but now largely forgotten attempt to photographically catalogue the human cultures of the planet between 1908 and 1931. It’s one of those artefacts of record and culture which really make you remember what an extraordinary race of creatures we are.
Also in Humans Are Extraordinary research was this story about huge super-ancient constructions in Turkey. I had known about this stuff since reading Chris Gosden’s The History Of Magic last year, in which he talks about the purpose of these sites, and the fact that larger locations remain identified but unexplored. News that one of them is now well under investigation is fascinating. I’m not saying that I am writing anything about sophisticated neolithic cultures, but hey, one day maybe.
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Hey, KIERON GILLEN: Die, Die! DIE!
I’ve known Gillen for a while now. He regularly beats me at Warhammer. We worked on PC Gamer together, we founded PC gaming site Rock, Paper, Shotgun with Meer and Walker, and we wrote The Ludocrats in an intoxicated fugue. (Buy a copy!) So it’s safe to say I have no critical distance from the exploits discussed here. Nevertheless, I thought I should get him to say a few words about DIE, the RPG he has made based on the comics he made based on RPGs. Yeah, it really is that sort of creative Ouroboros. It’s being Kickstarted to the tune of lots of backers, and deservedly so, as I have seen a glimpse of the extraordinary amount of research, time, care, nonsense, and inspired conceptual hoodwinking Gillen has applied to it over the past few years.
So what is DIE? Well, Gillen likes to call it “Goth Jumanji”, but I feel like that undersells the conceit. Plus I just don’t like Jumanji. This is more like a 21st century meta-commentary on our lifelong fixations with game culture and the very currency of escapism, particularly along nerd vectors, and particularly, obsessionally, in tabletop RPGs. It’s a game where you play the once-teenage players of a TTRPG, who were dragged into the game (like in that D&D cartoon) and then forced to return to it as adults in later life, a bit like… wait— a bit like a forty-something writer who has returned to the preoccupations of his youth for reasons of existential examination and cultural-philosophical heartstringing?! Hang on a minute!
JR: So you’ve been on a bit of a TTRPG journey for the past few years, combining your comics career with this long term love, via a huge amount of research and running your own TTRPG community around the genesis of a new game. What do these funny games with their play-acting and their sheets filled with numbers mean to you now?
KG: I think back on my life, and know games have always been there. I used to separate them distinctly - boardgames, videogames, RPGs, whatever - but I was a fool. I look back and just see them all part of the same conversation. My old theory when I was a games critic was that games are utilitarian - yes, they’re pleasurable, but you come to them to fulfil a need in your life. I remember the year when my most played game was Robot Unicorn Attack, as its canter fit the spaces in my early comic career best. I remember the big long post-heartbreak games of Planescape Torment. I remember the teenage anger of Syndicate - as Fuck You I Won’t Tidy My Bedroom as Rage against the Machine.
Anyway - since I left videogames around the time I left RPS, I spent the next five years being primarily into boardgames and the next five years primarily being into RPGs. I was into boardgames as the utilitarian need was a way to make sure I socialise with friends while tickling the ludic itch. I was into RPGs, because - and now I’m finally coming back to your questions - because RPGs are all about the big questions. Who are you? Who do you want to be? Who can you imagine yourself being? Do you like that person? And perhaps, can you take this self-knowledge back to the world?
Which is what DIE is really about, both in comic and game, and what RPGs are especially good at.
There’s a couple of other angles which really are on my mind, both which link to previous strains of my thinking.
One is me as critic and demystifier. It’s no longer good enough for me to write a story. I have to know how that kind of story works well enough that I can explain to someone else how they can make their own version of that story. You can see that in DIE, but you can also see that in stuff like Come Dice With Me, which is clearly born of me analysing the TV show to death, until I entirely grokked it enough to turn it into a game. RPGs are very good at this. Get the right rules, and you generate the right narrative. But finding the rules - that’s the trick.
The other is me as full on zine-kid who believes in power of individual creativity and how that frees us. The world wants to make us into consumers. It tries to make us think creativity is something that godly other beings do - the punchline of WicDiv is, of course, creators aren’t gods. RPGs show how easy creativity is. Some friends, some rules, an evening? You can make a world, a story, something personal, something better than what’s being sold to you by the simulcra because it’s yours. RPGs remind you of your own power. Creativity is infinite and freely available to you. I love that. They’re the most democratic, even anarchistic form.
I also like hitting kobolds with my sword +4 against scarabs.
JR: Yeah, you are not optimally min-maxing with that sword build. But also I think the thing about it showing us how easy creativity is really strikes home in my experiences: because as both a critic and a creator it is easy to be siloed into that same line of thinking, that there’s something special about that process, and there really isn’t, and it’s explicit in RPG gameplay. One of our most inventive players at my regular table had never played an RPG before joining us, was doubtful to begin with, and is now routinely imaginatively ambitious. That said, there remains a line for a lot of people in TTRPGs between being a player and being the GM type of person: that seems like something you are hyper aware of in the light of DIE’s comic storylines?
KG: You’re right - people who don’t have the expectations can do amazing things. I think of a player who jumped into Blades in the Dark and immediately got that she was meant to want things, and drive towards it. She wanted to assassinate anyone who trafficked sex-workers, which is such a big move, right? She didn’t have to be untaught the standard RPG “You’re a party, sit back and wait for the GM to give you stuff” tropes.
But the step to GMing a game is something else, as you say. And it doesn’t have to be. Like, there’s a lot of DIE, especially in the early Beta days, about caring for the GM. The GM is a player too, and you think about how much they take on in a traditional game, and think how players so rarely think about their own actions - hell, even the common idea of “Players have complete agency!” is basically reinventing GMing into some kind of Customer Is Always Right thing. I look at that stuff, and sometimes think it’s folks internalising all kinds of bits of capitalism. GMing doesn’t have to be that. Even at its most classical, it’s more like being the person in the band who writes the songs and maybe arranges the practise than anything else.
So while DIE is a game with a certain cognitive load (based on the classes being so different in certain ways) I also really tried to make the job as easy as possible. In terms of making it low prep, in terms of how to mine information from the players and reintegrate and so on. Also, an express statement of However The Game Works, It’s Great. DIE is a game which can turn therapy, but it needn’t be dark to be right. A fun adventure is 100% a great way to spend an evening. Don’t beat yourself up.
I also find myself how my own perpetual-GMing has influenced my games. Like, it’s telling that all the small games I’ve released either have no-GM (The Greatest Gamer, Come Dice with me, Amble) or have a GM-who-is-embodied-in-the-game (DIE). Hell, the other stuff I’m working on is similar.
I can also tell with the broader bits of the design - you know the Elmore Leonard 10 rules for writing. “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” which I always remember as “Try to leave out the part that you tend to skip.” That’s very much in there. If it’s prep I would never do for a game, why would I advise anyone else to do it?
JR: Tsk, who does Leonard think he is telling me how to write, eh? I’ll write the bit people tend to skip and like it!
Two questions come to mind at this point:
The first is that given what you’ve said here, and also my own experiences in writing for TTRPGs recently, the task of writing these things is clearly a very instructive and diverse challenge for writers. I feel like it has broadened my skills as a writer and designer in a way that previous work, even writing and designer for videogames, has not touched on: working muscles not previously exercised. (My meta-game design has been better when going back into videogame design, for one thing.) You started to talking about this, but I am interested in how you think DIE itself has challenged and changed you as a writer, from talking to you over the past few years it feels like the research you did around the RPG scene, as well the process of writing the comic, have changed some inner part of the Gillen writer mechanism. Do you think that’s fair? What does it look like from the inside?
Secondly, and this is clearly related, the title of DIE is both a sweet pun and also an acknowledgement of the totemic presence of dice as capricious chance systems within many TTRPGs, but has writing this game, in which you make so much of the motif of dice, changed how you think about dice - the objects and the concept of chance bound up with them - as a part of these games? (Also I asked Grant if he cared about dice as objects and he… did not. Do you?)
KG: I think I honestly won’t be able to know what it’s actually taught me until I step back and see what the final release is like. I’m not even sure that I’ll be able to know what I think of anything until I have some perspective.
There is one thing I can think of - it’s in terms of being hyper aware of writing as discovery. DIE’s original manuscript is basically 300,000 words. The final book will be about 100k, and a bunch of that is new. In reality, I look at what I thought of as the manuscript and view it as an exploration of a land. Like, a diary or a travelogue. And when I’m back, what was required is to actually remove the lessons from it. There’s so much stuff which is GM advice in that document… but it’s really saying a few key things, time and time over, from different angles. By the end, I’ve managed to boil almost all of it down to a handful of key principles, if you hit, and hit again, you’ll have something that feels like DIE.
(And then there’s a lot of other stuff, sure, but it’s mostly outside the context of the game. As Grant dryly notes: “you do have a blog, Kieron”.)
In terms of dice themselves as an item? Well, more towards the beginning of the development than later. This is obviously fundamental in the thinking of the comic and the game - as in, that set of original D&D dice are weird magical artifacts that transform us and take us to magical worlds. As we’ve now won the cultural war over RPGs, DIE absolutely flirts a little with all the imagery of the Satanic Panic, and viewed through those filters, to parents who don’t understand what was happening, those dice are freaky looking objects. Why on earth would anyone have a dice with 20 sides?
So a lot of both DIE’s core work is trying to treat them seriously, and to try and re-enchant them a little. That echoes through the whole design, but it’s especially there with the dice. Everyone has ownership of one, and only they get to touch it. They mostly use it in a different way. Plus all the rituals we use - the bit of DIE where we hand out the dice, and then use it as a physical prop when you first transport to the fantasy world? That is some of the most sizzle-y bits of the design.
Also, just because I did the research, there’s lots of fun facts. The D10 being the latest dice of the 6 to be invented means it’s perfect for the technological neo. The D20 is the world - even if DIE wasn’t set on a 20-sided sphere, a D20 is close enough to a globe to read as that. As such, it’s the Master’s dice, the GM. The Godbinder’s D12 - apart from the obvious “12 gods in a classic pantheon” thing, also has the interesting fact that it’s isomorphic to the D20. As in, there’s no points in common. So if the D20 represents the material reality, then the D12 being isomorphic seems perfect for the supernatural D12. And so on.
This is all tactics to try and enchant them again. And folks love dice. Like, that’s the main thing which I’ve got from running this game with so many different people, and people who’ve never gamed before. Within half an hour, everyone falls into their own superstitions, and starts doing things like mocking people for being bad at rolling. Dice, being capricious little gods, are great for getting your primal brain to come out and play.
JR: To wrap up, let’s talk about the books that have really excited you within TTRPGs over the past few years? I know from your own zine-y stuff that what has informed and entertained you has covered a broad script. Your excitement over, say, Trophy, was obvious, but I know there’s a lot of other stuff. What’s the list of things our readers should try for themselves? (There’s even some stuff you and I have played together which I think has informed my thinking in ways I didn’t expect, and that I expect we could, or already have had, discussions of.)
KG: Coming off the back of DIE and the first few months of parenthood, I’m aware I’ve been well out of gaming entirely. I don’t even quite have the full brain to think about what I would be playing if I had the time. I’m not sure when you’ll be doing your next newsletter, but at the time of writing there’s just under two days left on Brindlewood Bay’s KS, which is a Cosmic Horror Cosy Adventure game, and I want to get to the table. If not it, its sister game, The Beneath, which is basically Penny Dreadful but using the same mystery mechanic as Brindlewood Bay. It basically means the players generate the solution to the adventure rather than there being any intrinsic truth whatsoever. I backed Ma Nishanta’s kickstarter (ma-nishtana-why-is-this-night-different), and already have the early version, which sounds amazing - basically a PBTA Passover game, and does some really smart things with ritual. Coming in the next few months should be Pasion de las Pasiones, the really smart Telenovela RPG. I’ve played it once before, and it’s powerfully flexible - I played a Western game, which is clearly outside what you’d think from its Soap Opera conceit, but Soap Opera is a way of doing things rather than a genre per se, right? It’s got some frankly inspiring moves - the “reveal a shocking truth” move is a particular high point, which (if the dice go well) lets the truth you’re revealing be true even if it 100% is against everything we’ve seen so far. That’s pure soap, right? Plus the death move where if someone is killed, you have a variety of ways you survive it - clearly including coming back as your evil twin. Grab the quick start while we wait for the final PDF to go on General release. And I really want to get one of Sword Queen Games’ games to the table - The Twilight Throne should be out this summer , and is a really striking intrigue game I want to play. Though I do also have Apocalypse Keys (Hellboy, basically) and Once More Into The Void (Mass Effect 2, basically) that I want to really get to table.
So many games, Jim! So many!
On a personal level, I’m aware that when I wrap off DIE, I have a few more small zine like games I’d like to develop up to a release version. Do some things to scratch itches before I see if there’s anything else big I want to get my teeth into. I may even do a three pack of Trophy Dark incursions which I’ve sort of written some of?
In terms of us two - well, for a start, we have to do another game soon, and I swear, I won’t just rope you into some last minute DIE playtesting. I should be able to carve an evening out relatively soon. Putting aside Band of Blades, I do keep on thinking about the Belonging Outside Belonging game we played, and now I’ve listened to half a dozen interviews with BoB designers, how I think, in a real way, we really were Just Doing It Wrong. Which makes me think we should take something out again to see if we can Do It Right.
And of course, there’s always Agon, because it made us realise that even when playing narrative RPGs it is good to know Who Is Best.
JR: I am best! Thanks for your time.
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More soon! x