Occupational Jargon That I Am Missing
Bizarre and anti-human worlds
Hello there! You are reading the TEETH newsletter, written and compiled by malevolent omen Jim Rossignol and disturbing portent 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!
POLITE ADVERTISEMENT: TEETH GAMES ARE NOW AVAILABLE ON DRIVETHRURPG.COM!
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.
We suffered an unexpected and unwelcome hiatus recently due to illness and deadlines, but expect more of This Sort Of Thing in the coming weeks. We’re back in the game, returning to the ring, back in the saddle, and any other phrases that share a connotation of an earnest resumption of endeavour. (Yes, it’s Jim at the controls of the newsletter today. Hello.)
If you’ll permit me, I am going to go off on one about game design. I am not sure there are any super critical insights here, and others have said all this before in different ways, but perhaps it provides an insight into our process, and occasionally I just like to say stuff out loud. So here are some words about meta-games, house-keeping, and thematic coherence.
The Ineffable Mystery Of Game Systems Supporting Fictions, And Supporting Each Other, And Back Again
Most readers of this journal will already know that I am engaged in game design for a day job, albeit most routinely making computer games. One of the things that has come to obsess me during this career (and we all know that we must let our obsessions guide us like sleepwalkers through life) has been the tricky business of identifying how game systems and narratives can support each other, and how one discipline within the whole can be coherent with and complimentary to the others.
This relationship, for which there is doubtless some name or occupational jargon that I am missing, but that I occasionally call Thematic Coherence, which is not a perfect term as I am looking at all aspects of a game - (holistic coherence?) - is the phenomenon whereby the general experience of the player is reinforced by all aspects of the game design: often seen as a sort of balance between art, story, and the game systems which make up the decisions and actions the player makes.
I think you know what I am talking about here: game experiences, be they digital or physical, where each aspect of the design builds up and amplifies the other. In video games the brutal mechanics of Souls titles and their bizarre and anti-human worlds being a routinely cited example for this sort of thing. I often point people to Sea Of Thieves using both an accessible art style and accessible game systems to sell their cartoonish pirate fantasy, or contrast that with Hunt: Showdown’s grimdark misery supporting the unflinching PvP game. One reinforces and exaggerates the experience of the other.
But this is not necessary about art style or theme. It’s about the architecture of systems and how they old each other up.
Since I have been indulging in TTRPG design, the outline of those relationships seem to be clearer, as if having them laid out on a page makes the relationship between the different elements more explicit than it could ever be in the overwhelming and often byzantine library of pixels that you experience in a video game.
There are a bunch of examples of this I can point to: Mothership, Mork Borg, Trophy - all these games are excellent examples of marrying severe game mechanics to the kind of perilous worlds that they might depict, and adding additional systems to make the consequences of action scenes more interesting as the game unfolds. (There are others which aim for quite different results, and I am thinking here of the generous bucolic fantasy of Wanderhome, and the way that entire package delivers on its goal of travel in a wonder-filled pastoral fantasy world.) Their success in this is subjective, of course - what I am talking about is a subjective response to formalised sequences of gameplay - and I would certainly say that we as a game group have had more success with some than others. But the commitment of these games to finding the feedback loop is aspirational. And, I should say, this invites a point about the value and success of setting-agnostic systems, but that’s not one I’ll explore right now…
Coming back to the main topic, which is myself and Marsh making a Forged In The Dark TTRPG, well, as I’ve mentioned a few times on here, the marrying of the FiTD systems to the setting of TEETH has been one of the most engaging and challenging game design tasks I’ve ever tangled with, and trying to ensure that thematic coherence comes to the fore is one of the things that has been foremost in my concerns.
Having worked on this in earnest for some time now, I have to declare the deepest respect for what Harper achieved in putting Blades In The Dark together in the first place. Harper’s games, I believe, demonstrate this idea of thematic coherence all the way down. While the position/effect system makes a fairly abstractable core process, it’s really the way fiction and rules are baked into each other that makes the original game so coherent and so internally self-supporting. Harper’s work on this and Agon always impress me as I see how the systems interlock. The way stress acts as a narrative currency in Blades In The Dark, for example, while also feeling like an appropriate character-developing conceit - these scoundrels are, naturally, going to under huge pressure in their inescapable city - melds with opportunities for world-building in the phases designed to manage that currency: your vice and the related phases of play being a fantastic device for both exploring the character and providing a sensible, in-fiction reason for your players to recuperate or simply go off the rails.
It is this area, what we’d perhaps call the meta-game when designing video game systems, which I have found the most interesting in putting TEETH together. It is not about the need for unnecessary detail, although it’s related to it, and it’s not about that core experience of What You Are Generally Doing in a game, although it frames and contextualises it. Getting that into shape by designing phases and non-action sequence activities for the players to be engaging with will, I think, decide how people end up related to TEETH and enjoying the larger campaign structure that we’ve put together. TEETH certainly supports a sort of “monster of the week” gameplay, but what makes it cohere with the setting is the idea that the characters have a deeper interest in what they’re doing, one that puts hooks into the game world that we have been building. (And on the topic of world-building, the big TEETH book will be divided into broadly three sections - the core rules, the worldbook, and the bestiary - and Marsh’s recent work on the last two of those has been magnificent.)
In the rules part of the book, the idea we’ve been developing and testing most recently is that of an “agenda track”, which allows players to unlock benefits and abilities for the group by pursuing their shared agenda in each cycle of play, placed against a “seasons clock”, which counts down how long the characters have left within the Vale. What I like about this solution is that is acknowledges both the practical need for the characters to be able to progress and develop as a group, and also the fact that our setting - that of an occult zone of alienation in the 18th century - clearly hooks into the agenda-driven themes of that period in history: political agendas, the motivations of those who sought enrichment, particularly through new technology and industry, and the agenda of those who sought to destabilise England at a time when its power was both enormous and deeply unpleasant. It also gives reasons for the players to be more or less keen on pursuing specific narrative leads that get dropped in the course of play.
All this is against a series of clocks: the length of time the players have to accomplish their goals before their commission to hunt runs out, and they must leave, either for their own health, or because the king demands it. I am particularly pleased with this because, while the book allows for a long-running campaign, there are also clearly limits, which again I feel touch on that thematic coherence stuff. This is not a place that human beings from the outside should be exposed to for long. And having to get your shit done before time runs out provides a really clear measure for deciding, as a big picture, whether the campaign has been a success, and whether the characters won in their overall pursuit of an agenda.
The lesson for me, as a game designer, is the extent to which a big picture view of the work remains super important when design even house-keeping systems within a game. Getting laser focused on specific responsibilities and tasks - which I certainly guilty of doing in the day job - shouldn’t be at the detriment of making these designs support each other. Acknowledging this explicitly, thinking out loud like I am doing now, and having it as a yardstick for design on both the page and the screen is certainly keeping me in check as a designer. I feel like that’s a necessary thing to pursue, and has certainly been thrown into far clearer relief by the work Marsh and I have done in the past year or so.
Anyway, I clearly needed to get that out of my head this weekend, and I will probably talk more on this topic. There are, clearly, links here to messy game design, and the ways in which games that have lots of moving parts which work to convey a coherent fictional and systemic experience often end up being more engaging than something which pushes either for elegance or utility, and I’ll try to explore my own thoughts on that, too, in a future newsletter.
For now though, let’s have a look at what others have been up to.
LINKS
We cannot proceed any further without mentioning that the CBR+PNK: Augmented Kickstarter got funded this week! We talked a bunch about our own sessions in the game a while back, and it remains one of my favourite reworkings of the FiTD rules. The Kickstarter boasts a bunch of distinctly attractive additions, including search and rescue scenario PRDTR, which I am definitely running for our group, and +WEIRD which provides rules for integrating magic and tech. Excited to receive this, I really am. Hopefully there will also be some way of ordering this for those who missed the Kickstarter, because it looks simply fabulous.
Also, while we’re in that area, I missed the Kickstarter for Token, but now there are pre-orders. Why is that interesting? Well, “TOKEN is a game about a hero and monster circling each other in a haunted forest, offering gifts and signs of their intent—the story ends when they meet and face one another at last.” I’ve played a few one-shot GM-less games over the past couple of years, and now that I’ve acclimatised to that way of thinking, games like this have deep appeal.
If you paid attention to the clever meta RPGing of Fake Chess, then you might be interested to know that there’s a Fake Chess 2. It’s ludicrous, in the best way. “Fake Chess players use a very basic set of rules and mechanics to live out their grandmaster fantasies by acting like serious chess players, engaging in what looks like an intense battle without the burdens of chess strategy, knowledge, or skill.” Meta-RPGing like this makes me guffaw with its cleverness. On a related note you should take a look at Comrade Gillen’s The Greatest Gamer, which plays beautifully on a similar idea.
Look at this lovely map. We should just have a Map Of The Week section, right?
Here’s an interesting take on the “ludicrous collaborative story-telling and interruptions” game idea, called So You’re In A Tavern. “Players take turns drawing cards to prompt for an outrageous story. As the player tells their story, other players add wagers to change the story. "I'm sorry, Sir Pantsonfire, but wasn't it a giant daisy, not a fire-breathing dragon?" The player can accept the wager and incorporate the change or deny it by adding a coin of their own.” I’ve played a few variations on this idea over the years, and I am keen to add this one to the mix.
Did we link to Cezar Capacle’s Scraps before? I tragically am too lazy to check, but if not then we really should have done. This is a crafting game about exploring and bringing back the things you find to advance personal projects. Honestly it sounds like a pitch for some sort of solarpunk videogame, and I am very into that setting. There are hardback and softback versions of the book now, too, so it’s the perfect point to check in.
The Baron’s War feels like bait for mediaeval war nerds like me. Set in the titular 13th-century conflict, this “narrative-driven” tabletop miniatures game has a bunch of stuff going for it, including an art-style that I would describe as 1980s Usborne history book, which is a style I am, of course, wholly programmed by experience to love. I happened by their page because of the promo for this new expansion for the game, but also because I have recently become super interested in the idea of narrative miniatures games, and whether entirely narrative-based systems could be applied to the normally dice-and-table dependent wargaming scene. It feels to me like there’s something waiting to be born at that particular crossroads.
Guilherme Gontijo’s work continues to be super stylish and enticing, and Blurred Lines, a solo detective RPG based on italian horror cinema, is certainly no exception.
Can raiding a dungeon be ethical? What are the moral positions which explain killing monsters for their treasure? This essay explores that conundrum.
The Alien RPG has absolutely no need to snare any attention from the likes of us, but holy shit it looks lovely. (Even though we’re more likely to play the more recent edition of Mothership, sorry lads.)
A 5e Beowulf book - Trials Of The Twin Seas - straddles our collective interests and is engaging in a fairly successful Kickstarter.
Research this week brings me to this portrait of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, the Marvel Cinematic Universe of ancient mesopotamian epic poetry. I jest of course, but I do love the idea that one day our corporate-owned characters will collapse back into this sort of culturally-shared story-telling, with collective generations iterating on spandex people just as they did a bearded warrior and his lusty friend in a way that is remembered and inspires fan-art four thousand years later.
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More soon! x