On Landscapes And TEETH
A morbid and awesome potential.
That Kickstarter Interest-Registration Page, In Case You Missed It Last Time
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!
Hello, You
Links!
Marsh on Landscapes and TEETH
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