Roughly Equal To 150 Hell Rounds
Some gentle nostalgia and a cup of reminiscence.
Deluxe! You are reading the TEETH newsletter, written and compiled by soft power Jim Rossignol and hard equation 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!
Anyway
Hello, you.
What’s been going on? Well, we’ve been playing some Trophy Gold, as we detailed last time, and it remains a delight. So far so satisfying, in fact, that both my current groups, Monday Night Dice and the The Catfail Club, are playing it at the same time (but on different nights, obviously), and we’ve managed to both play entirely different scenarios but with, confusingly, characters with the same names (chosen from the presets). I am just glad I am not GMing both.
Still, seeing how different people engage with a system is fascination itself, and some of the post-match analysis has been really satisfyingly chewy. I do love RPG system conversation. Really, how did it make you feel? What can we learn? Edifying as hell, my friends.
Anyway, the backlog is piling up now, with PDFs from the new edition of CBR+PNK, Mothership, and DIE all stacking up like aeroplanes demanding a landing slot in the busy airfield of our attention. We’ll get to those soon enough. And we have Teeth testing to do!
None of that has stopped me idly flicking through completely unrelated things in search of inspiration, of course, because mining the literary potential of everything for word-resources is the point of the job, as we shall look at in a moment.
Meanwhile, The Great Embarrassment is continuing over at Twitter, which looks like it will result in Nothing Good. We’ve recently tucked ourselves safely into the Tumblr-like pouch of Cohost, if you fancy a breakout.
Also the PDF for solo-play bounty-hunter RPG Notorious turned up this week and it’s as delightful as I had hoped. It will be my first single-player RPG playthrough! Tune in next time to find out how I got on.
LINKS!
Bloodclotte is “a tabletop RPG about doctors in a world of Gothic horror, where alchemy, reanimation and medical astronomy are used to save lives every day.” I love this idea very much, with the action revolving around treating people in a spooky castle, while a chaotic supernatural war rages beyond.
“Moorcockian” is a descriptor that doesn’t get applied to enough RPGs, and here’s this one being all Forged In The Dark and everything. Pacts & Blades is worth a look.
Monstrous is easily one of the most interesting projects on our radar. It’s about telling better stories through monsters, and provides GMs with a bunch of material to do just that. Click through for their preview PDF, it’s a lovely looking thing.
A new edition of our beloved The Vast In The Dark.
Also in new edition news this week is word of a new edition of beserk science-fantasy Troika! - a game which we got a lot of use out of last year, and which remains one of my favourite RPG books. It’s such a wild singularity that I am sort of surprised that it’s getting a new version, but I will buy it nonetheless with gusto.
Anyway
I’ve been doing some research for a thing. I found my head empty and decided to fill it up with things to be processed and turned back into ideas. One of the things I irregularly dig up are these comedy D&D spells, published long ago in a copy of Dragon magazine. One of the few benefits of being an older hoarder is that I can dig through these and other articles from the ancient times, seeking inspiration and other gold.
While I have only once deployed any of these in a D&D campaign (yes, it was Speak With Mud) some ideas from this era have lodged with me, and I have used them for great dramatic effect over the years. I often think about the D&D spells, and how they are a little creative essay in themselves, with references to rules, eacg effectively doing their own thing. And now that I think about it, I would propose that spells are at their most interesting at levels 5-7, because they have to be fairly powerful, but also come with very clear and hard limitations, so that they don’t impinge too much on the world changing realms of levels 8-9. Sorry to talk D&D spells, it’s just how things get around here sometimes.
So yeah, prising these old clips out of the photo archive and reminded how, because Dragon only covered TSR games, but sold advertising to the rest of the industry, I would most often learn about other games solely via the adverts in there. This era was, perhaps, the one during which adverts were most effective on me, having sold most of the Palladium line and filling my teenage years with Rifts.
But there were plenty of ads that remain a mystery to (almost) this day. Let’s have a look at this one.
Now, these days you could just look up on the internet what TORG is, and probably order it, too. But as a twelve year old kid I did not have access to such things. I just had this advert’s imagery and copy. Look at that illustration! Some dude calling lightning down onto an unsafe looking bridge leading into a cloud furnace? The Possibility Wars! I only found out what TORG was recently, and now I am not sure whether the unknowing was actually better.
Speaking of which, this ad was the coolest thing you, I, or anyone could imagine in 1990. I had no idea what any of it meant. RENEGADE LEGION. That sounds amazing on its own. But then it had that readout of the spaceship! “Yield: UNKNOWN - Roughly equal to 150 hell rounds.” 150 hell rounds! That was a lot of hell rounds, I knew.
“A 16 page book of forms.”
Okay, that sounded a little less exciting, I admit, but the rest of it was pretty strong.
In retrospect I could have ordered this from the games shop in Canterbury instead of just expecting to find it one day, like really cool treasure. Reader, I never did.
Then there was this.
Crime! Needless to say, I really wanted to play this. My mum, though, suspected it was, somehow, related to actual crime. By signing up to this there was no way I wasn’t going to become a gangster forever, in the crime pits. In Blackpool.
As time went on it became clear that I was never going to be allowed to mail off anything to anywhere. Which is a shame, because some of the small ads for play-by-mail stuff really promised something special.
Lead your planet’s inhabitants! (CorGaSyl?)
Become a starship captain!
Uh.
Maybe not Xenophobe.
Nevermind, twelve year old me. Multiplayer computer games are coming! You will be able to remotely interact with humans without exchanging a postal address. In fact, unknown to me at the time, it turns they were already here. I remember not understanding this ad at the time.
And now… is this… is this an ad for a free-to-play sniper game on CompuServe in 1989?! Wow.
‘Endure’ doesn’t seem like a word you should include in your ad.
Also: “Just call 800-848-8199, ask for Representative 94 and request a free introductory membership…”
I never did call Representative 94 to find out what this was about. Beginning to wonder whether they are still there, now. Waiting. In an abandoned call facility, under a flickering strip light. Representative 94 is waiting for your call…
Not sure what this was about, either.
Anyway.
More soon!
x