Sentimental Value In Imaginary Objects

Don't Change Color, Kitty

You are reading the TEETH newsletter by Jim Rossignol and Marsh Davies. Your narrator this week is me, Jim Rossignol.

TEETH is a tabletop RPG series by those same two people, and this newsletter is about the process of producing those games, our experiences with other tabletop things, and also a document of our esoteric findings and ephemeral interests as we plunge, trailing glowing debris like falling stars, through the gassy layers of Planet TTRPG.

Hello, you.

Real life has weighed heavily on your TEETH authors this week. Nothing particularly bad beyond the usual global and local anxieties, but nevertheless a lot of life to deal with. Like being crushed beneath a tonne of feathers (imperial).

Nevertheless, the quest continues, and we’ve got another interview with an indie RPG superstar lined up (next week, probably) as well as begun waxing on some issues that have influenced the development of the TEETH games, which you can read below.

Also: DELIGHT! The two published TEETH games, Night Of The Hogmen and Blood Cotillion, were featured this week in Jon Harper’s own itch.io round up of Forged In The Dark games, much to our socially distanced high-fives. Thanks to Mr Harper for that.

But now: links!

LINKS!

• Links are going to be heavy with Forged In The Dark stuff this week, since loads of it has come to our attention. I mean, this isn’t strictly speaking a Forged In The Dark newsletter, but please don’t sue us for really making a big deal of it. And that’s my clever segue to SILKS, which is a Blades In The Dark crew playbook for a bunch of dodgy lawyers. “It lets you play out courtroom dramas in the corrupt legal system of the haunted, crime-infested city of Doskvol, using the game's flashback mechanics to tell compelling stories of legal skullduggery.” I am genuinely considering running a campaign where we play as two different crews: these bewigged lads, and a bunch of gnarly thieves that they are defending. Now wouldn’t *that* be a thing? Actually, I feel it has to happen.

• There’s a fantastic Forged In The Dark bundle up on itch.io, and it’s packed with keen invention and wild implementations. Take for instance Space Train Space Heist, a GM-less FiTD game in which you perform sparkly galactic space heists upon, yes, a space train. Or Slugblaster Turbo, in which “you play a crew of teenage hoverboarders trying to make a name for yourselves in the world of slugblasting.” I mean, it’s in the name.  The bundle also includes a sweet downtime module for Blades In The Dark, which I was going to pick up anyway. A bargain!

• I had somehow previously missed Home Rennovation Of Great And Terrible Power, and now that I have found it I can say it covers a number of subjects close to my 40-something heart: Yes, of course, Forged In The Dark, tryptophobia, and home rennovation. Honestly take a look.

• I rather liked this Goblin Generator. It struck me that it might go rather well with Grant Howitt’s Goblin Quest. I should like to play a game about goblins. Also, speaking of Mr Howitt, his ascending star has been noted by games site Polygon, with this interview. (Lots of rising and falling of celestial bodies in this newsletter. It’s a theme.)

• Very much not Forged In the Dark, but nevertheless fascinating is the release of The Halls of Arden Vul, a gigantic (perhaps the most gigantic) dungeon crawl supplement. The stats alone are formidable: with thirty-three (count ‘em!) maps, and 2,162 encounters, it claims to be “the most ambitious megadungeon ever created, with over 1,100 Pages of Incredible Adventure”. I cannot attest for the incredibleness, but ambition speaks for itself.

• Research this week, thanks to Marsh, comes from the Wikipedia page on Long-time nuclear waste warning messages, specifically this bit: “French author Françoise Bastide and Italian semiotician Paolo Fabbri proposed that domestic cats be genetically engineered to change color in the presence of dangerous levels of radiation. The significance of these "radiation cats" or "ray cats" would be reinforced through fairy tales and myths, the story being that one should move away from sites where such creatures are encountered, or where domesticated cats begin to exhibit such behaviour.In 2014, musician Emperor X wrote such a song called "Don't Change Color, Kitty", designed to be "so catchy and annoying that it might be handed down from generation to generation over a span of 10,000 years".”

IDLE CHAT (PART I)

In which we get honest about tabletop experiences.

JR: Marsh, we’ve played a couple of campaigns together now, the first one 4e D&D, and then Blades In The Dark a few years after that. What was your experience of those different campaigns? How do you feel like they compared as different games run by the same GM?

MD: That D&D campaign was my first foray back into TTRPGs after many years and it felt great to be in familiar fantasy territory again. The campaign built to epic, world-changing events, as our party roamed vast landscapes, got into scrapes, looted ancient treasures, and betrayed gods. And that's expected, right? That's what you go to D&D for. Blades in the Dark is utterly different: the events are of a smaller scale—you're just a bunch of crooks trapped in a horrible city—but the sense of importance is somehow higher for being intimate. Similarly, it's odd that much more of the setting, and who you are as a party, is prescribed in Blades and yet the path ahead of you feels like it could go anywhere. 

Obviously clever GMs can tell lots of stories with D&D, but do you think the power trajectory that sits at its heart ultimately dictates the dramatic arc of a campaign? Is that strength or weakness?

JR: I was saying to a friend the other day that, actually, as a youth, I would often start new D&D campaigns just because the players had levelled too much, and I felt it was getting away from the gritty low level game that I liked so much. Two of our campaigns in my school years lasted many months, one a straight up Forgotten Realms campaign, the other a Spelljammer campaign, and in both situations the players had become wildly formidable, with a tonne of magic weapons and abilities (and even a modified insectile spaceship in Spelljammer) and I remember being annoyed by those and not wanting to run campaigns like that again. It has stuck with me, I think. But it’s also understandable: players want long-running campaigns because they are attached to the characters they’ve created, and also the loot/power ladder of D&D is very comprehensible. You can see there’s shiny stuff to get, and so that’s where you are going. The endgame of Blades, basically to be able to afford to retire unscathed, is not particularly glamorous by comparison: and it certainly sets a very different tone.

To answer your question: I think it’s D&D’s main strength, actually. People love seeing numbers going up, and in a combat game the core principle of being and to swat something that was a danger to you earlier in the campaign is a very basic pay off that people love. But that strength is - in an area that dangerously invites Tarkvosky-referencing philosophy - a rigidity. D&D is less flexible than Blades - and that’s where the sense of the “it could go anywhere” comes from - precisely because of all that stuff. Blades builds in the possibility space and the ambiguity. Every dice roll is a discussion about what it means. Relatedly, I was following a twitter discussion about “fudging” dice rolls or encounters in D&D to make a story work, and realised I’d never been tempted to do that (i rarely dared anyway) since we stopped playing D&D.

That said, I think we miss something in our Forged In The Dark games when we can’t really get a new magic vest, or special sword. (I sort of want to play Numenera with our group so that we can just become about collecting some of the crazy shit in those manuals. That’s a big part of the appeal of GMing some RPGs, I think: deploying all the stuff you purchased in those lavish books.) Don’t you sometimes just wish you were collecting unearthly doodads that do something weird?

MD: It's true. I love me a pair of magic pauldrons. The idea of the Legendary Item probably serves some deep anthropological yearning, doesn't it? You don't get to have a Wikipedia page this size without some deep anthropological yearning. I definitely get a potent monkey-brain thrill from the idea of being bestowed (or unearthing, or simply stealing) a Legendary Item, but I almost feel like that is a separate phenomena from the advancement up the power-curve. For me, the allure is not in the stats going up, but in the way the item changes or evokes the character wielding it. Bilbo's Sting is a much better Legendary Item for having the property of glowing when goblins are near. Imagine if it just made him do stabbing +10 better. Shite.

I think that's why I like Numenera so much: the devices in question don't buff you, they do something orthogonal to power, orthogonal to any discernible purpose, even: they're a button that makes everything wooden float for four seconds; or a disc that simply gets very, very hot when you say the word "Jennifer". They're fun in themselves, but the real pleasure comes in figuring out how your character would understand or exploit them.

In a way, that's how I've approached the special abilities in our one-shots, Night of the Hogmen and Blood Cotillion (and the mutations that befall the hapless peasants of the upcoming Stranger & Stranger). We don't use loot in the same way as D&D, but in the special abilities, I think there is space for the kind of characterful, situational, improvisational expression that the best loot invites.

Videogames have done a great (and/or terrible) job of isolating and enhancing the addictive properties of acquiring empowering loot - how do you think that's impacted TTRPGs, or the way you as a player and GM perceive loot?

JR: Yeah. There’s a link. And the diagnosis you make for videogames is a good one: the limitations of code mean that +10 to stabbing is very much the thing, which I feel entrenches the mutual feedback loot between stat-driven RPGs and the video game realm. That, in turn, changes how players think about the game. I have played D&D with groups who treated like a boardgame; trying to build the strongest deck, min-maxing so they can one-shot the terrasque. Giving magic (or any) items narrative purpose is therefore more interesting to me, because it ends up being about the relationship between the player character and use of the object. I have loved, LOVED seeing what people do with the random items in the TEETH games, and it does make me want to write a big tome full of magic objects that simply have stories and properties (and personalities) attached them, without worrying about the stats. I am sure there’s an entire game in just that.

Also, I think there’s something significant here in player attachment. We’ve talked before about how attached people can get to characters, but if they can have attachment to objects - sentimental value in imaginary objects - then there’s even more value to be had from this stuff in narrative.

Have you ever been emotionally attached to an imaginary object, Marsh?

…

(His answer in Part 2.)

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More soon! <3 x