TEETH: An interview with Chris Bissette, creator of The Wretched (Plus the usual stuff)

The end of june consists in a Strange couple of weeks.

Hello, you.

This week we have a toothsome banquet for you! The main course of this is the first of our interviews with creators in the indie TTRPG world. Subject Zero is Chris Bissette, a wildly creative writer and designer whose work we’ve been admiring for some time. Please enjoy Jim’s chat with him below.

We’ve also been testing the next TEETH standalone, Stranger & Stranger, which it turns out is more like a mini-campaign than the previous games, stretching easily over a number of sessions. Needless to type, that has taken a little more playtesting than the previous iterations to straighten out our typos and to balance the dice. I do, however, think it contains some of our best work, including rules for mutations and corruption, as well as some excellent fantasy cartography (fantasy in  that it’s not a real place, but obviously still set in 18th century England). 

Yes, it really is a British landscape for you.

Links!

LINKS

• Link of the week is definitely Max FitzGerald’s glorious Turnip28, which has released its own Swollen Magglet, a zine about the world of Turnip28. Which is what? Well, it’s a 28mm tabletop combat game based around a horrible root. A turnip that has encompassed the land, clogged up everything, and inspired bizarre religious orders to form regiments and make war. The magglet is filled with lore and art, and even goes into detail about creating your regiment (converted from existing minis, largely, although there are some 3D printed elements going on). I particularly like the conversions and the root vegetable heraldry.

• Swellbloom Kids is “based on the various figures of Philippine folklore. Originally conceived as an attempt to answer the question, "What if astrology as we know it today was based on Philippine beliefs?""

• Icarus Games are creating SIDEQUEST, a monthly RPG magazine.

• Vincent Baker, of lumpley games, posted a Q&A about making games with Apocalypse World, and there’s some really very interesting answers in there. (If you’re into that sort of thing.)

• Red Carnations on a Black Grave “is a freeform roleplaying game for 4-6 players that brings to life the 72 tumultuous days of the Paris Commune.” 

• We’ve been enjoying the discussion on the RPGTalk Discord of late, and so it makes all kinds of sense that we should link to Blood And Sacrilege, their vampire Forged In The Dark offering.

• Research this week unearthed 18th century soldier, physicist, and inventor Benjamin Thompson. Why is he notable? Well, he was a fantastic character in the history of science: inventing one of the first standards of luminous intensity, designing warships, and becoming a Count Of The Holy Roman Empire. But more than that, as an American scientist fighting for the George III, he is a character whose semblance could very make its way into TEETH. And what greater legacy could there be than that?

INTERVIEW: CHRIS BISSETTE

Chris’s work (as Loot The Room) is as diverse as it is prolific, including vaunted journaling horror with jenga and musical backing, THE WRETCHED, through 5e horror campaigns that look right up our street, to his recent TREASURES OF THE TROLL KING module for Scandinavian post-apocalyptic sludge-crawler MÖRK BORG (that’s ‘Dark Castle’ in Swedish, translation fans!), all the way to THE HUNTED, a folk horror RPG inspired by Forged In The Dark rules (and one which Monday Night Dice Club will be lining up for itself in the near future…)

JR: Are you playing TTRPGs with a regular group right now? If so, what are you playing and why? If not, well, that's okay too.

CB: I am! I have a regular Friday game of Mothership, where we've been playing through Gradient Descent by Luke Gearing. This is the same group I had a long-running Blades In The Dark campaign with. When we finished the Blades game we wanted to try something completely different and none of us had played Mothership yet, so we decided to give it a shot. It's been a lot of fun so far.

JR: That sounds remarkably similar to us, as Teeth readers will recognise. Can you talk a bit about your journey as a RPG writer? When did you know that was what you were going to do? Can you talk about any landmark moments or influences you look back on and know were important?

CB: It's been a long and winding one, and it's been something I've come back to time and time again over the years. I started playing RPGs in the Nineties as a kid and it didn't take long for me to start submitting things to Dragon magazine (though I never sold anything). I forgot about RPG writing for years and focused on fiction instead, before picking it back up in my late teens and early twenties when I used to make zines that I'd try and sell outside conventions in the UK. Never inside, because I couldn't actually afford to go to them - I'd just hang around on the street looking shifty and trying to sell my dodgy books. Then I forgot about games again for the best part of a decade - again focusing on fiction - and it wasn't until my early thirties and the resurgence of popularity that Fifth Edition brought with it that I finally came back to games writing. I launched my blog Loot The Room in 2016 as a hobby and was nominated for an ENnie within a few months of starting and I took that as a sign that maybe I should stick with it this time! That seems to be going well, though it's only in the past year that I've started to think seriously about this being my sole career after the success of The Wretched and Treasures Of The Troll King coming very shortly after one another.

JR: As a follow up to this: what are the games have you encountered in the past few years that have had most influence on you, creatively? Why were they important?

CB: The biggest one was probably Avery Alder's The Quiet Year along with Mark Diaz Truman's reimagining of it, The Deep Forest. I come from a very traditional background - D&D, Advanced Fighting Fantasy, games that feature a group of players doing violence in opposition to a world that's controlled by a sole other player - and these games completely blew apart my idea of what a roleplaying game can look like, both in terms of how they're played and also the kinds of stories they can tell and the themes they can interrogate. Mechanically this was also the first time I'd seen gameplay driven through card prompts, and that was a direct influence on The Wretched. These were definitely my gateway to indie games and I wouldn't be doing the work I do now without having found them. 

JR: My ignorance of journaling games means I don't know if they have been popularised to some degree by the solitary conditions of the pandemic, but they certainly have my attention now. Can you talk a bit about how these solo games are important to you?

CB: I get asked this question a lot - unsurprisingly - and it's interesting because I didn't actually know that solo games were important to me until I started answering this! When I wrote The Wretched I didn't set out to write a solo game specifically, it just so happened that that was what came out (presumably because it was right at the start of lockdown and I knew I wasn't going to be able to play anything I wrote with other people). But in thinking about it, solo games have always been with me. I mentioned earlier that I got my start in games with D&D and Advanced Fighting Fantasy, but the solo Fighting Fantasy gamebooks (and especially the Sorcery! series) were a huge part of my childhood. Where I was introduced to traditional games by my family, I discovered Fighting Fantasy myself - literally, I found a copy of a gamebook in a bin near my old school, and spent the rest of the day playing it. It's always been a vague goal of mine to write a Fighting Fantasy style solo gamebook and I've dabbled in interactive fiction a lot at degree and postgraduate level, so in hindsight it seems very natural that I'd also be drawn towards journaling games as a designer. I think it also helps that my formal education is in creative writing, and a lot of journaling games take the form of very directed writing prompts. They represent a blending of the two areas I work in in a way that feels very natural to me.

Plus, they're just a lot of fun to play!

JR: I would be really interested to learn a bit about how The Wretched and the SRD came about? How do you feel about the response to it?

CB: The response to The Wretched still completely blows my mind. I think it was definitely one of those "right place at the right time" situations and I continue to be very grateful for that. It's no exaggeration to say that the response to this game has changed my life.

The SRD - and, consequently, the games that have come out of it - wouldn't exist without Matt Sanders. Matt is a good friend and an excellent designer who I've worked with on and off for years. We regularly bounce ideas off one another and share work-in-progress stuff, and I was talking to him the whole time I was writing The Wretched. When he saw the final thing he asked me how I'd feel about him writing a game that used the same system, because he had something he'd been working on for a while that he thought would be well suited to it, and I said "yes, absolutely, do whatever you want". In the process of writing his game The Sealed Library he made notes for himself about how the system worked, and that just sort of naturally flowed into the SRD. When you download the SRD you may note that it's Matt who hosts it, and that's because it's his work - I just put my name on it and gave it the seal of approval. I often get the credit for it because I wrote The Wretched itself but it was Matt who put the SRD together and who convinced me that doing the original Wretched game jam was a good idea, and I absolutely do not believe the game would have been as successful as it has been without his support.

JR: You mention music as inspiration for your work, which feels like a surprisingly rare thing in game writing? Can you talk at all about how music connects to your written work? Can you describe how it influences your output?

CB: Music has been as big a part of my life as writing or games are. Since I was a kid the only "jobs" I've ever actually wanted were writer or musician, and I've stubbornly pursued both of them despite always being told they're not realistic career goals. When I came back to game writing, streaming was becoming a really popular thing and I noticed that lots of streams used background music to set the mood for their shows and that people were starting to want music for their home games, too. I realised that this would be an opportunity to combine music with my writing and so I started making small pieces of ambient music to release with the maps and encounters I was writing for my blog.

At the same time, the initial inspiration for The Wretched was watching John Carpenter's The Thing and saying to myself "I want to write a game that makes you feel the same way a John Carpenter soundtrack makes you feel". It seemed silly to write that game and not also write a soundtrack to go with it, so I did that and I realised that I just really like making music to go with my games, so I've attempted to keep doing it. 

JR: Can you talk a bit about your process for writing modules for existing game systems? How did that apply to your recent work on Treasures Of The Troll King?

CB: I'm not sure that I have a process per se. With modules specifically I try to focus on them being usable at the table with very minimal prep on the part of the GM. Part of that process involves looking at lots of other modules for that system and trying to ensure I follow the standard style for whichever game I'm writing for. For example, I don't particularly like the way Fifth Edition modules are presented but if I'm writing one, I follow that format anyway because I assume that the people using my module are going to expect things to look a certain way. Asking them to use something that looks like nothing they're used to doesn't exactly increase usability! Luckily with Treasures Of The Troll King, the beginner adventure for Mörk Borg in the core rulebook is one of my favourite examples of adventure layout, and so it was a joy to mimic that.

JR: Do you think Kickstarter being a, if not *the*, key platform for RPG publishing right now skews what is created in some way?

CB: That's hard to say really. I can only really speak for myself, but my attitude is that I'm just going to make the things I want to make regardless of what's 'popular' or seems to be 'trending' on Kickstarter. I imagine it can be tempting to look at how well things for Mork Borg and 5e fund and think "I'll just make that", but there's definitely space on Kickstarter for less obvious things to do well. Just looking at my own work - The Wretched did astonishingly well for a tiny little indie game using its own system, and d36 was a very weird proposition that still funded nicely (even if it didn't quite live up to everything I wanted to do with it).

JR: While we're talking about huge gravitational masses in space, I want to ask about the Dragon game: what does its influence on TTRPGs mean to you personally? A regular topic that comes up when I talk to writers is how D&D being most people's first game alters perceptions of TTRPGs as a thing - do you think that's fair? Does it matter?

CB: I honestly think it matters a lot. I bang the "play other games" drum regularly, and the things I hear regularly from people are a) I don't have time to learn other games and b) I don't have the money to invest in other games. That's definitely an expectation that comes from D&D - and the other trad games that follow the "3 big core rulebooks that are hundreds of pages each" model - being their introduction to the hobby. 

When you've got a monolith in the space branding itself as "the world's greatest roleplaying game", that inevitably has an effect on the way people perceive other games. Everything gets looked at through a lens of D&D - and it's often found wanting, because people expect the same level of production values, support, and community that comes from Hasbro investing millions of dollars into their IP. Indie games can't compete with that - and largely we don't want to, but we're forced to time and time again because every conversation about RPGs always inevitably comes back to the dragon game. Even between designers who explicitly don't want to talk to each other about Hasbro, we end up coming back to it anyway - because, like you said, it's a huge gravitational mass in the space and it's frankly unavoiable.

JR: I would really like it if you'd share a couple of recommendations, both from your own work and from work you admire. What should our readers be looking at? What do you want to see more groups running?

CB: I'm going to start by plugging my own game The Hunted, because I'm really proud of it and I don't think many people have played it. It takes a lot of what I love about Forged In the Dark and Powered By The Apocalypse games - including my favourite piece of PbtA tech, the "Tell A Story" move from Escape From Dino Island - and rolls it together into a system for telling folk horror stories like The Blair Witch Project and The Ritual. It was one of those rare projects where I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to achieve and - I think - absolutely nailed it, and I'd love to see more people play it.

As far as other games go, there are loads I could recommend! Some of the most exciting work in tabletop right now is coming out of the RPGSEA scene. Navathem's End by Sinta Posadas and Pam Punzalan isn't released yet - it was part of the Our Shores Kickstarter earlier this year and will be releasing in late 2021 - but I've seen and played early versions of it and it's fantastic. It's a PbtA game about trying to prevent a coming apocalypse, and it does some really clever things with the PbtA framework that I've never seen before. It's also packed full of beautiful art and is gorgeously written, and people should definitely keep an eye out for it when it releases.

I'm also a big, big fan of Brindlewood Bay by Jason Cordova. You play a group of elderly ladies in a small New England town. By day you live the cosy life of a retiree and have a book club with your friends, and by night you solve murder mysteries and slowly become embroiled in a dark, cosmic horror-laced conspiracy. It's a joy to play, I've written a few things for it myself, and I think everybody should be playing it.

JR: I feel that the indie TTRPG space is about the most interesting place in game design right now, and I hope that some of the trends we are seeing in individual expression and creativity are able to go much further. What are your hopes for scene? 

CB: I agree with you! We're seeing an explosion right now in the popularity of TTRPGs as both a medium for artistic expression and a hobby for gamers, and that's coming alongside a lot of barriers being lowered in terms of who can actually create art and get their work in front of audiences. Some of the most exciting work is coming from the RPGSEA scene and also the South American RPGLATAM scene, and if those creators had the same resources as your average white American man they'd absolutely be dominating the industry right now. So much incredible work is happening right now, not just in terms of visuals and aesthetic - though creators in both those scenes continue to blow everybody else out of the water in that regard - but also in terms of the stories that are being told and the new ways people are finding to tell them.

If I have one hope for the scene it's simply for it to continue to grow, and to continue to expand to include and support more people who have traditionally been kept out of RPG creation. Exposure to more and varied voices and experiences is good for everyone. It leads to healthier, safer spaces, and it leads to better and more interesting work. I sincerely hope it continues.

JR: Thanks for your time.

—

More soon! x