TEETH: DIE, BLOOD COTILLION PLAYTEST
Polyhedral teeth.
Hello, you.
Welcome again to the TEETH newsletter, in which we discuss our pen and paper tabletop hobbies and creations, with a view to somehow ruling the world through the agitation of polyhedral dice. It’s a way to pass the time.
In this week’s letter we write to you, beloved reader, about the games we played in the past year, about the game we played this past Monday, and the games we wish to play in the future.
But first, links!
LINKS
A Kickstarter has launched! ORBITAL BLUES is about Sad Space Cowboys and comes with an actual cassette tape like we used to record the radio on when we were kids. One suspects our first-time-around knowledge of tapes makes them a less attractive prospect than this retro package intimates, but ah well, nevertheless…
A Kickstarter is coming! This is going to be good. We really like the look of COURT OF BLADES because it’s about courtly intrigue from folks well versed in the Forged In The Dark ruleset. Intrigue clocks! They even reference the best bits of social murderin’ from Game Of Thrones, and those were the best bits of the TV show we’re already beginning to forget about.
Look at this ceiling-propagated wargaming table! Jesus Christ.
I can’t see myself using this, but at the same time I can see it doing extremely well among those who might: Talespire is a tabletop RPG engine for your PC which is both nostalgic and futuristic at the same time. In Early Access on the Steam.
This last bit isn’t really a link at all, but it is a good fact: at its height the British Empire was almost exactly twice as large as the surface area of Pluto (17.8 million sq km). Research is, as ever, going splendidly.
LAST YEAR TO DIE
Look, we said no more Kieron Gillen links last time, but there is one more reason to mention his name, which is that last year, as part of our quarantine-rpg pastimer The Catfail Club, he ran his RPG-of-the-comicbook, DIE. It’s quite good.
I am fascinated to reach a point where I run it myself because, of course, having something GM’d for you by its creator (and that being someone you know) is clearly a different experience of taking the thing out into the wild, but it was still a thing.
DIE, as you probably know, is a comic book about people getting sucked into the world of their fantasy RPG, with horrid consequences. It made a perfect sort of sense for Gillen to continue the thing out the other side with a TTRPG based on the comic. He ran a one-shot for myself, Gardiner, and Hewitt, and it was the first time I have glimpsed inside the machine, so to speak.
Perhaps what’s most interesting to me about DIE is the methodology of deliberate, almost theatrical, playfulness within traditional frameworks. Each class gets one of the Platonic polyhedral dice, and that is related directly to their special abilities. The character classes are things like The Neo, who is literally powered by the acquisition of gold, or The Emotion Knight, whose powers derive from a type and intensity of a specific emotion, and which uses a colour wheel of emotional progression to guide you through the tiers of your feelings.
There’s a sort of iconic separation of powers here: each of the character classes DIE sits alone in a web of their own skills and function, in a way that feels like both commentary and old school game design. The comic is, of course, intended as a sort of dark satire on RPGs - a Dungeons & Dragons cartoon in which everyone does bad things - and as such conjures both tropes we would recognise in the oldest of old school fantasy RPGs, but is also intended to play, Loki-like, with the meta-tropes of the people who play RPGs, why they play them, and the bad things they do in the real world. The GM gets to do some interesting stuff with this, creating the emotional relationship network of the TTRPG players you are playing as to underpin the material of the campaign. Meta, yes.
We finished the session having murdered our insane schoolfriend, and then by actually watching a YouTube video of a man in a porkpie hat singing/playing U2’s One on a Ukulele. I feel like we got off lightly, all things considered.
If that sounds like your kind of a good time, then keep an eye on DIE’s open beta, which I have it on good authority will be entering a new and more approachable phase of development later this year.
BLOOD COTILLION
Blood Cotillion is coming next from us. And here’s a taste:
We ran the first proper playtest this week, and I feel like it went rather well. Poisonings, things and people set on fire, and more sixes rolled than can be healthy for any kind of playtest. Who knows what could have happened if the dice hadn’t been quite so favourable?
The scenario is somewhat more challenging to GM than our first outing, NIGHT OF THE HOGMEN, but the package is also rather more diverse, with two maps, some interestingly experimental rules, an alarming cast of characters, and even some cheat sheets to help things along.
What’s best about Blood Cotillion I can’t possibly spoil here in the newsletter, but what’s second best is that it really begins to capture the “Jane Austen’s S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” or “Blackadder vs The Witcher” that we’ve really been going for in the development of our full RPG. The world of TEETH, explicitly set in the King’s year 1775, aims to capture what is most alluring and most rotten about that age, while also providing an immense palette for players to draw upon as they become stately, villainous, or heroic monster hunters in the past of England’s disturbing heyday.
Wigs, ball gowns, hyper-violence, and the occult. It’s a mixture we know you’re going to enjoy.
Coming soon, anyway.
And, while we’re on the topic of the TEETH book (which I will childishly refer to as Big Teeth) we’ll soon be putting up a Coming Soon for the Kickstarter of that. A rather exciting milestone.
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Love you! x