TEETH Kickstarter Coming In April! Plus: TEETH Interactive Fiction

Lured into Notre Dame cathedral, where they were slain with rocks.

Behold! BEHOLD!

The TEETH Kickstarter looms! You can register interest and be notified of the precise moment of launch by signing up on this page.

As a very special treat, we’re doing an early reveal of the Kickstarter pitch video for you, our beloved newsletter readers:

Please do sign up and share the page.

And there’s more! (Below.)

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You are reading the TEETH newsletter, written and compiled by the notorious fabulist Jim Rossignol and erudite fantasist 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!

1. A Taste Of Teeth: An Interactive Fiction

2. Links!

3. Please Be Excited For The TEETH Kickstarter

He seems nice.

Those of you follow us on itch.io may have noticed a little experimental sojourn from Marsh, who has created an interactive fiction of the starting locations of the TEETH campaign, freely playable in your browser. It mirrors our suggested starting adventure within the setting, and comes with all the usual conceits.

As Marsh disclaims in his blurb, this is just him learning the Inky scripting tool, and as such isn’t a fully-fledged attempt, but is nevertheless a fun and colourful introduction to the world we have been build, at tremendous length, in the 320-page book which we will be Kickstarting in April.

Links!

• Thing Of The Week (it’s been a long week, hasn’t it?) is without doubt A Collection Of Improving Exercises, which Marsh and I have been marvelling over. Author Tim Hutchings’ - who you might have taken note of via the tremendous and acclaimed journaling game Thousand Year Old Vampire - says: “It is just a perspective drawing manual. No really.” And that is what it is. But it is also, of course, a little more than that, too. Go take a look. I insist.

• Hellpiecers: Harrowing Tactical Action. “In HELLPIERCERS, you and 2-5 of your closest friends play as divine humanity clad in the corpses of angels storming the gates of hell.” Hell yeah.

• This (via Gillen) is absolutely incredible. It’s 800 pages of highly inventive generative space RPG. There’s so much of it! Well worth $10.

• A tale (almost) as old as tabletop boardgames: “In January 1977, the French Situationist Guy Debord founded the company "Strategic and Historical Games." This company had an immediate goal: to produce the "Kriegspiel," a "game of war" that Debord had already designed in his head years before… "The surprises of this Kriegspiel seem to be inexhaustible," he confessed later in his book Panegyric. "I fear it could be the only one of my works that anyone will dare to recognize as having some value.”" Oh mate.

• S.T.A.L.K.E.R., much beloved of this newsletter’s founders, is getting a boardgame.

• Appropos of nothing at all: the tagline on the Ravenloft module Castles Forlorn, “Deluxe Adventure Set for Characters Levels 4 to 6”, is the best tagline a D&D module can have, because those levels are the optimum chapter of that game’s progression. The module itself - which was one I desired but never obtained during the AD&D 2nd Ed era - featured a castle which behaved a bit like the Dishonored 2 time-travel level, A Crack In The Slab, with the player characters shifting between three different time periods at the castle as they adventured, with prompts and advice for GMs handling paradoxes and time-shifting consequences. Ripe for a reboot, I would say.

• Research this week was into Brotherhood Of The Wolf, which inevitably led me to the Beast of Gévaudan, upon which the movie is based (and within that to a story in which “an unrelated series of attacks occurred near the commune of Soissons, northeast of Paris, when an individual wolf killed at least four people over a period of two days before being tracked and killed by a man armed with a pitchfork.”) Let’s have the movie of that guy! He deserves to be remembered. Horrifically, Wikipedia also keeps a list of wolf attacks, which led me to the tale of Courtaud, a wolf which led a pack of forty others to hunt people within Paris itself during the Hundred Years War, until the pack were reportedly lured into Notre Dame cathedral, where they were slain with rocks, spears, and arrows. It really doesn’t get much more medieval than that.

• Comrade Gardiner adds to the reading pile last-minute by linking us to this account of 17th century blood transfusions: “Beginning in the spring of 1667, public opinion in Paris was rocked by a remarkable affair involving domesticated animals: the first practical experiments to transfuse animal blood into humans for therapeutic purposes. The experiments that came to be known as the “Transfusion Affair” were shrouded in the competing claims of a highly public controversy in which consensus and truth, alongside the animal subjects themselves, were the first victims.”

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Dearest Newsletter Persons, Please Be Excited And Anticipatory For The TEETH Kickstarter

The journey that Marsh and I began some three years ago is reaching its culmination in the Kickstarter for the book which we will launch in April. We are both positively vibrating with expectation.

In case you somehow missed, it you can sign up for a notification on launch over here.

The book - all 320 pages of it - has been laid out and illustrated single-handedly by Marsh, and he has put in just an astonishing amount of his talent and vision for the project. The document itself I am enormously pleased it: it’s funny, the design works encouragingly well and people have had a riot during playtesting. And despite all the excruciation we went through trying to rework things this way and that and all the grinding thinky-face with had to do to bend an existing ruleset to our own ends, it feels amazing to have achieved this much with so much distinction.

I’m not sure there’s really anything else like it in tone or setting, although it is very traditionally tropey - monster hunting! - and leans on a proven system that we love for the mechanics, that of Forged In The Dark, which runs our beloved Blades In The Dark, by Jon Harper. It is, as if often the way with these things, a child of our obsessions, and a hymn to the things that have significance to us.

For Marsh and I it has been an experience unlike the others we’ve collected over the years: we’ve both worked on magazines, books, websites and videogames for many years, but the TTRPG exists in a space of its own, with its own challenges (getting a group to playtest your new tabletop RPG is quite different to getting someone to read a draft of your latest script or article!) and with an astonishing array of abstract problems and practical concerns to consider and to chew upon.

Like all game design, TTRPG design is fascinating to me because of the numerous moving parts involved, and all the more rewarding for its immediacy and social currency. More than that, though, TEETH is one off the bucket list for me, since I had longed to write RPGs since I first started to run games as a kid back in 1989, and I have finally - thanks to Marsh’s astonishing ability, dedication, and patience - been able to reach that goal.

I hope you’ll all support us with when the Kickstarter unveils its offerings in April, but whatever happens, it’s been a privilege to return to the subject of the eerie English countryside and, once again, to carve a game out of it.

thanks,

-Jim

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More soon! x