TEETH: The 18th Century Of Teeth

It's not pretty.

Hello, you.

And there are now hundreds of you along for this coach-ride into the blighted moorland of our imagination. Welcome, all!

I am sure you know what you are getting yourselves into, but for the lonely wanderers I will explain again that this is a newsletter about tabletop role-playing games, of both digital and pen and paper flavours. We report on our own creations, as well as discussing those of our many talented peers. We talk about the games we’ve played, link to games we’re excited about playing, and share our insights, such as they are, on the dicey medium we’ve decided to work in. We are Jim Rossignol and Marsh Davies, and we are the proprietors of TEETH: A ROLEPLAYING GAME.

This week Marsh talks a little about our decision to set our RPG in 18th century England. But first: links.

LINKS!

• If ‘Everest Pipkin’ is Everest Pipkin’s real name, then what a fabulous name that is, for a real name. Or even an adopted nom de plume. Well done. Everest Pipkin is more than just a name however, having created a number of things including The Ground Itself. This collaborative story-telling game gets us right in the feels as it encourages us to consider psychogeography, personal nostalgia, and deep history in a single game. The game explains: “The Ground Itself unfolds over radically disparate time periods that may range from 4 days to 18,000 years. By casting wildly into time, it considers how places both change and remember themselves. Fundamentally, The Ground Itself is about the echoes and traces we leave for others after we are gone.”

• The Green Knight movie has its own RPG. Oh my goodness we are interested in this. Marsh is, after all, literally a qualified Arthurologist. In fact, he is not qualified for anything else! And facts are super-true.

• We have only recently been made aware of the Conan: The Tower of the Elephant game, which is Quite The Thing. An actual tower! Now you are aware of it, too.

• Research this week led to Timothy Dexter, an 18th century merchant and businessman renowned for his “uncommon good fortune”. “Because he was largely uneducated, his business sense was considered peculiar. He was advised to send bed warmers—used to heat beds in the cold New England winters—for resale in the West Indies, a tropical area. This advice was a deliberate ploy by rivals to bankrupt him. His ship's captain sold them as ladles to the local molasses industry and made a handsome profit.”

  More importantly, perhaps, he “hoarded whale bones by mistake,” only to win again “selling them profitably as corset stays.” No-one rolled as many unskilled double sixes as Mr Dexter.

  He also had a sweet hat/dog/cane/marionette-face look going on.

Well done, Timothy Dexter.

Next: Marsh on the 18th Century setting of TEETH: The Role-playing Game. (And how we’re right in it.)

TEETH & the 18th century

A couple of newsletters ago, Jim talked a little about why we took TEETH back to the 18th century—a liminal time, not yet shed of its folkloric past, but nonetheless powering chaotically toward our industrialised present. It's also when England became a truly global terror. The events of TEETH occur in 1780, a point at which England is at war with many parts of India, as well as its own colonies in America, the French, the Spanish and (imminently) the Dutch. And this is to say nothing of our part in the slave trade and its dependent industries, which the Financial Times pegs at about 11% of Britain's GDP in 1800.

It seems obvious to say it, but unless you were English—and, despite the best efforts of the Crown, most people were not—the English were the bad guys. That other empires might also have been bad, or worse, does not exempt us from a moral reckoning. This is something that, bafflingly, much of England struggles to understand today, as evidenced by the tribalist paroxysm which placed our country in the hands of kleptocrats back in 2016. The Venn Diagram of people who think the Empire was a bally good time and people who think Angela Merkel was trying to straighten our good honest bendy British bananas is a horrible circle. 

TEETH isn't a diatribe about such jingoistic lies, but it is impossible to write a game set in Britain at the time of its burgeoning Empire, without reflecting on its ills, both historic and present. And while we primarily want to make a fun experience, we've left space for, well, vengeance, essentially. Though you play as a band of monster hunters, operating under Royal commission to suppress occult incursions in a cursed corner of England, the game happily concedes that you may be there under false pretext to work insurrection or sabotage against the Crown. That choice for players should feel in no way perverse or anti-heroic, but quite possibly a just cause against a ferocious oppressor.

Complicating this picture further: the occult contamination of the Vale of Deluth is both a threat to England and an irresistible resource. Hunters, like those that the players embody, are nominally sent to drive the horrors back, but really they are kept on a short leash, maintaining a bloody equilibrium that allows the Crown access to occult treasures that fuels its dominion. The safety of those that people the Vale is not really a consideration.

To be clear, we don't set out to make this some sort of ironic inversion of the way in which Britain scoured the treasures from other parts of the world. Indeed, Britain is still doing terrible things abroad in the world of TEETH, and is only aided by what it finds in the Vale. Nor are we claiming any sort of equivalence between Empire's atrocities and its attitude towards its own citizens. But we do want the hypocrisy of nationalism to ring through. 

Nationalism is always a front for more venal ambitions, and though modern Britons have as a whole undoubtedly benefited from the wealth that our Empire stole from others, it's hard to believe that farsighted patriotic largesse was ever held in good faith by the wealthy, landed classes who championed our Imperial designs. After all, during the very period in which TEETH is set, the Inclosures Act was being used as a pretext for the gentry to simply redefine England's common land as their personal property, eventually stealing 6.8 million acres from the English people and into private ownership - a fifth of the total area of England. 

This isn't some distant, historic crime: today, much of England remains in private hands. In fact, half of the whole country is owned by just 25,000 people - less than 1% of the population. Some of these are spivs and corrupt oligarchs looking to bank their cash in a nigh untraceable way, which our terrible laws make very easy. But about 30% of the land of England is still in the hands of the aristocracy, whose titled privileges date back centuries to the time that one of their ancestors wanked off Henry VIII and got given Cheshire, or made some similarly mighty contribution to our nationhood. 

They may own much more, in fact, as 17% of England is simply unaccounted for: only recently has it been mandated that ownership be recorded at the Land Registry at the point of sale, and since this property hasn't changed hands, it can be very hard to interrogate who actually owns it.

A fuming expose of land rights doesn't make it into the text of TEETH, you'll be pleased to hear, but these injustices are so much a part of who we are as a nation, a theme only made more pressing by the nativist idiocy of Brexit, that it can't help but infuse and flavour it. It's important that the rich are felt to be awful, and that everything they do and support is a pretext for theft, both abroad and at home: because that's the way it was, and that's the way it is. 

Indeed, perhaps in 1780, We the People were more aware of this than now. Revolution is bubbling. America has rejected taxation without representation. Soon the guillotines will fall in France to the chant of "Liberté, égalité, fraternité!" Whoever they choose to be in TEETH, players must be alive to the injustice, turbulence and desire for change that scintillates that era. And there, in the heart of England's bleak and cursed land, they might just find something to feed the fire.

(Incidentally, James Dyson - the billionaire vacuum cleaner inventor; the hardcore Brexiteer who then immediately moved large parts of his business out of Britain; the man recently embroiled in scandal because he apparently begged a tax cut via personal text messages with Boris Johnson as part of surprisingly informal deal to design and supply ventilators which weren't then needed - that James Dyson owned 33,000 acres of farmland as of 2017, and has bought up a good deal more since. Farmland, incidentally, receives huge subsidies, which Dyson has been very vocal about not reducing, and it is not subjected to inheritance tax in the same way as other property. Great guy.)

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Next week: an entirely differently beef with the rich, in CBRPNK. I know we said that before, but really this time!

Love you! x