The Abbot of Unreason
Capricious interventions of fate.
Hello there! This is probably our last-but-one newsletter before Christmas, which we really hope is a wonderful time of year for you personally. Obviously the world beyond the pages of our books and PDFs is looking less than magical right now, so let’s engage in some cheer by turning our minds to the creativity and cleverness of the TTRPG communities.
As ever, thanks for reading x.
You are reading the TEETH newsletter, written and compiled by Jim Rossignol and Marsh Davies. This is a newsletter about table-top role-playing games: our own - that we’re publishing over here - and some by other lovely people whom we link below. Want us to see your work? Get in touch!
Our latest release was STRANGER & STRANGER, a 63-page, beautifully designed and illustrated campaign-length adventure based around the perilous tribulations of a gang of mutated villagers, an abomination, and a rather convincing stranger. Low prep and highly entertaining. Please do check it out, and, if you are interested in supporting our exploits, please do buy a copy!
The Catfail Grimoire
We’ve not had a great deal of opportunity to play new RPGs lately, so it was a delight and a relief to indulge in an interesting one this week. I was fortunate enough to be able to spend some time with Chris Gardiner of Failbetter Games, James Hewitt of Needy Cat Games, and Kieron Gillen, whom I met in the pub, a long, long time ago. Together, at Gardiner’s prompting, we played a game of The Thief & The Necromancer, which was rather an interesting experience, and I shall tell you about it!
The Thief & The Necromancer (Patreon link!) is based on and is a sort of sequel to The Wizard’s Grimoire - and don’t let these tropey names put you off, because this one fascinates; not least because The Wizard’s Grimoire reverses the relationship between player and GM. As the authors explain: “Instead of a GM saying, "hey, I have this game I'd like to run, who's in?" you say, "hey, I'm trying to get my wizard through this spellbook, do you have a minute?"”
So this isn’t about a GM offering to run an adventure based on a game he’s read the rules for, it’s about a player asking GMs to run a game that the player has read the rules for. The players have a ruleset for each of The Thief and The Necromancer characters, and they set up some initial stats (which feed into dice rolls made later) by asking themselves some binary questions. The answers to these queries feed into this stat or that, rounding out the character’s personality at the same time as defining their ability scores (I am always impressed when RPGs make these two character-creating tasks go hand in hand, rather than being distinct steps in the process.) The GM meanwhile needs do little more than read half a side of A4 guidelines to prepare themselves.
In practice this means that the GMs (or “volunteers”) are taught how to play by the player (or players, in the case of TT&TN) because the players are the ones getting through the thing. Or at least one of them is, because it’s the Necromancer who gets to explore the grimoire as events unfold. The players choose the starting scenario, tell the GMs about it, and then the group plays that through. Later, between scenes (or “sessions”, as the game somewhat awkwardly calls them) the Necromancer takes a moment to research the grimoire, unlocking its various powers and developments by “studying at the feet of your ghostly tutor”. This tutor, Goerne, is the only defined NPC in the game, although there are some useful guidelines for the world generally, and for the world the Thief and The Necromancer find themselves in.
What’s most unusual, however, (to me, at least) is that the same GMs are not really required for continuity. You could readily play with the same two players, or even just the Necromancer and a fresh Thief, and have two entirely different “volunteer” GMs. There might be some context to explain once you were a way into it, but it’s very much set up with this sort of approach in mind. (The top of the hierarchy, the “real” player here is The Necromancer, which is clearly a genetic inheritance from the original Wizard’s Grimoire, but it nevertheless feels weird, like there is a hierarchy of importance through the players, reversed from the usual expectation of things. Clearly the intention!)
Hewitt observed that it is somehow akin to a solo journaling game, only you need other people to complete the story with you. You could, in theory, run the game sequentially with entirely different “volunteers” - yes volunteers plural - because it is the player’s experience that matters here, and in TT&TN we played with two GMs going back and forth, answering questions, sketching the world, and occasionally even finishing each other's sentences.
We started with a “Dream Swallower” attacking the pair of characters at a tomb, and ad libbed from there. Figuring out what a dream swallower was and establishing that pulp action novels were a thing in that world, for some reason, led us quickly into a Christmassy theme complete with comedy action scenes and jealous ghosts. The scenes unfolded as improv underscored by quite crunchy and interesting stat-driven dice rolls. Anyone, player or GM, could call an end to that chunk of narrative by deciding it was done, which was a little twist on the live editing of role-playing that I rather like.
At the end of the scenes the Necromancer could spend some time studying with his ghostly teacher, and have more things to throw at events in the future.
Clearly I came at this through the lens of being one of the volunteers, but aside from anything else, the experience of sharing the GM role with another, in this case Mr Hewitt, was immediately interesting. I’ve played a game (Alas Vegas) where the GM responsibility rotates from session to session, and others where there is no GM (Fiasco, Thistle & Hearth) in which the story simply emerges from the interactions or moves between the players, but this is my first time running it both as a partnership and an auxiliary. We really were just there to supply answers to questions, and to build a world that we had done no prior prep for. The players were running things.
I was going to edit the Bilbo “after all, why not” meme to comment on the idea of the player in these games also being the person whose Thing it was, “why shouldn’t I be the player”, but it was too much effort, and it’s better in your imagination anyway.
So yes. All of this stuff does turn the usual sort of RPG experience on its head, and in a wonderful way. It’s this sort of invention within TTRPG games, and the capacity for people riff on these structures and consequently magic up new narrative experiences (all the while keep us on our toes via the capricious interventions of fate via dice rolls) that really keeps my attention. The Wizard’s Grimoire structure is one that I could immediately imagine taking and playing with other groups and other people in a way that I seldom do when I play a new RPG, one-shot or otherwise. Indeed, Mr Hewitt DID go and play with another group literally the following evening, he was that taken with it. I think you can take that as our general, vague recommendation, or something. Anyway, I expect we’ll explore more such experiments in the new year…
But for now: time to explore the links!
LINKS
Christmas RPG recommendations, you say? This was actually a relatively tricky problem, since we’ve not played any of these, but hey ho: for 5e there’s absolutely no shortage of Christmas-themed stuff, such as the charming Winter’s Splendor, or this Nightmare Before Christmas hack, with an excellent Santa as 5e monster. Or perhaps How Orcus Stole Christmas by Frog God Games, which is a cheery tale about how the demon prince did a Grinch on a fantasy village. Or for something indie and one-shotty you might consider the family-appropriate Trouble At Santa’s Workshop, because if there’s one place that we don’t want trouble, it’s Santa’s workshop. Or, if your family is a little more pagan and horror-positive, you might want to go with Krampus Comes At Night. Of course, you could even hack Blood Cotillion to be a Christmas party. Ah yes, that’s the best solution. Christmas parties are very uncontroversial right now.
Or perhaps your gift to yourself will be to create your own RPG. If that’s the plan then this list of readily hackable systems might come in handy.
I do like the look of Nova, and the idea of a tabletop RPG trying to capture the frenzy of a loot shooter intrigues me.
A delightful single-page RPG “about Vulnerability And Asking For Help.”
Tundrabower is a good name, and it might well be a good thing to play solo, based as it is on the Lay On Hands system. (Which I think we linked to before, but if not, take a look, it hits some of our key interests.) It’s very pretty, anyway.
I wasn’t previously aware of Top 10 Games You Can Play in Your Head, by Yourself which is not a spoof on 80s CYOA, as it might initially appear, but actually a bunch of intriguing imaginative exercises, like a mental activities book for role-play world-building, or something.
It has come to my attention that some folk aren’t aware that Gillen did an RPG inspired by a certain competitive TV dining show, and those people need to be made aware that Come Dice With Me exists.
Research this week led us to read about the decline of traditional Christmas customs over the 17th and 18th century. We almost lost Father Christmas back there, and we actually did lose The Lord Of Misrule, who had been doing his thing in one form another since Roman times: “the Lord of Misrule – known in Scotland as the Abbot of Unreason and in France as the Prince des Sots – was an officer appointed by lot during Christmastide to preside over the Feast of Fools. The Lord of Misrule was generally a peasant or sub-deacon appointed to be in charge of Christmas revelries, which often included drunkenness and wild partying.” THE ABBOT OF UNREASON. Christmas of the past was set in Troika, and you can’t tell me otherwise.
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More soon! x