This Is Actually Quite A Good One, And Contains A Grant Howitt Interview!

To save even a scrap of our dignity.

Good day to you! You are reading the TEETH newsletter, by Jim Rossignol and Marsh Davies. It’s a newsletter about table-top role-playing games: our own - that we’re publishing over here - and some by other lovely people, which we witter about noncommittally, below. 

This week we have an interview with another star of the TTRPG constellation, an author of Spire (with Chris Taylor) and of many one-page RPGs via his admirably productive Patreon - Grant Howitt. Investigate that exchange of ideas below.

Also this week: we have begun a task of revising the main TEETH rules based on what we learned by creating the three smaller adventures, NIGHT OF THE HOGMEN, BLOOD COTILLION, and STRANGER & STRANGER (coming soon!) It is an intriguing task of diving from the entrails of live games, feedback, and playtesting, what the full game should look like. Peculiarly, we have written 90% of the book already, and the task now is to spend another 90% of our time fine tuning it for that final, brutal round of playtesting.

The TEETH campaign, in case you have missed what this is all about, is a game of monster hunters in 17th century England. It drags in the native eeriness of the British countryside, the horror of Empire, the ghastliness of our folklore, and the cheery perversity of myself and Marsh in making something horrifying and amusing. Because isn’t that the best of combinations?

It’s the rules that will really earn the focus of our attention, however, because we found the lite’ned rules of the one-shots so wieldy, so engaging, so immediate, that we want to apply some of that in broader strokes. STRANGER & STRANGER, which makes up a short campaign, was perhaps the most vital of these exercises in learning how the rules shape the experiences, because it emphasized for us how the “downtime” sequences in a Forged In The Dark game end up framing the experience and anchoring the players in their world - if done right. But anyway, I have wittered enough about that elsewhere, so let us get to the meat of this letter: 

LINKS!

• It is October, you know, and the dangerous month of November will soon be upon us. That month will bring with it a Kickstarter of vital provenance - that of DIE COMIC, written and imaginated by our comrade in escapist rhetoric, writer and midlander of moderate reknown, Kieron Gillen. I have been fortunate enough to play in a game of DIE, and it is one of the most interesting games-that-is-also-a-commentary on games that I have played. And I don’t say that simply because Kieron told me to say it. Never, he is a dreadful man and must be ignored if we are to save even a scrap of our dignity.

• Look at this great big map of a dungeon! It’s big and dungeony. I love it.

• There’s a tonne of awesome things on Rook’s Press, but it’s hard not to gravitate towards Wet Grandpa. I mean, it’s in the name, right? “Sadness and fear haunt his living corpse. In his dreams he reaches out and the water listens. In dreams (and unexamined thoughts) he needs others to be like him. And so the river thrashes landward.”

• A lovely-looking solo journaling game of flying ships. Not new, but we hadn’t linked it before.

• Design and release a ‘colour me intrigued emoji’ for Million Dollar Soulmate which “is a two-player game about romantic ambiguity”.

• Look at these horrible AI-generated MTG cards.

• Also on Twitter: someone being funny, but also mean, about D&D 4th Edition. Which I actually quite like, so there.

• Sorry, we don’t want to come across as a newsletter exclusively devoted to RPGs based on 16th-18th century European history, but there’s Long XVIth, and look how lovely it is. You can only sign up for playtesting for now, but keep an eye on it, regardless!

• You know how we also love grimdark cowboys, so you can imagine the visceral reaction to these wildly western MÖRK BORG hack character sheets.

• Research this week was the result of us finally completing a reading of a giant biography of German chancellor/tyrant Bismarck, and remarking on the very particular habits of his wife, Johanna von Puttkamer, who meticulously kept a comprehensive card file of Bismarck’s ‘enemies’ so that he wouldn’t forget who not to invite to social occasions when they voted against grain tariff reform. Pettiness is so important.

TEETHNTERVIEW! That’s What We’re Calling Them Now.

Here’s RPG Designer and Writer, Grant Howitt

There’s a good chance you’ll have encountered Mr Howitt’s work before, wonderful as it is. One page RPGs such as Nice Marines, Giant Goddamn Robots, and of course bear-criminality improv, Honey Heist, have provided the internet with no small joy these past years, but it’s his longer, sexier work, such as the lavish Spire RPG and its award-grasping expansion, Heart, which really clinch things. He’s got a beard, too. It’s not as good as mine is currently, but I’ve had a lot of practice, so that’s only to be expected.

JR: Are you playing TTRPGs with a regular group right now? If so, what are you playing and why?

GH: I'm not! I used to have a regular group come over to my flat every week, you know, in the Before Times, and I haven't really recovered since then. I really want to run a game of Brancolonia, because it's brilliant, but it's so hard to get my brain engaged in being creative and exciting after a day of making it do that for money.

JR: Did you play more or fewer TTRPG sessions than would be normal for you since the pandemic began? (And did you have feelings about the growth in remote play?)

GH: So - right at the start, like back in April 2020, I immediately panicked and ran three online games. I needed to do something, to have some kind of rhythm to life, to feel like I was affecting the world in some way while I dreaded streets full of bodies and the wailing of the dead. Then about two months after that I burnt out completely and I've barely run anything since, aside from the occasional stream for promo purposes or a three-shot with some other folks without day jobs. (I mean: this is my day job, but no-one gets angry if I fuck off for three hours and play The Mecha Hack in the afternoon, you know?) Distressingly, boringly, uselessly, I don't really like online play. It's about half as much fun as it is to do it in person; you can't do body language properly, attention is fucky, and I keep getting distracted and painting a model instead of GMing. I have been playing Arkham Horror online every week, though, which is tremendous fun because I don't have to worry about roleplaying or any of that nonsense.

JR: When the history of this period is written by hard-nosed future academics, do you feel that Honey Heist will end up being thematic - a landmark piece of evidence that biographers rely on to explain you - or will it be a mere footnote in the chapter about Grant Howitt?

GH: Oh aye, that's my peak, that's the most important I'm going to get. I'm good but I'm not pushing boundaries any more, I'm attempting to master the form. I'm looking at work by people like Jay Dragon and it's so generous, so experimental, so trusting and playful in a way that my work simply isn't - and that's what's coming next, I think. Honey Heist seemed to spark something in people, they saw it and thought a) I could play that and, more importantly, b) I could write that. It gave people permission to half-ass games with interesting mechanics and fuck about a bit, and that's pretty valuable, I think. 

JR: Which brings us, hopefully, if I've anticipated this correctly, to Spire. The theme, setting, and art of this book made me giddy, and as someone who occasionally contributes to creation of game maps, the Tim Wilkinson Lewis version of map of the Spire made me sick with envy. Can you talk a little about the creation of Spire, particularly with its explicitly political theme?

GH: I can! Spire started off as a Science Fantasy Heartbreaker, in as much as I'd run Dark Heresy for about a year and a half and was getting thoroughly tired of the mechanics. (So much of that game says "No," you know? Don't do this, don't try this, don't fuck about, don't push your head above the crowd. And fine, it's thematic, it fits, but it's frustrating to run.) I wanted to write a game about covert action spies which had rules for Spy Stuff in it; making contacts, burning them, expendable assets, fieldwork, etc. I wanted to play with the concept of reducing people to functions and duties, and what that does to you. I bashed together something vague which did that, and then changed "Imperium" to "Moon Goddess" and swapped out everyone for elves to avoid copyright issues, and promptly forgot about it and wrote something else. Then a scant three years later I brought Chris Taylor in on it, and he had the much cleverer idea to make it about revolution rather than espionage - which lets you do the espionage stuff but not get bogged down in having to know what fieldwork is. I'm much more of a furious ACAB lefty than Chris is, so what started as an objective-based concern became something much more ideological when I got my hands on it.

JR: How does Heart build on (or under) that?

GH: That was Chris again. We did Spire and we wanted to do something about dungeoncrawls, and Chris realised we already had this big tear in reality festering away under Spire, so rather than write a new setting and try to sell that we could just expand our existing one and capture the same fan-base. This was at the same meeting where we discussed trying to make Honey Heist into a 150-page coffee table deluxe book, and I'm glad we went with Heart instead, as I don't think that the landscape book about criminal bears would have won as many awards.

It's brilliant, though, is Heart. I think it's where we found our feet as writers, both in terms of mechanics and fiction and pairing those up, and trusting the players and the GM to make their own decisions. I'm so proud of it. The art is amazing, the layout's gorgeous, the physical book is beautiful and nice to touch, but it's got enough Weird in there to keep it interesting, to keep an edge on it. 

JR: Why should readers of this newsletter pick up a copy of Spire tomorrow and run it for their friends and/or family?

GH: It's good! And it's different from lots of other things. We tried very hard to take the tropes of fantasy roleplaying games and mess with them in interesting ways, so you're not playing a Fighter - you're playing a Knight of the North Docks, who's a sort of drunk gangster in quarter-plate who breaks legs for protection money and wears the crest of his patron pub on his shield. You're not a Ranger - you're a Carrion-Priest, a heretic death cleric, with a hyena chained to your wrist. You're not a Rogue - you're a Bound, a vigilante killer who whispers to the godling they imprisoned in their axe. I think the classes are reason alone enough to buy the game. 

JR: Your next announced collaboration is with our long-term comrade in righteousness Kieron Gillen on the DIE RPG. Can you talk a little about how that came about and then, if the fancy takes you, about why that system is so interesting?

GH: Kieron asked us and we said yes because a) it's a good fit as our styles fit together nicely and b) we like having money to spend on things like rent and food, and this is the sort of thing that makes money fall out of Kickstarter like a fucking piñata. I'm always a bit wary of working with someone else's IP because I have a bad memory and lots of enthusiasm, so "canon" isn't something I really enjoy working with or indeed around, but Kieron's writing the whole bloody thing himself and all my job amounts to is cutting it up and rearranging it so it reads like a roleplaying game. It's a tidy little system that he's put together - doesn't read like someone's first time out at all - which ticks along very nicely and doesn't get in the way, because the bulk of what makes the game special isn't necessarily mechanised but arises from the interplay between the real world and the fictional world, the players' authority and the GM's authority, and so on. It's a machine for telling big messed up stories and it's great at it.

JR: Do you ever find yourself explaining what you do to people with no understanding of TTRPGs? If so, how does that go?

GH: Not often! My barber doesn't speak great English and I can't recall meeting anyone who wasn't a massive nerd in about, oh, a pandemic's length of time. But if anyone asks I generally say "You know, like Dungeons and Dragons" and they get it, D&D seems to have penetrated into the mainstream enough for people to recognise what I mean. Also they don't give a shit, so I get the impression I could pretty much say anything and they'd nod along politely. 

JR: You've obviously been quite successful in working with Kickstarter, which is now a, if not *the*, key platform for RPG publishing, but do you think that its dominance skews what is created in some way? 

GH: Yeah, absolutely! It absolutely rewards making something with an existing IP, because you're not selling a game, you're selling everything the game could be, so if you get to say "Oh this is the game of Judge Dredd" or "This is the game of Blade Runner" then you get support from people who like Judge Dredd or Blade Runner no matter what sort of game you're doing. (That said: if you liked DIE the comic, you'll love DIE the RPG!) BUT crucially it means that you can have a daft idea that's just good enough to break the water and you can flog it to three hundred people and maybe turn a profit if you're clever, and it's not as sustainable as getting a 9-5 job and selling your labour like a good little cog in the machine, but it's a damned sight easier than trying to a) get it past a publisher or b) funding the whole print run yourself and selling it at cons, which is what you had to do fifteen years ago. 

JR: You do like a miniature, but do you collect dice for aesthetic reasons, or do you view them as mere implements of the trade?

GH: Jim - I wish I gave even a single shit about dice. My life would be greatly enriched and I'd have something to spend my money on other than toy soldiers and whisky. But: they're just tools. Dice are to roleplaying games as photocopiers are to offices - they're just things we use to play the game, and while they should be easy to read and perhaps nice to look at, I can't say that I've ever seen a dice that I especially cared about owning. (I use "dice" as the singular, too. Don't edit that out. It's valid.) And don't get me started on metal dice, either - absurdly loud, horrible things. Might as well slap your PHB against the walls and yell. Grow up.  

JR: Strong opinion. Metal dice owners, like my wife, will be unsubscribing their way out of the newsletter about now, I think. Still, I would really like it if you'd share a couple of recommendations, perhaps 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?

GH: Other people's stuff:

• Wanderhome is great, very charming and with just enough edge to it that it doesn't get saccharine. Jay Dragon is a genius and the Possum Creek team are putting together outstanding stuff.

• Brancalonia is bawdy and sexy and stupid and, unlike core D&D 5e, is about fucking about and spending your money on extravagant parties, which is much more exciting than magic boots or what have you.

• Into the Wyrd and Wild is, for me, like a sort of woodland Heart. I like everything that Charles Ferguson-Avery puts out and am continually upset that he can both write and draw, which seems unfair to me.

• Electric Bastionland takes the raw elements of roleplaying games and the raw elements of New Weird storytelling and shoots them out of a mechanical cannon at the reader. I adore it. 

• Kingdoms by Sophia Tinney is the sort of punkish, brutal, nasty shit that I wish I was writing when I was younger. It's about killing giant monsters and maybe having a kid and it's grim and glorious.

My stuff:

• Havoc Brigade is a packaged one-shot with characters, art (by Tim Wilkinson Lewis, he of the Spire cartography), a map, a mission and a whole rule set. In it you play a gang of orc "infiltrators" who are "sneaking" into an Imperial City to capture Prince Theodore Holstein, who I did not realise was named after a cow when I wrote the game and now it's too late to change it. It's freeform and daft and creative and anarchic and it's always a good time and no-one knows I wrote the damned thing. 

• Heart is really good. It won more ENnies than any other book ever - I think, please correct me if that's untrue - which proves I'm not just saying that. There are a bunch of APs you can listen to if you want to get a handle on it, but really, it's two clever people thinking about dungeoncrawls for two years and then a team of even cleverer people what they wrote down both legible and beautiful.

• I wrote a game called HEY KIDS, LET'S ALL MEET THE GIN WIZARD about eight years ago on a plane, and in it you have to disguise yourself as a wizard using found items, and really that's the sort of thing I want to see more of in the world.

JR: If you could predict something about the future of TTRPGs and then have it come true, what would it be? Please avoid wording this so that it could be interpreted by fate as some sort of awful curse.

GH: I reckon the OSR crowd and the Belonging Outside Belonging crowd are going to unite and form some new movement of games that are incredibly specific and incredibly vague at the same time. 

JR: Thanks for your time.

—

More soon! x

-TEETH