We're On DriveThruRPG / What Do Words Mean
Characters in a Raymond Feist book.
Hello there! You are reading the TEETH newsletter, written and compiled by sleeping giant Jim Rossignol and towering inferno Marsh Davies. This is a newsletter about table-top role-playing games: our own—that we’re publishing over here, oh and also here —and some works by other lovely people whom we link below.
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THE TEETH STANDALONE GAMES ARE NOW AVAILABLE ON DRIVETHRURPG.COM!
Hello, yes, the TEETH games aren’t just on itch.io now, they’re also on the mighty DriveThruRPG, so if that’s your portal of choice then you can collect our games over there!
STRANGER & STRANGER, a 63-page, campaign-length adventure in which a group of hapless bumpkins attempt to save their village from abomination, while undergoing a series of grimly amusing mutations.
BLOOD COTILLION, a 45-page one-shot in which assassins dress-up in fluttering petticoats, attempt to infiltrate a society ball and murder the cultists therein. Think: Pride & Terminate with Extreme Prejudice.
NIGHT OF THE HOGMEN, a 23-page one-shot in which an assortment of travellers are forced to flee a massive horde of monstrous pig-creatures. It's name-your-own-price, so you can dive in without onerous financial risk!
They're all low prep, rules-lite and easy to get into. Hogmen is particularly ideal for newcomers! Please do check them out, and, if you are interested in supporting our exploits, please buy on itch, or now on DriveThruRPG!
So that’s the big sales platform type news out of the way, and on to some thoughts about the world of tabletop games. Jim at the controls this week!
On The Experience Of Being A Parent Of A Child Discovering RPGs For The First Time In 2022
Listen, I am quite old. Old enough to have a twelve year old son who is, without much assistance from me, discovering D&D for himself. It’s an interesting thing to watch from the sidelines: TTRPG has gone, in his experience, from being nebulous “Dad stuff” that he’s only been faintly aware of me pottering around with in the background of his life - like my own father having a model railway in the attic - to something he’s actively taking an interest in because other kids at school are so excited about it.
It’s usually a request for a mobile phone or new pair of trainers, but recently came the call: “I need the 5e Player’s Handbook!”
Ah, a bit of D&D with some friends. I supposed that was inevitable. And sure, he’s mostly interested in how to min/max his build to kill goblins as fast as possible, but the other stuff will come. Perhaps he’ll even play a Rossignol-authored game one day.
Strikingly, this new line of interest goes much further than I’d imagined. To my surprise, my son has taken a step that I have never taken: he’s joined an in-person D&D group run publicly for teens in the nearby town. A public group. Now, it’s hardly surprising that I never did anything like this as a teen, because it simply wasn’t a thing that was available to us at the time, to my knowledge, at least. If I wanted to play these books I bought, I had to organise it myself. And, of course, still do. Youth groups barely had boardgames on the ticket in the early ‘90s, let alone organised D&D, but here we are in 2022 when the current generation of adults have grown up and realised that this is what they can provide for the kids who need something to do after school. Twice a week the lad gets home late, with tales of tavern brawl chicanery and wizards named after characters in a Raymond Feist book. And none of it has originated with me. I haven’t run D&D for the kids, although we play plenty of broad-ranging boardgames, and he hasn’t even really looked at my collection of books.
Which has made me realise that really, the D&Dness of what he is doing, while important for those of us who have spent years contemplating the industry and its surrounding scenes, is really barely relevant to the conversation. This is a kick around in the park, a social space, a place for kids to hang out in organised fun that *isn’t* in the park. I am glad it exists, and I am even more pleased that my boy has got involved without even a prompt from his old man.
Of course, as with any group of teens, with this public group come problems that I have rarely faced in my usual friends-and-friends-of-friends roleplaying situations: he is dealing with GMs who don’t know what they are doing, because they’ve never done this before, or who are unable to deviate from script, or don’t have the experience to improvise. He’s dealing with players who are too young to really be there, kids who are disruptive, kids who have a beef with other members of the group. Each day comes with a report of some antics, some nonsense, some grudge. I asked him if that made him want to quit: no way, he snorts, that’s just how life is. You have to roll with this stuff.
Hell, the boy is a better person that I am. He also has a much cooler haircut that I ever did. (But I would still kick his ass at Quake.)
Of course, now too the questions have begun to appear: what do I think about 5e? Why don’t I play D&D? What’s the best character class? What’s the difference between and wizard and a sorcerer, and why would anyone be a wizard when their hit points are so low? All good questions. Not all of which I have answers to. I always preferred wizards, quite honestly. We’ll work on that stuff. There’s much to discuss.
The best question, though, and the one that threw me most severely was this earnest puzzlement: “Did ‘nerd’ used to be an insult when you were a kid, Dad? Why?”
God damn. The times: they change.
LINKS
THING OF THE WEEK? IT’S A THING NOW
Thing Of The Week this week is the super-condensed zombie survival horror gaming, Breathless. Think Left4Dead or The Last Of Us. As I’ve mentioned a bunch of times, I am extremely keen on super-condensed rules, and while Marsh and I can’t help doing more each time we make something (Marsh pointed this morning out that each of the standalones is exactly 20-pages longer than the last) I still find rapidly comprehensible mechanics aspirational as a creator, as well as being deeply interesting to me as a GM, not least because my group like one-shots and standalone games, and I know I can quickly bring this to the table, as I will be doing in the coming weeks. Breathless is one spread and a character sheet, which includes some mechanics you’re likely to already be a familiar with, and others that support play allowing you to pick it up in just a few minutes. It also lets you employ the full range of platonic dice shapes, D4 through D20, and comes with its own SRD, which is always a good thing in my (overwritten) book. It’s $4 currently, so take a look.
Speaking of one-page RPGs, I like the look of Raefenheim by Tadhg Lyons: “xplore a mysterious, crumbling castle in a far-away land, inspired by the gothic literature of the 18th and 19th centuries.”
We’ve linked to Inspirisles before so it’s also vital we point to Overisles, which is the campaign setting for the game which teaches British and American sign language. We feel obliged to signpost it again because the entire concept is just so interesting - the Kickstarter is doing really well! - but also because it’s just a beautiful thing in its own right.
Chis B has started a podcast about creator’s favourite RPG adventures.
River Trash is a solo game about being a piece of trash in a river.
I love these lino-cut prints so much.
A really cool itch collection, which is the RPG that each designer featured is proudest of having made.
Research this week led us to this note about just how tea drinking powered the industrial revolution in Britain. I knew it was the reason why we have a higher voltage electrical grid than the rest of the world (it takes twice as long to boil a kettle in the US?) but this insight into earlier behaviours leading to tea-driven health is new to me.
Also in research I was, for some reason, reading about people who were the earliest born humans to be photographed, such Conrad Heyer and Caesar, who were both over 100 years old when they were recorded in the mid 19th century. This means they’d have already been in their thirties by the time TEETH is set, in 1780. (Which led me down a weird thought-hole of the potential, rather than average, length of a human lifespan being essentially one century, and how odd it is that it should broadly line up with the way we define chunks of time, and also how much can happen in a century - look at 1922 to today, and consider what that period of time covers, from electrification and flight becoming near universal, to nuclear energy, the internet, spaceships. An extraordinary vastness.)
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More soon! x