A Little Something About Our Next Book. Also: a message for my buddy.
Welcome, lonesome netsnuffler, to the TEETH newsletter! This is a regularly irregular transmission about our adventures in the very secret land of Tabletop Roleplaying-Games. We have published a whole series of our own TTRPGs! That series is expanding. In this regular publication we also look at other RPGs, play stuff, interview people. It’s a whole lot of newsletter.
What’s within is written and compiled by jolly postman, Jim Rossignol, and cheery mailbox, Marsh Davies. Come and join us over on the TEETH Discord! Free tooth emojis for everyone.
And hey, if you can wish to support us and also get a fantastic 320-page RPG, you can BUY OUR BOOK. If you aren’t already a member of that deeply cool and intensely exclusive club.
Hello, you.
Links!
I don't have time to prep a D&D campaign.
Hello, you.
As we mentioned back in March, our second book, GOLD TEETH, is coming this year. We are currently putting together the assets for a Kickstarter which will go live in the next few weeks!
Set in an alternative 1781, GOLD TEETH is a game of horribly cursed pirates seeking redemption in a chain of islands radically transformed by an occult explosion. This blight of unhinged magic and imperialist meddling is profoundly linked to events in the Vale of TEETH from our original RPG tome and players will contender with that central, dangerous mystery, while carving out wonderful, horrible stories of vindication and doom, all of their very own.
GOLD TEETH will be a 300+ page hardback book, written by Jim Rossignol and Marsh Davies in addition to being illustrated and laid out by (Ennie-nominated!) illustrator and designer, Marsh Davies. Building on our previous work, the much-beloved TEETH RPG, we are creating a new setting, with rules for both LAND and SEA. It’s packed with new horrors, rules, playbooks, abilities and grotesque foodstuffs. Our familiar adaptations of the Forged In The Dark ruleset find new purchase for our characters with a Pirate’s Curse and a race to Redemption. GOLD TEETH has much of the same funny and grim tone as the original book, but I think it’s even more ambitious in terms of the wild world-building and possibilities for characters, their agendas, and what they need to do to make it as pirates in this desperate, reality-warping situation.
Needless to say, all this means that Marsh is locked away drawing his trademark horrible characters, only this time they are all at sea: pirates, privateers, buccaneers, reavers -- we have all the flavours. And he’s also had to draw some ships which, as someone who had to fight his own hands for a week to draw a toad, I can tell you is no mean feat at all.
We have parasitic mind-crabs! We have moray eel aristocrats, living armours from the sea, sharks, sunfish, and the most horrible jellyfish I could possibly imagine! There are sea battles! There are crustacean calligraphies, mollusc castaways, buried churches, sacred treasures, political revolutionaries, French philosophers, beards, gunpowder, wigs, magical plagues, ships of the line, ships on fire, and seagulls, oh god, the gulls!
It’s bad luck to kill a seabird, but will you be able to avoid it? GOLD TEETH is alive with weirdness and beaks and nautical horror. We can’t wait to share more.
Oh, and there is, of course, a unfathomably cursed seafood table.
Because that is the kind of book we love to make for you.
Watch this (abyssal) space.
-jim
LINKS!
THING OF THE WEEK: Thing of the week this week is having too much work on to read or play anything, but we did get in a game of CBR+PNK on our regular game night, so I am going to recommend the pamphlet adventures that came with the Kickstarter bundle. We played PRDTR. What is this a reference to? It’s on the tip of my…
THING OF THE WEEK Mk2: Ennies voting is open. TEETH is in the Design and Layout bit. PLEASE VOTE FOR US. And anyone else you like, naturally.
Look, it’s genuinely difficult for me not to be drawn to a game that seems to exist simply to make use of a reference or play on words? Why is that? I give you Dice Hard. Darby Machin’s lovely art certainly doesn’t hurt the overall allure.
Also Starscape. Okay that’s not a reference as such, although it rhymes with something pretty familiar, and it’s not a pun that I understand… In fact it’s actually a pretty standard space game name BUT the PBtA-in-space worldbuilding stuff it has under the hood has me interested regardless.
Research this week gave us this: the incredible French word “sardanapalesque” has no direct translation in English, but means "like a powerful male leading a luxurious life". Sardanapalus refers to the last king of Assyria (7th century B.C.), who was famous for his sensuality and material largess. Modern-day billionaires are all well and good, but I am not sure there is any greater achievement than being a famously sensual Assyrian king from the 7th century BC whose name became a byword for male luxury in French. Is there? Am I right?
Playing Games, Part 1*: “I don't have time to prep a D&D campaign.”
So don’t.
This essay basically has an audience of one, and he knows who he is, but the rest of you might get a kick out of it, too.
A couple of years back you, a friend of mine in the (digital) games industry, were listening to my tales of TTRPG exploits. You sighed and said, “I’d love to play again, but I don't have time to prep another D&D campaign.”
Your group, for which you were the GM, had played D&D for some years, particularly during the Covid lockdown, and theoretically you still had time to do so. But, my friend, you are a busy professional in a chaotic industry, and even though you might have picked up any number of pre-prepared modules to save yourself the map-drawing and the encounter-inventing, you knew this fundamental truth: that the burden for running the game would fall most heavily upon you. If you did not have time to prep, even if that was just reading off-the-shelf stuff beforehand, then the game would not run.
Here’s the thing: the majority of people who play RPGs just don’t realise there’s another way.
Nary even a wisp of motivation for the work I should have been doing, I found myself discussing this reality with Comrades Gillen and Gardiner, and we agreed that there is something valuable here. It’s a thing which a number of people have observed before, which is that learning to play other systems is off-putting for people who started with D&D, but when they do learn, they break through a perceived barrier and realise that other modes of play (and preparation) are available. That changes things.
Importantly though, the difference between D&D and, say, Blades In The Dark is not how tricky the rules are to learn (there are a lot of rules in both instances, and Blades is hugely procedural) but rather that with D&D you still have to prep a lot of material to apply the rules to.
For the purposes of what I write here I am going to use Blades and adjacent games as an example because they are my bread and butter. Furthermore, experience has taught me that this is more or less true of some other indie RPG systems, too.
D&D’s structure is one that makes things easy for players -- they basically just have to show up -- but relatively (relative to other certain games) complex for a GM. The GMs are the ones actively running the game and the players are something more like “consumers” of what is happening. GMs need to manage the complexity of D&D’s combat, to juggle the roster of the cast, the monsters, and the NPCs. They need to be on top of the rules: those of all the participants of a combat encounter and their possible interactions. They need to be familiar with the action of spells, of feats, of monster special abilities, and they need to steer it all back towards the intended structure of the adventure, so as to ensure the players encounter the vital elements of what’s supposed to happen.
I can see why you might baulk at all this.
I tried to explain to you that all this loading-the-camel-with-straws isn’t quite the same for the games I tend to play now, but I am not really sure you believed me.
But it’s true! Having learned the rules of some other games, applying them requires much less prep on my part. I am not going to argue that learning a new rule-set isn’t challenging. There can be real difficulties to that, even when the book is a lightweight one. There are concepts to learn and unlearn, and there is reading and thinking to be done. But here’s the difference: playing a game of Blades In The Dark (or TEETH, or a bunch of other indie games we could mention) removes some of the burden from the GM and shares it with the other players. The GM does not roll the dice. All the actions happen from the player’s own playbook (or character sheet) and most of the time the GM is asking questions of the players. I am not saying that players don’t act in D&D, but what I am saying is that Blades and their ilk make that into much more of a conversation. The focus shifts from “this has happened, how do you react to it?” to something more like “what do you want to achieve, and what does that look like?” Even with the complications and consequences of doing the thing, it’s up to the players to answer.
We ran a game of CBR+PNK just last night. A cyberpunk game designed for one-off games or short campaigns. It’s lightweight. Just some fold-out pamphlets with a streamlined ruleset based on Blades In The Dark. Here’s what it took: a 15-minute read of the rules, and another ten browsing one of the adventure manuals. I had read it before, sure, but again that was less than half an hour of skimming. I then spent five minutes making some notes. It took less than ten minutes to create everyone’s characters at the start of the game. Then we began.
Now, the extent to which you prep for a game like this will still depend on what sort of GM you are, but the reason that CBR+PNK was playable immediately was that it’s not a D&D-type game. There were no monster stats to track. No sum for working out what made a fair encounter. Instead, we discussed it between us at the table and got on with it. It is a framework for building a story. It still has dice, and stats, and special abilities, but they are more like triggers and prompts. They invitations and guidelines to invent what’s going to happen next.
I need you to understand this much about TTRPGs: games like CBR+PNK, like the zines that Marsh & I wrote, like hundreds of other publications, are light, and easy going, and based on absolute classics of the form. Running them requires some reading, yes, perhaps some notes beforehand, but they are nothing like preparing a D&D campaign. In the games we play you are very much “playing to find out what happens”, and rather than the GM meticulously delivering every encounter, you are going to have to work with the other players to figure out what’s happening. You are all applying the rules, together, to a situation that you probably only have a thin sort of sketch for. Improvisation plays a key part in this. Hell, our recent Blades campaign has been improvised entirely, with no prep at all, but that’s probably for another essay.
Playing these games is a learned skill, yes, and it does take some reading, some comprehending, and some patience. But it is worth learning, for precisely the situation you quoted. You can bring with you a bunch of what you learned from D&D, but not all of it. You will have to unlearn some stuff, like initiative and fixed round orders. Instead, it’s about what makes sense for the narrative. But I have seen a bunch of people do that, now, and the journey has always been shared. The GM isn’t closeted away, figuring it out, instead we’ve done it together. At my table most of the players have cheat sheets for quick reference. They are more involved. Their part of the story-telling is greater. Their stake is, I think, increased. And the work the GM has to do is far, far less involved.
Hell, you know what? If these games didn’t exist, I don’t think I would have come back to TTRPGs at all. I just don’t have the bandwidth. I am, like you my friend, a very busy professional in a chaotic industry. I don't have time to prep a D&D campaign. And so I don’t.
-jim
*I figured I’d do a series of these, now and again, on how/why we run and play games. Come and talk to me about it on the Discord!