A Melancholy Thing To Rummage In
Hello there! You are reading the TEETH newsletter, written and compiled by rude boar Jim Rossignol and candid panda 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!
AN INFORMATIVE PLUG FOR OUR THRILLING TRIO OF STANDALONE, LOW-PREP/HIGH ENTERTAINMENT ADVENTURES SET IN THE TEETH UNIVERSE:
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 do buy a copy!
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Jim at the controls this week!
Listen here, I’ll get back to some interviews and forward-looking chatter in the next newsletter, but since I’ve been on a nostalgia tilt lately I need to get the content out while it’s still oozing. Forgive me! Here it comes.
Wandering With Necromantic Intent In The Plaintive Graveyard Of Abandoned Campaigns
It’s been a rather odd week here at Teeth Towers, with a whole bunch of creative things all happening in parallel, each of them with entirely different directions and possible vectors for professional fallout. As I worked on Secret Narrative Design Project For Videogame, and TTRPG Book You All Know About, and Off-And-On Research Thing, as well as the other projects boiling in the background, I found myself leafing through abandoned ideas, of which there have been a large number in the past couple of years. Several videogame projects I’ve done preliminary work on have come to nothing, despite having wild and exciting fiction attached, and even magnificent artwork created for them. All this is a melancholy thing to rummage in and ruminate upon, but not unusual over the course of a creative career. It also provides clues for what’s next: picking through the ashes looking for embers. You know the metaphor.
Still, this line of plaintive scavenging and archaeological thinking led me to dwell upon the abandoned campaigns I’ve undertaken over the past couple of decades, and what was lost in their failing to survive to the intended denouement.
A long campaign game fizzling out is a tale as old as D&D itself, and the abandoned campaign is one of the commonest and yet saddest eventualities of playing TTRPG games over a long period. Most groups, I feel, go into campaigns with the best of intentions, and the ones which manage a beginning, middle, and end are of course the ideal - but the chances are that something will cause the campaign to end prematurely. Or, as if so often the case, there is no end planned or imagined, and the campaign simply runs out of energy, not least because no conclusion was ever really specified.
There’s also sorts of things that could be said about this phenomenon, and I find myself wandering idly down a route of analysing which games work best as a sort of “series of one-shots”, so that if abandoned no one feels like anything of value was lost. We did that well with Blades In The Dark, as it happens, and I can see it working well with other, similar games, too. Hell, our own one-shots could easily feature the same characters for other adventures, as a few GMs and players have indicated they intend to do. Does that mean we should create a campaign-length game that actually IS a series of one-shots? Probably. Maybe. There’s a lot of things we should do.
Regardless, in my own case as a campaign-abandoner, that end has come back most often of all because a shiny new thing has come along, or my reading has progressed to a new sourcebook, or I have seen something in another game or movie that I want to try out at the table. Occasionally, as detailed in our writings here over the past year, the end has been about players deciding they didn’t like a ruleset, or that the system we were playing wasn’t making the most of the time they were committing to the game. Which is entirely fair, especially when you are a group that is interested in exploring a bunch of different systems, as ours is. I do wonder if we will, at some point, encounter a system that sustains our interest for a long period, or whether we will just keep on making excursions to other systems, and then return, refreshed, to the games we had the most time for. Yes, like Blades In The Dark.
Anyway, with this in mind, here are the planned conclusions of the three campaigns I never finished that I would dearly like to have reached my planned conclusion. They never will. They are lost futures, fictional stubs, never to be completed, and ruins of imagination that never came to pass.
Also, I know a few people who played in these campaigns are reading this newsletter, so I’ll be interested to see if they imagined that this is where they were going (or if they even remember!)
The Depleted World (Rifts)
This was (probably?) the last of my teenage campaigns, and was set in the Rifts campaign setting which I revisited last week. Run when I was about sixteen or seventeen, it was no wonder that this didn’t really survive to its climax, given that we were all learning to drive our parent’s least expensive cars and pretending that we liked to smoke cigarettes.
This was also the campaign that I put the most effort into, ever, probably. With complex backstories for all of the characters, ongoing dream sequences for each of them, and a complicated thread of clues which lead to the climax reveal that never was, it filled a binder. The story was based on Rifts interdimensional slave-trading Splugorth (a sort of sexed-up Cthulhu mythos crashed into the story of Atlantis) which led my players, initially on a road of rescuing people from slave pens, and then having to travel across multiple dimensions to bring back stolen family members. We got a fair way into this, but the group fizzled out just before we got to the bit where they would begin to realise they were trying to rescue someone from an abandoned version of Earth, which was actually our real Earth, which I had intended to make clear to them by having them discover evidence of their own real world existences, and therefore reveal that Earth of the Rifts setting was a different dimension entirely. I thought this very clever. Perhaps it was.
Also notable that I mentioned in an interview about my science fiction work this week (readable next week, probably) that I hate it when fantasy worlds cross over with the real world, so perhaps I was just talking utter rubbish! Stay tuned to find out.
The Parallel Campaigns Of Groups That Would Never Meet (D&D 4e)
A few years back I ran two simultaneous campaigns on 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. One of these campaigns was for my wife and her friends, and the other, running at the same time in the same world, was for a bunch of Rock, Paper, Shotgun and Big Robot adjacent friends. Why not, I thought, make up a campaign world and then have both stories take place in the same timeline? I had no intention of the two groups ever playing in the same session, as some such mega-campaigns seem to manage, that would have just been a disaster, but I did have them cross each other’s consequences, so that they encountered what was happening in the other’s campaigns (finding evidence of their battles, one group exploring a keep that the other had burned to the ground, and so on).
The overall arc of the game was about resurrecting dead or retired gods in order to get them to fix things that were beyond the player character’s own abilities to deal with. Ultimately, I thought, it would be fun to have the team’s different gods fighting each other as both groups performed missions within visual range of the god-battle, but without meeting each other. Sadly, it all mired up before that spectacle could deliver.
Thinking about it, the campaign setting for this was a butchered version 4e’s supplement “Monster Vault: Threats To The Nentir Vale”, which is a mini setting within the larger and “intentionally incomplete” Points Of Light campaign setting intended to accompany that edition. That was an entire world of abandoned, monster haunted wildernesses, which I always liked, and whoa, is sort of thematically relevant to this article! I’ll perhaps come back to it and look at the book itself, because I really liked it, despite it being one of the most widely ignored bits of output from D&D settings, and want to engage that flavour again at some point in a future game (if not a D&D game). It was also an influence on TEETH, if indirectly…
I Just Like Feeding You To The Spider People (Symbaroum)
The most recent campaign that I really regret giving up on was Symbaroum. My regular group found it really hard to enjoy themselves with the Symbaroum ruleset, leading me to even consider re-writing the game entirely so that they could bask in the loveliness of the grimdark ruin-explorers setting via another ruleset. (We made Teeth instead!) In this case I ran the starter campaign suggested by the game itself, with a view to ending the game with the most horrible demise for each character I, or the players’ could imagine. My plan was to try and set up the characters with the players, over time, to work out what, for that character, would be the worst way their story could end. For someone, I hoped, it would be being fed to the spider people of Symbaroum’s Monster Codex. How could you now want that? Look at them!
With my 9th level hindsight I can now see that there’s good reason to believe we should just have played Trophy Dark. Oh well!
So yeah. Old campaigns. Abandoned like the ruins of Symbaroum. Perhaps I should write all these up as modules for other people to run? Lord knows I will never get around to running them!
What did you abandon, readers? In a tabletop game, I mean, I don’t want to hear about the darker corners of your lives.
Anyway. Links!
LINKS
Thing of the week, if indeed that is a thing, is SOLARCRAWL. Gosh, it’s just a beautifully presented piece which really does push the right buttons and check out this for a list of references: “SOLARCRAWL is an orbital-fantasy, hexcrawling tabletop roleplaying game, built from the OSR system, The Black Hack, and inspired by such touchstones as The Outer Wilds, No Man's Sky, For All Mankind, Gravity, & the early manga works of Hayao Miyazaki.” If I have a gripe it’s that I really want SOLAR CRAWL to be two separate words, for some reason. A minor, petty, and irrational aesthetic point, much like myself.
MORIAH is itchfunding and you should take a look at this game. They explain: “MORIAH is a simple role-playing game of ordinary people facing the extraordinary. It is a game of sacrifice, where people living quiet lives at the base of a holy mountain must attempt to ascend it in order to ask for the mercy of the gods.”
Chris never stops. Perhaps cannot be stopped. A force of nature. Fear Chris. In The Bluelight is a MÖRK BORG adventure.
Cubicle 7 announces 5e Dr Who. I am raising an eyebrow at this. I mean, not as much as the Eve Online Dr Who crossover. My eyebrow came off when I saw that. Clean off! Horrific.
Forged In The Dark RPG Seven Rings is so much my jam that I can’t even begin to articulate it. Let’s try how the creators pitch it: “The final city. Magic decadence. Four ruling families that keep the people in fear. Take back the city, and carve out a home in it. A TTRPG that mixes 1920s glamour & gilded age grandeur, with pulp fantasy & crime action.” I am waxing my moustache and booking seats at the opera in anticipation of this, and not just because I am obsessed with the decadents-era monstrousness of The Pike.
Gorgeous 80s-styled magic RPG Arcane High looking for funding on the Kickstarters.
Research this week led us to the Windmill Vehicle of medieval clever man Guido da Vigevano. He didn’t just build real-life Warhammer battle wagons, though, he was an expert anatomist and antidote wizard: “Guido describes testing an antidote of his own creation against wolfsbane. After poisoning himself with the plant, he writes that he ate a mash made from larva which had fed on Aconitum flowers and successfully recovered.” Glad that worked out, Guido.
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More soon! x