A Rare Degree of Criminal Gusto (On The Life & Times Of Ann Duck)
Behold! You are reading the TEETH newsletter, written and compiled by the science-experiment Jim Rossignol and literary-opus Marsh Davies. This is a newsletter about table-top role-playing games: our own—that we’re publishing over here and also here —as well as interviews, links, and general noodling. Want us to see your work? Get in touch!
Hello, You
Links!
How bad was the 18th century, really? (Spoiler: Quite Bad, but with some surprising nuance.)
Hello, you.
Marsh has written some more about TEETH’s complex and horrible 18th Century setting, and you can read that below. We visit the tale of Ann Duck, a real person who makes an appearance in our forthcoming tome. Marsh knows his history, does that man.
In terms of other TEETH stuff: we’re getting the book finished and now gearing up for the Kickstarter! Yikes. No dates yet, but everything is ticking along, including our anxiety at running a Kickstarter in the first place. It is now almost ten years since I last dabbled in crowd-funding, raising the money that got Sir, You Are Being Hunted, Big Robot’s first-wave survival game, off the ground. Incredible days, those were. Reader, you should see my wistful gaze. You shall just have to imagine it.
But tabletop games? Well, we’re in the midst of obsessing over our favourite-indie-RPG-since-the-last-one, Trophy Gold, at the moment, and while I am playing that with Tuesday night’s group, I am anticipating running it with Monday night’s dice club from next week, too, so I am going to hold off on my impressions of it for another newsletter. To summarise: I deeply regret not backing the Kickstarter for the physical books. Yep, it’s one of those. I’ve consoled myself by spending far too much on the new plastic space dwarves, but it’s not the same.
LINKS!
Speaking of Trophy Gold, Indie RPG friend Thomas Manuel is guesting on the excellent Indie Game Reading Club to talk about it in what is not a review. Quite interested by the “main character” observations made here - I have some opinions on exactly what Trophy Gold is evoking - but we’ll get to feelings soon enough. (Actually that’s all from Jim this week, now over to Marsh for more links and an essay! - Ed)
Lumpley Games' The Thief and the Necromancer has blossomed into a full Kickstarter release. You can read about Jim's time with the game in this previous newsletter:
It sounds fascinating: a sort of inversion of the roles of player and GM, in which the latter don't so much run the game as help players who otherwise both direct and star in the action.
The new game from, Elizabeth Hargrave, the creator of Wingspan, is about breeding foxes. With Wingspan, she very successfully turned competitive bird sanctuary-ing into a card-driven boardgame, and no doubt she will find interesting ways to playfully mechanise the mating of animals for human satisfaction and benefit. But. You know. There is something about that which is inherently less wholesome than enjoying the nice birds. This is apparently something the makers recognise, acknowledging the rather grim history of Soviet genetic experimentation which inspires the game and saying, "We understand that for some of our fans the setting of the game is not something that they will enjoy. [...] We have made donations to the American Humane Society and the Johns Hopkins Center of Alternatives to Animal Testing to help move toward a world that ensures the humane treatment of our animal friends." But that won't turn a chihuahua back into a wolf, now, will it?
Dicebreaker's Chase Carter has written a piece for Polygon charting the history and possible future of the way TTRPG systems are shared and adapted under licence. Wizards of the Coast has made many attempts to create a walled garden in which to cultivate, tame and profit from their players' creativity, and now we are seeing other publishers try something similar - albeit with a more generous spirit - as with Modiphius' World Builders Hub, who additionally offer design seminars, rule consultation and promotional support in exchange for a 10% royalty on major sales. I take Modiphius' Chris Birch at his word when he says this is about being the linchpin for their community and fostering talent, rather than an attempt to lock creators into their ecosystem, but many will say that these more restrictive licences are antithetical to the spirit of sharing and iteration that have borne TTRPGs to their current point. I suspect that one will not greatly impede the other, honestly: I don't see that Modiphius' particular plans will have a chilling effect on the wider indie RPG scene, and while D&D's efforts to further corral its players may make them even less accessible as customers to other creators, they are already pretty damn inaccessible - and the indie scene abides nonetheless. As far as TEETH goes, Jim and I haven't really discussed licensing, probably because the very phrase "system reference document" is immediately and profoundly boring. But we are the beneficiaries of Forged in the Dark's largesse - why not pass it on?
We do love a Discord bot around our way, and Sparks! is nudging us towards playing Spire. It supports Sparked by Resistance (Spire system), FiTD and PBtA dice rolls and stuff.
Potato “a one page RPG about being a halfling and trying to quietly enjoy your potatoes in a world that refuses to leave you alone.”
Archon Ruins is just delightful.
How Accurate Should We Make A Game Set In A Terrible Time?
TEETH is set in 18th century England. Is this a mistake? It's certainly pitted two contradictory impulses against each other: that of the historical pedant, and that of a designer who wants their setting to be readily playable. We can't rely on GMs or players to know, or care about, the 18th century. And it would certainly be bad to hamper the freeform, improvisational nature of play with intervals of fact-checking. We do provide a (not very) brief guide to the 18th century - mostly because it was fun to write - but it should also be clear that TEETH's England is not exactly our own: magic exists, and is a decidedly convenient way to excuse all manner of ahistorical dalliances on the part of players and ourselves.
It's also not entirely desirable to recreate the 18th century in fastidious detail for the simple reason that some of that detail is kind of a bummer. For example, firing a gun is a massive, time-consuming faff. Do we want players to spend turns tamping and priming and fumbling with shot? It would get boring quickly. Coinage is an absolute nightmare: rest assured you will not have to know the difference between halfpennies, farthings, shillings, crowns and guineas in TEETH.
And then there are the other ways in which the reality of the 18th century might suck for players looking for entertainment: its bigotries and injustices. The role of women in society was complex and varied hugely by social status, but it would be fair to say that we give them more unquestioned freedom in TEETH than was widely available at the time. We want people of all kinds to play people of all kinds in TEETH, and while there is a strong undercurrent of anti-colonialism in the game that players can choose to engage with, we don't want to burden anyone with the need to fight for emancipation every time they roll the dice.
By 1780, the year in which TEETH is set, slavery had recently been deemed illegal within England itself, and was widely opposed - but the British had hitherto been the world's biggest slavers. Slavery therefore squats in the background of every depiction of England at this time: it would be a further 31 years before the trade in people was made a felony throughout the empire, and even then British nobility would continue to thrive off the products of existing slave labour in colonial plantations. It is impossible to disentangle the country's domestic development from all the things slave labour facilitated, even as the British Navy patrolled West Africa to suppress the trade itself. It would be irresponsible for us not to acknowledge this very real kind of horror at all, but nor do we want to force players to continuously confront it in what is ultimately an entertainment product about hunting gribbly monsters.
All that being said, the British attitude to matters of race in 1780 was not as uniformly grim as you might expect. The bogus science that cemented ideas of superiority and inferiority was to come later. People of colour were not that unusual in England: the reach of its empire brought many people to its shores, from Black Americans promised freedom in return for service to the Crown, to Malay sailors, to the first Indian tourists. Many stayed and enriched Britain. In fact, it was the official policy of the East India Company to have its officers make local marriages in the places they colonised: a cynical means of cementing control, for sure, but one which does not suggest supremacist bigotry (though that was to arrive shortly, and the policy explicitly reversed). The children of these matches were an accepted part of the social strata, without particular condescension.
As such, we aren't actually making any wild progressive statement by having people of colour throughout TEETH. The cursed corner of England in which the events take place attracts people from all over the globe, and players should feel they can take on such roles themselves, without having to engage in a potentially traumatic struggle with the issue of racism.
One character players might meet is Ann Duck - who we've simply stolen from the pages of history and immortalised (in a very literal sense). In reality, Ann (or sometimes Nan) was daughter to a white mother and a Black sword-fighting instructor, who had a short but prolific career as a robber in Clerkenwell, for which she ultimately hanged in 1744 at the age of 27. Notes upon her death describe her to be "as expert a Mistress in all Manner of Wickedness, as Satan himself could make her", which seems a bit harsh, but she certainly had a rare degree of criminal gusto for which it is hard not to admire her.
You can actually read the transcripts of her several trials in the online records of The Old Bailey - the actual words of commonfolk, more or less as they were spoken, 278 years ago! It's not that easy to browse, but search results for her trials begin lower down on this page. Not only do you get a vivid sense of the way people used language then, and an insight into the loose nature of justice, but the transcripts reveal that her heritage was not especially remarkable to the people of Clerkenwell. She was more recognisable to witnesses, but there's no suggestion of other animosity or prejudice because of her skin.
How broadly indicative is this? It's hard to say. But in any case, these records are worth reading for the fact that they're surprisingly funny: her robbing victims struggle to find innocent explanations for how they ended up with their pants round their ankles before being parted with their money in an alleyway renowned for prostitution. Ann Duck seems to have robbed a fair few men that way, as part of the Black Boy Alley gang, whose intimidation tactics were widely known in the area. Despite meting out some brutal beatings, I find her sympathetic, and not just because she primarily targeted men with badly fastened trousers. It was simply incredibly hard to be poor. Even with the modest education and respectability that her father bequeathed her, the fact that her victims so readily believed they could use her for sex in a grotty backstreet speaks to the limited options of her lot. And even if she was not scorned by the folk of Clerkenwell for her race, her life was still tragically impacted by the atrocity of slavery: her brother joined the navy, was shipwrecked near Chile and then reportedly captured and sold because of his skin colour. How could she respect the law in a world so utterly, demonstrably unjust?
I wanted to give our version of Ann Duck some sort of cathartic extra life, for her to thrive as a robber par excellence, to become a force of retribution against a society that gave her few opportunities that she did not have to prise from the pocket of a priapic gentleman. And so, in our world, she survives the noose by supernatural means, and several other attempts to kill her across the years, and absconds to the Vale of Deluth - where the events of TEETH transpire - to form a guild of bandits beyond the reaches of law. Whether she finds revenge or redemption there will be a story for players to tell. But by adding her to the cast of people of colour in our game along with those the players themselves may inhabit, I hope we make TEETH more readily accessible and satisfy our own pedantry - redressing the misconception of 18th century England as being a place of racial homogeneity, instead of an increasingly cosmopolitan era which actively welcomed the influx of people, their ideas, inventions, foods and more - even against the backdrop of Empire and its ills.
I'm keen to hear your thoughts, though - how do you deal with authenticity in historical settings? What if that authenticity is troubling or traumatic? Should we have come up with rules for the full, 15-second-plus process of loading a gun, with an Action roll for every stage? Should characters take +1D Stress if they don an anachronistic wig? Let us know in the comments!
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More soon! x
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ALSO, BUY OUR GAMES PLEASE
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!