March 5, 2025

A Scooby-Doo rubber-mask-type situation.

It’s the TEETH RPG newsletter! Pulsing and electronic in your inbox. Written by Marsh Davies and Jim Rossignol. And hey, you can buy our tabletop games.

1. Hello, you.

2. Links!

3. “Ever Heard Of The Knife Alien?”

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Hello, you.

We’re still in the midst of playtesting our forthcoming pirate RPG, Gold Teeth, while Marsh is also producing the many, many pages of that book! So many pages! And pictures. And little charts and tables. It’s busy in there. Crowded, even. Packed. Densely so.

We’ve been further looking at the ship rules, as well as working on some ideas to shake up both what it means to be having excursions on land, and engaging in downtime. With the ship as a sort of mobile base for your crew it makes sense for us to go to town on those procedures, and massively change the equivalent phases as you find them in the original TEETH. We’re a long way out at sea, but the ship is a fine one.

You know, we’re quite pleased with how ambitious GT has ended up being, but like all our games it also ends up being a fantastic engine for ludicrous farce. Our regular playtesters recently found themselves singing a sea-shanty (a group action in which everyone rolled a 6) to convince a golden ape to travel to London, while the baboon-like “wolf apes” of Erksensau mangrove lagoon watched with a mixture of bemusement and cold ape fury as their leader was serenaded away. Is the sing-song saga of the golden ape over? Not likely.

And yes, the bestiary is also filling up with the weird and the salty.

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We should have more concrete news on the beta PDF and other things in the coming weeks! Obligatory push: you can still pre-order Gold Teeth.

We also finished off a short campaign of Beowulf: Age Of Heroes with Mr Gardiner. We played D&D! But it was different! More thoughts on that soon, probably.

In the meantime, do come and say hi over on the Discord.

Love,

Marsh & Jim

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LINKS!

• THING OF THE WEEK: This was an easy one, because I was involved in the playtesting and can report it is very entertaining indeed. How Do Aliens Do “It”? By comrade Gillen, is a GMless cooperative world-building game about alien teens in an oppressive society trying to figure out how their kind have sex, based on the absurd and unlikely clues they’ve picked up via osmosis (not a sexual metaphor) during their adolescence. The game is a sort of Brindlewood type calculation, where there’s no hard answer (missus) and you end up coming up with the most absurd and ludicrous theories for how It is Done until one sticks. It’s party-game level japes, and remarkably gentle, kind, and silly.

• I am sorely tempted to run a game of D&D on the new Unreal-powered VTT, just to see. You know, professional curiosity. But maybe we should wait until it stops falling over. (I am increasingly convinced that Foundry is where VTT peaks as a form, but that’s for another newsletter.) 

• The Cold City Hot War Kickstarter of Cold War supernatural spooks is now live.

• Monsterhearts is being turned into a video game? The messy lives of teenage monsters is certainly ripe material for a video game, and I’ll be interested to know how the “dialogue-driven RPG with card mechanics” compares to the original pen and paper game.

• But while we’re on the digital games train, Andy Robertson is making a dating app that matches you with the right (computer) game! Look at this. I wonder if there’s scope for TTRPGs turning up in this? An interesting concept if you never know what to play. I always do, of course, because I am an expert.

• Finally, if you still have bandwidth for piratical happenings, then Spectral Sea is a tale of sad, dead pirates living their pirate afterlives. Feelings are going to be had, apparently.

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“Ever heard of the knife alien?”

I had some thoughts: how does your TTRPG group deal with a character who behaves in a way which is antagonistic to what the rest of the characters are doing? What if that was the point of that character? Mechanistically as well as narratively? What if it was the point of the entire game?

Let’s examine where these annoying thoughts came from.

This week I was filled with nervous energy for some reason, and found myself tidying up the Rossignol crypt. One of the mouldering documents I unearthed was my early 90s copy of Beyond The Supernatural, the Palladium-system game of modern-day monster-hunting and ghost-bothering game which I don’t remember ever having much of a following. The main reason that I own this book is because when I went to the old games shop in Canterbury for the first time, the only Palladium books they had in stock were this and (something like) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I’ve never been a great one for ninja anything, so I picked up BTS. The beardy little man in the shop cannily determined that I had actually come in because of Rifts ads in Dragon magazine, and soon his shelves were filled with Rifts books, which I duly purchased over my adolescent years. As the Rifts collection grew, with its cyborgs and techno-wizards, Beyond The Supernatural was forgotten. But not before I ran a couple campaigns which I can now barely remember.

Leafing through the book decades later, one memory did return: the Nega-Psychic. No, not mega-psychic. Nega. As in negative. Here he is.

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So this character class was the first time I can remember specifically encountering a character type that told you not just what the character type could do, but also how they should behave. Essentially the nega-psychic is a sceptic, so they had to attempt to explain away everything they saw as either a Scooby-Doo rubber-mask type situation, or simply as something science could explain later on, given enough evidence. Was it supernatural? No sir, that’s just bunk. It doesn’t matter if the rest of the group are wizards, you just can’t believe it.

But there was more to it, because this was also primitively mechanised in the system: the nega-psychic was a powerful psychic in their own right, altering reality so that it was less likely that magical or psychic powers would work in their presence. It’s an archetype that somehow seems deeply redolent of the 1990s. A sceptic who actually alters reality because their scepticism is so powerful? It could certainly explain a lot.

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What I remember about this in play, however, was that as teens we had no idea how to handle it. Generally we would play as a group of friends who were getting along just fine fighting monsters. But then there was the nega-psychic which not only fucked up their friends’ cool abilities, but also seemed to give the player permission to be the asshole pragmatist character in a supernatural farce. One of our players seized on this, and duly role-played his way into us deciding to play something else, because For God Sake, Callum, Don’t Be A Dick. 

Now, I accept that this was us just being emotionally immature and socially inexperienced teens, but I feel like it’s also revealing of the journey both I and RPGs generally, have had in the intervening decades. Now, I am not going to argue that modern RPGs do enough to explain how to handle role-playing, or how to run a difficult, potentially antagonistic character like this, but I do think games generally have a greater awareness of the mechanics they have, and how they might set the game up and enrich play for a Unique Selling Point, for want of a less marketing-speaky phrase. In a sense, I don’t really think Beyond The Supernatural really understood what it had created here, because it strikes me, even now, as the potential lynchpin of an entire game.

I get this feeling often: where a small part of a big game (of TTRPG and videogame both) could actually have been the entire engine of a smaller indie thing. I know it’s never really about ideas, and ideas ARE cheap, but that means they are often not really recognised as valuable and used disposably. Remember that level in Dishonored 2 with the time-travel fan? That’s like the whole loop of an indie game, right? Thrown away for one level? And to me the nega-psychic feels like much the same deal: you could have based an entire RPG on the trope of the earnest wizard/clairvoyant/FBI agent whose investigations and ghost-busting is unwittingly saved or bungled by their ultra-sceptical magic-suppressing cynic buddy. Hell, I feel like it needs writing. I really think there’s something in that. Double-hell, maybe someone made a game of it already! Perhaps, if I use my overwhelming psychic powers of optimism to alter reality, one of you will tell me.

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More soon! x