Announcing: BLOOD COTILLION. Answering: "Why Forged In The Dark?" And other matters.
Hello, you.
This, in case you are a first-time reader, is the TEETH newsletter. It’s about a series of pen and paper games made by Jim Rossignol and Marsh Davies. It also covers, in quite some nerdy detail, our interest in the TTRPG space and tabletop stuff in general. Join us! Read! Reply! And, if you enjoy what you see here, please share with like-minded others.
If you want to read and play something by us, then our first release is NIGHT OF THE HOGMEN, available on itch.io for a fee of Pay What You Want. We would absolutely appreciate any contribution, of course.
We also announce the next thing a bit further down the newsletter, in case that’s what you are here for.
Let’s begin with some stuff that caught our interest.
LINKS AND THINGS
New this week: The MÖRK BORG folks (a rules-lite, grimdarkness-heavy RPG) are doing a space game. It’s called Death In Space. You know how much we enjoy overly-instructive titles. It looks incredible.
Speaking of void-based doom, if you’re looking for something you can play solo then you should absolutely check out The Wretched, which is “a solo journaling RPG played with a deck of cards, a tumbling block tower, and a microphone.” It quotes Alien on the store page, so I suspect you already have a flavour of what to expect.
The Kickstarter for this is long over, but I’d previously missed the lovely Beak, Feather & Bone, which is “a collaborative worldbuilding tool as well as a competitive map-labeling RPG”. Honestly I’ve seen attempts to do similar things, but nothing quite like this. Please take a look.
Our bulging eyes have also been passing over Blood in The Roots, “a traditional fantasy game in a world of folk horror based in a version of medieval Britain.” As you can imagine, that’s right up our (winding, medieval) street.
There’s a D&D 5E adaptation of the exquisite Symbaroum on the way. We think that will do rather well.
Research this week dredged up this medieval cyborg, knight, and poet who seems to be the (an?) origin of the phrase “kiss my ass.”
BLOOD COTILLION
The next TEETH one-shot will be BLOOD COTILLION.
Here’s the cover.
Coming soon™.
And, with news and links done, we’re going to take a little breather from our look back at a year of intense TTRPGing for myself and Marsh, and try to talk more about that next week.
In the meantime, though, I am going to try to answer a question that we’ve been asked, and that we’ve asked ourselves. This is the question:
WHY FORGED IN THE DARK?
Well, because it’s really good?
Okay, more verbose: TEETH is based on the Forged In The Dark ruleset. For the one-shots, Hogmen and Blood Cotillion (plus one more!) we have created stripped down, distilled versions of these rules, and for the book we have expanded and adapted them to fit our 18th-century monster-hunting campaign setting. The Forged In The Dark rules were created by virtuoso designer John Harper when he produced the excellent BLADES IN THE DARK, and I think it’s worth saying that the rules are very specific to producing the kind of results that Mr Harper wanted from that title. Would it work for another game? Initially our thinking was: no.
What I like most about Harper’s inventions is that his rules tend to both anticipate and articulate the action and fiction they’re intended to express. In Blades this is heists, where the principle is cutting straight to the action (there’s “information gathering” to tell you what you are doing, but no planning of how it’s to be done: you leap in with a single roll) and retrospective context (the “how they did it” stuff is handled as flashback cuts—like you get in the edited narrative sequences of a heist movie such as Oceans 11, for example.) This imbues the game itself with a pace and lightness that isn’t initially clear from the 360-page rulebook. But what I got from it was less that I had learned rules for a game, but more that I’d mastered a set of procedures that enabled a game to feel like a specific story-type. It feels less like rules for a game than something could be thought of as a technique. Techniques, I note, tend to be very specific about that they’re technique for doing.
That aside, there are numerous rule-systems out there. So why this one? Why not make our own? Why not go for something more popular? We didn’t immediately settle on this for a new project, not least because a couple of wise folk advised that if we wanted a greater chance of attention and therefore success, we should make something compatible with a certain d20 system. Tempting, but no.
That we did settle on Forged In The Dark lies partly, I think, in the sort of pen and paper group that our Monday Night Dice Club ended up being. Back in 2016 I discussed with one of my regular boardgaming groups whether it was time to jump rails to RPGs. I’d been running two simultaneous D&D games beforehand, and so whatever we did next was definitely not going to be that. Friend and ally Quinns, of Shut Up & Sit Down fame, had been lauding Blades In The Dark, describing it with words like “magic” and “phenomenon”. He does this, but in my experience his use of those words tends to be a pretty good indicator of value. So myself and James Carey sat down to have a read of the rules and, being D&D nerds of ancient veterancy, said what I have since heard many people say of the Forged In The Dark ruleset since: “I’m just not sure how it’s going to work.”
In retrospect I am not entirely sure why we thought this, other than to say that it really is one of those things which really manifests in your understanding through practice rather than theory. This is, perhaps, once again because the rules are plugged into what you are doing, rather than being an engine on which the simulation is run. In the end we did struggle with some of the Blades rules, but the first outing was nevertheless delightful: by the end of it we had cohered upon a fast, fluid, narrative-led experience, brimming with cues for improvisation, invention, and rules-enabled foolery. This wasn’t a brakes-free improv session, of course: it was all delightfully underpinned by some hard, crunchy rules and structures that nailed the “gaminess” that everyone expected of an RPG experience. It didn’t exactly change how we viewed tabletop games, but it did prove that “rules-lite” didn’t mean “rules-thin”, and definitely didn’t mean discarding some of the campaign-length complexity that we cherished. It also meant that we had, in the space of one game, found something that suited our needs as a group entirely.
Anyway/However (is “anyhow” a portmanteau of these two words? I cannot be bothered to look it up) the question that hung in my mind— and a question I was asked by others— was whether the very specific magic of the Blades rules could really be adapted to another setting. Blades works so well precisely because it is so tailored. The pressure cooker environment of a city no-one can easily leave, the interwoven grudge-network of the gangs and factions, the payoff and heat from the cops, the immediacy and risk-taking behaviours encouraged by the system: it all spoke to a very specific kind of game. The framework of the Forged In The Dark rules, as expressed in the original Blades In The Dark seemed wholly focused on creating a foundation to support that kind of narrative. The fears that perhaps it wouldn’t work elsewhere seemed to be confirmed when we tried to play Scum & Villainy, one of the first games to use the ruleset, we felt like something was missing.
What was missing, I think, was the chemistry between setting and rules. I know loads of people have had a lot of fun with Scum & Villainy, so I don’t want to diminish that in any way, but we sure missed the mark. I do wonder whether the game needed to be more explicitly built to be a “you are a bounty hunter hunting naughty smugglers in pseudo-Mos Eisley”, or “you are smugglers running blockages against the evil empire”, then we might have connected with it more profoundly.
This is perhaps underlined by the moree convincing experience that arrived with my third run at a Forged In The Dark game, the very different Band of Blades. That campaign began to persuade me of the system’s need to be married to a driving theme (in this case your flight from a ravening horde of the undead.). I spoke about that in detail last time, but it began to make me realise that the Bladeslike techniques did work elsewhere, as long as there is a specific loop for the rules to attach to, and for the action to be about.
Writing up the one-shots—we didn’t actually start with Hogmen, but something entirely different, which will come later— has confirmed Forged In The Dark as the correct choice for me. It’s like using middleware in game dev: some of it needs hacking out of recognition, while the better stuff simply acts as a sort of scaffolding for what you’re trying to make. Boiling down the Forged rules to the minimum number of useful definitions, descriptions and examples has been a clarifying experience: it’s now possible for me to see what took us an entire book and several sessions to understand when first playing Blades In The Dark, as a thing that can be refined and reapplied in a bunch of contexts. Making this all work as the engine-house for our monster-hunting exploits in Teeth has been illuminating and rewarding to write. Not least because we can see that the lore and characters we’ve carved out are not fluff or colour, but actual structure into which the FitD rules will plug. (Neatly and firmly, like a UK three-pronged plug.)
So that, in a mere 1253 words, is why Forged In The Dark. Did I even answer the question? Maybe. Or no.
Love you!
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