Behold! You Can Pay What You Want For FALSE KINGDOM
False Kingdom
Marsh & Jim Explain Themselves
There is no 3. this time.
But there will be a 3. in a regular newsletter next week!
And who wouldn’t want to be a medieval miscreant?
Today we're pleased to announce the immediate release of FALSE KINGDOM, a table-top tale of treachery and greed in the court of a doomed king. It's available on itch.io today. Pay what you want, or nothing at all!
What is it? It's a grotesquely comic standalone campaign for 3-5 players in which a group of conniving courtiers attempt to survive a bloody succession crisis in a cursed corner of 12th-century England. Like our other zines, it's based on the Forged in the Dark ruleset and lasts just a handful of sessions, during which the characters—
embark on absurd and disgusting Arthurian quests
stab each other in the back, not always metaphorically
compete to be the one who narrates the tale of their proud deeds back at court
become the Favourite courtier and amass extravagant titles and weird rewards
—all before they likely meet a horrible end. All in 78-pages of Marsh Davies-designed and illustrated handsomeness!
In FALSE KINGDOM each player takes on the role of a sycophantic courtier who has made the mistake of supporting a deranged pretender to the crown. This False King is a capricious and dangerous fool who is certain to die when the True King arrives with his army. And yet, until that moment, he remains the courtiers’ only lifeline and single hope of advancement in a desperate feudal world. All they can do is attempt to survive the treachery and chaos of the False King’s final days and time their betrayal very well indeed.
Marsh & Jim Explain Themselves
Our heroes have made another TEETH game! But what was their motivation? What terrible crimes did the commit to make this latest endeavour possible? Let’s find out!
MD: So, Jim, why did we go all medieval?
JR: There’s a terrible love for medieval stuff in many an Englishman’s heart. I know there is some in your own! And although I am unknown-parts French, and therefore the natural enemy of myself, I am absolutely unable to resist the pull of barons, chainmail, and a state in which the wielding of power by the church creates a sort of gothic backdrop of hierarchical and systemic corruption which is so absurd as to be sort of funny? Pre-Reformation Church stuff always strikes my brain like a bell. Anyway, when we were writing TEETH we couldn’t help but allude to the early eras which fed into The Vale, including its founding in the 12th century, and my imagination was already straying down the path by the time we finished the book. Combine with that your natural (and studied) flair for things of that era, and it made sense to write another manuscript filled with English historical fancies! And horrors.
MD: I think this is our most mean-spirited TTRPG yet. Hooray?
JR: It is definitely mean! Our first draft was called HORRIBLE KINGDOM, because it’s about the sort of hardscrabble nastiness that the early medieval era has a good line in. We ended up leaning into that horribleness broadly across the whole game. The characters are horrible, and they are out for themselves, even though they are obliged to co-operate to overcome horrible situations. More importantly, FALSE KINGDOM, as it became, is a game in which players need to work together until they don’t, which is a theme that I do rather like in my games! To give people a quick idea of why it’s mean: as we’ve described, the players are in the thrall of The False King, whose favour they rely on for everything, and whose whims they must address if they are to thrive. Of course, to meet his whims they must work together, but once those whims have been satisfied, they must compete to take the credit! This means being the one who gets to whisper the tale of their proud deeds to the king, or to sing it to the whole drunken court, and so a brawl to be the storyteller ensues, and someone will end up in the tower. RECOUNTING THE DEDE could have been alternative title for the game, as this scene, where you place yourself as the favourite of the king by puffing up your achievements, or pin the responsibility on someone else to escape the hand of fate, is such a pivotal moment. It’s also the one that people were most excited for in playtesting. And yes, come the next adventure, they must forgive and forget because they need to address the False King’s desires once more. This cycle is a similar one to our other games, but I feel rather more bawdy, rather more bad tempered! Horrible. Mean. Funny! I suspect this is our funniest game by some distance.
MD: It's also our most historically inaccurate, which is something I didn't expect heading into the project. Our games do have wizards in them though, so the bar for historical accuracy isn't terribly high, I guess, but I was surprised by just how hard it is to casually represent the 12th century. Nearly everything we recognise as medieval is a 14th century invention - including the language!
JR: Yes. That’s partly the attraction for me when reading about that sort of era: it is so distant as to be quite alien. The role of the church, the structure of the state, the language, the culture. It’s very different. But, as you say, it’s also fairly hard to present authentically in a way that meshes with the way we have ended up presenting TEETH? The 1700s were easier to be faithful to because things are more recognisably modern, I think. A few people have said that TEETH is a sort of Blackadder-y horror game, and they are not mistaken, but I think this game is the most accurate to that description by being almost literally the plot of Blackadder I. In that long-lost sitcom Brian Blessed is the false king. I swear I did not put that together until after we had written several drafts of the document! But yes, we’ve not been historically accurate at all, in the end, and less so that TEETH itself. But the invention and archetype-fiddling we’ve done for the characters, challenges, and Things Which Can Be Acquired in FALSE KINGDOM have ended up being hugely entertaining in a way which historical accuracy will just have to fold its arms and be quietly satisfied with.
MD: Something I wanted to simulate—to the point where I nearly derailed the entire project trying to cram it in—was the see-saw-ing of loyalties between the current king you are serving, who is obviously going to die, and the king who is going to come along and kill him. I just think that is a feature of these sorts of political systems, and even modern day dictatorships, that is so ripe for drama and comedy: courtiers scrambling to position themselves advantageously as the new regime sweeps in and hurriedly condemning everything they previously stood for. It's horrible too, obviously, but very funny. I really wanted that building sense of doom and tension as the courtiers try to work out when and how they are going to make the moves necessary to survive the coming of the True King, all while trying to survive the final days of the False King too.
JR: Yes, it was a hard thing to systematise for the game, and I hope that the role-playing-led solutions we’ve asked the players to indulge in end up delivering the drama inherent in it. Not least because, for what it’s worth, don’t even think that sort of backstabbing and condemnation of the person you were just supporting is really confined to authoritarian regimes, I think we’ve seen a fair bit of it on both sides of the Atlantic in the past five years! It’s almost as if all art is commentary. Or biography. Or one of those writery things! Anyway, Reader, I hope you enjoy more of our absurd world-building. This is a particularly lunatic outing. As you say, Marsh, it might be the best zine-length thing we’ve done so far. It’s big! Seventy-eight pages! It’s funny! And it’s free, although we greatly appreciate the tips and donations so that we can keep cranking out the games (and newsletters!)
Naturually, there’s more to come.
FALSE KINGDOM is available now!
This is the TEETH newsletter, 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 now! More games are coming soon. And we shall play many others, and then report on those experiences right here, too.
This newsletter is written and compiled by illiterate outlaw, Jim Rossignol, and girthy friar, Marsh Davies. Come and join us over on the TEETH Discord. Jim will tell you what the postman delivered this week.
And hey, BUY OUR BOOK. (And maps and zines!)