Christmas Eve's Eve End Of Year Thing Of The Year!
Yuletide! You are reading the TEETH newsletter, written and compiled by rasping voice Jim Rossignol and fluting tone 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!
THINGS OF THE YEAR
Hello, you.
It’s that time again: we loom in the depths of winter as the northern hemisphere leans away from the sun in an attempt to get some goddamned sleep. I celebrated this cosmic shift in coherent style by purchasing the massive Rifts Bundle(s) Of Holding, which contains many of the books I lost in the great chaos of my early twenties, and many which I did not own in the first place. The highlight so far, as pointed out to me by a person that I actually played many of those Rifts games with in the mid 90s, musician and goatkeeper Andy Holbrook, was this line from Rifts England: "A Splugorth Highlord and ten Overlords are permanent residents of Margate. The Splugorth like their attitude." Those who know, etc.
I talked about my terrible love of Rifts earlier this year, and I might return to that theme now that I am scrolling back through these PDFs. Was it just youthful love, or was there really something to Palladium’s reckless genre-pulping? I suppose the question really is: would I ever run a Rifts game ever again? Not with that system, certainly, but there are alternatives in these latter days.
I feel like picking up these PDFs speaks to the fact that TTRPGs are two, or perhaps three, separate hobbies. I increasingly believe that the hobby of purchasing or collecting TTRPG books (or any books, really) is effectively unrelated to the reading or playing thereof. I could go into detail about this theory, but I will not. (Although for this audience I would say that it has an analogy in Warhammer being the two barely-related hobbies of buying miniatures and actually playing a tabletop combat game with them.)
Editorial note: I said last time I was going to document a playthrough of Jason Price’s delightful solo-zine Notorious, but having gone through the PDF I am going to wait for the print version, which is apparently imminent! So bear with us on that count.
Right, anyway, what now? I am going to do a little roundup of the year, which you can read after some links.
LINKS!
Just a couple of things of interest before the year closes out!
If you type “osr-rpg.com” in a browser, this is the page you go to. It stands for Outcast Silver Raiders! A little double entrendre, there. And it looks good! “Outcast Silver Raiders is what the televangelists, the hack investigative journalists, and the grasping Hollywood producers imagined when they caused a satanic panic around RPGs in the eighties. Daemons. Darkness. Sacrifice. Blood spilling over cracked altars in desecrated chapels.” To be fair I think there’s quite a lot of competition in that particular sector, currently, but OSR looks really strong!
We’ve posted elsewhere about Jeeyon Shim’s fantastic current work, but Marsh notes that Have I Been Good, from a little while back, is very much our sort of thing: “This is an epistolary game for two players, one of whom is a dog. Within the construct of this game dogs think of humans as ageless, near-immortal, untouched by sickness or death except in rare confluences of time. You know this is not true; but it does not matter.”
The Crash at Crush intentional trainwreck. Probably a metaphor for something.
THINGS OF THE YEAR
This year has been a fascinating one for me personally as it has seen me go on something of a journey in terms of my understanding of making RPGs, and also what it is that I want from RPGs. It’s a journey that we started back in 2017, when we started playing Blades In The Dark. That was the first new (to me) system that I had played in many years and, although I have never shared the propensity to fear learning new systems that many folks who came in with the Dragon game carried in their hearts, I had not really expected that playing Blades would initiate a journey into so many other games. The past few years have been one of browsing and exploration. A tasting menu of dice and character ledgers.
During this time I have come full circle from a complete lack of desire to run a long and entrenched campaign and a wish only to explore and dabble across many systems and scenarios, right back to a desire for another big campaign. We just twelve sessions of Trophy, mind you, so that was a started. And, that said, I suspect there will be more dabbling in the new year, and the Things of This Year will likely be among the dabbled.
Forged In The Dark Things Of The Year (Joint Winners)
Having created a series of Forged In The Dark games with my beloved friend Marsh Davies, I am sort of amazed that the ruleset has ended up being just so popular for general use - it is, after all, a remarkably tailored and arcane system to have been chosen as a general-use SRD, but I am glad of the excitement it has aroused in people, because it has turned up gems such as these.
Slugblaster by Wilkie’s Candy Lab: a Forged RPG about “teenagehood, giant bugs, circuit-bent rayguns, and trying to be cool”. Slugblaster is a masterpiece of repurposed rulesets, with wonderfully colourfully design throughout. And I mean literally colourful as well as how it delivers the game. Honestly just pick this up.
As The Sun Forever Sets is on my schedule to run next year (we had a lot of downtime this year, or I would have squeezed it in) because the premise and presentation — ordinary Victorian people trying to survive in the context of HG Wells’ War Of The Worlds — could not possibly be more appealing to a brain like mine. It’s also a sort of diametric opposite to Slugblaster, which demonstrates how far the poles of the FitD community have been dragged. A beautiful horizon.
Not Forged In The Dark But Actually Genetically Related Thing Of The Year
I am not sure that we’re going to have this category turn up every year in our annual awards ceremony, but you know, maybe. Trophy Gold’s dice pools and things happening on a 6, and complications happening on anything less than a six means it bears a strong family resemblance to the Forged games that we generally orbit around, without actually being anything like those games at all. Comrade Gillen, who ran one of the campaigns I played in, observed that people outside the hobby might wonder what all the fuss was about, since it might look similar to the other games, but as I explained at length, the game has a power and identity like nothing else. (Interview with creator Jesse Ross coming soon!)
Thing That My Friends Did Thing Of The Year
We talked to Kieron earlier in the year about the Kickstarter of his DIE RPG: an RPG which is based on a comic about a group of people getting sucked into an RPG in a very literal sense, which has turned out to be the most meta-thing that Gillen has ever attempted in a career of really quite-meta-indeed accomplishments. Gillen describes DIE as “goth Jumanji”, which I think actually undersells the enormity of the thing, which, as one friend put it “is like a shared-hallucination therapy session for these characters you only just made up”. It’s also just one of the most interesting things I have encountered, based on a heavily-researched understanding of RPGs as a whole.
Boardgame Experience of The Year, Forty Years After Its Release Thing Of The Year
I had never previously played the original 1970s version of Dune, which was created by the folks behind my favourite ever boardgame, Cosmic Encounter. It was, we discovered, an insane and sprawling masterpiece that delivered, over the course of several hours, intense high drama. Unforgettable, and I am nervous about trying it again.
Thing That Marsh Gave Me Thing Of The Year
Finally, look at these items from Marsh’s own childhood collection which he gifted to me for Christmas! Perhaps I am just looking after them for him as he goes off to live all around the world, but either way, it’s amazing to have that Warhammer cover on my shelf. Look at it! (The D&D one is quite good too - and it has somer glorious hex-maps in the back, we might dig into those later…)
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And that’s it from us. See you in — holy gods! — 2023.
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