Discord! Book! Zines! Interview! Martians!
This is the TEETH newsletter, a regularly irregular transmission about our adventures in the top secret land of Tabletop Roleplaying-Games. We have published a whole series of our own TTRPGs now! More games are coming! And we shall play many others, and then report on those experiences right here.
This newsletter is written and compiled by distant pulsar Jim Rossignol and looming nebula Marsh Davies.
Hello, you.
Links!
INTERVIEW WITH TEETH! (With Riley Daniels!)
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Hello, you
Aha. These newsletter things should get a bit more regular now as Jim has moved on from his long-term gig at Guildfordian videogame makers Glowmade (watch for their exciting computer game in the near future!) and will be doing a bit of the ol’ freelancing while working on these TTRPG doohickeys and other soon-not-to-be-secret projects. But also we’re opening the floor so that you can say “hey, when’s the next newsletter” directly to our avatars on the new Teeth RPG Discord! That’s right, we’re going to party like it’s 2016 and start a Discord server for the Teeth RPG Products & Services Division. And hopefully that link will work. Please be kind, we are so old and frightened.
Another link that you might be interested in is the one to buy the TEETH RPG book directly from the Soulmuppet store. If you missed the Kickstarter then now is your time. There are also copies of the map and the zine bundle!
Love you!
-Marsh & Jim
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LINKS!
Wait, what’s this? NASA, the actual North American Space Agency, are releasing their own RPG adventures now? Yes, they are, with The Lost Universe. “A dark mystery has settled over the city of Aldastron on the rogue planet of Exlaris. Researchers dedicated to studying the cosmos have disappeared, and the Hubble Space Telescope has vanished from Earth’s timeline. Only an ambitious crew of adventurers can uncover what was lost. Are you up to the challenge? This adventure is designed for a party of 4-7 level 7-10 characters and is easily adaptable for your preferred tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) system.” They mean D&D, don’t they? Tsk! Nerds.
Kneel down and cup the weird fruit of Exclusion Zone Botanist in your hand! A solo sketchbook-driven hex-crawl design that we think is inspired.
Quinns takes on the big bots in Lancer. Lots we agree with in here.
And he’s not the only one pushing Tabletop news and reporting: Rascal News is now a thing.
Research this week: our good friend Ian McQue suggested we link the deeply unfortunate John Arthur Priest. “Arthur John Priest was an English fireman and stoker who was notable for surviving four ship sinkings, including the RMS Titanic, HMS Alcantara, HMHS Britannic and the SS Donegal. Due to these incidents, Priest gained the moniker "the unsinkable stoker".”
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AN INTERVIEW WITH TEETH: Riley "AS THE SUN FOREVER SETS" Daniels.
Teeth reader Riley Daniels is one of our favourite creators. And we aren’t alone in that: Blades In The Dark publishers Evil Hat have picked up Daniels’ Victorians-survive-the-Martians game As The Sun Forever Sets to publish in the relatively near future. Needless to type, we are going to be all over that. Having read this news we realised it was time to point our Teeth interview beam in their general direction to interrogate this and many other topics, to see what information we could glean.
JR: Why do you think writing TTRPGs is such an interesting challenge? What do you get out of it?
RD: It’s such a delicate balance between pushing the players in directions that are interesting to them and giving them enough freedom to feel like they’re not forced to do something, or that they don’t have options. That’s interesting to me – the idea that you’re not the only person designing the game, part of the design always takes place at the table with the people playing. They’ll come up with scenarios you’d not imagined and interpret your rules to fit, or just discard them in favour of new ones. A big part of learning to design was learning how lightly to hold on.
Knowing how to support GMs and Players is part of that too. How much guidance is too much? Does this need an example of play or not? Too much and people might stop reading, but not enough and people might not get why you’re writing a rule the way you have. There’s a lot of differing schools of thought on this – I’d always rather over explain than under explain, and finding a good balance is pretty challenging.
To be honest, I’m not the best roleplayer! I’m kinda bad at being put on the spot and I struggle to play out how my character is feeling. I think part of what I like about writing games is enabling someone else to have that experience, prompting situations, moments and characters they can really vibe with and bring to life. I really like hearing play reports, I think my favourite part of writing TTRPGS is hearing what happened at someone else's table because it’s always so unexpected! Hearing how other people have built on the ideas you’ve had is always really cool. Playing vicariously through design!
I also just… like writing systems and laying them out in documents, it turns out. Making a little artefact that conveys what you were thinking about and the vibe of the game is a cool challenge. It’s part instruction manual, part creative writing, part artwork. Often I find the artwork and the vibe of the writing and the layout are informing the mechanics, which is really cool. Another part I really like about design is designing through play – coming to the table with something mostly complete, and saying “when we get to this thing, we’ll work out how that works”. Players really like it too! It’s very freeing, especially if you feel like you’ve been head down in a set of rules for ages.
I dunno! Games are fun! It turns out they’re mostly fun to make too!
JR: Tell me a bit about your influences? Do you find you have influences you don't or can't always acknowledge?
RD: That’s such a broad question! As the Sun Forever Sets was inspired (obviously) by the War of the Worlds. The original novel is very focused on procedural problem solving, moving from small location to small location and really drilling in on the minutiae of scenes before stepping back to deal with the emotional repercussions of what’s happened for the characters. That loop of problem-solving-to-emotional-decompression and back again is something I find really rewarding in play. The first season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead did this excellently, and managing your relationships with the people near you in ways that might have consequences is another thing I find really interesting, especially when those relationships are with characters being played by other people at the table.
Unsurprisingly I really like disaster fiction, both the 90’s movie kind with a big naive heart (Independence Day, Twister, Deep Impact) and the more recent trend towards uncomfortable, creeping terror (Shin Godzilla, Contagion, Chernobyl). Gravity is one of my favourite movies and was hugely important to me as a closeted trans woman trying to work up the courage to come out. It’s the perfect combination of space explosion bombast and a heartening story of how difficult taking the first step out of a cold unfeeling void can be – finding a reason to carry on, no matter how dark things are or might get – a perfect trans coming out metaphor. Sandra Bullock’s last transmission still makes me well up!
I played a lot of Amiga and PC games growing up, I was always really drawn to games that had an intense atmosphere. Things like Uplink: Hacker Elite, Quake, Another World, UFO: Enemy Unknown and Ecco the Dolphin. Maybe it was because I was too young to really understand how they worked (and wasn’t good enough to finish them), but they all had this undercurrent of mystery to them, like I was walking on ice above a frozen lake and at any point the experience would crack and I’d fall into some new situation I was completely unprepared for. Maybe the hacks in Uplink were actually real? My child brain couldn’t completely rule out the idea that the FBI were actually coming to get me for computer crimes. I got the same feeling watching the first Blair Witch and Ghostwatch. It sounds a little silly, but that sense of enormous unknown is a feeling I really like playing with in games.
It’s interesting that you ask about influences you can’t always acknowledge. On the Runescape episode of the always excellent RTFM podcast, Max talks about citing the inspirations of your work in the context of academic writing and how that applies to TTRPGs. It’s a great episode and you should listen to it, but to summarise – when you cite an influence, you’re giving that work and the author of it power (however small) by pushing people to their work.
So for me it’s less can’t acknowledge and more won’t acknowledge – I have a bunch of ideas for games knocking around inspired hugely by media whose authors later turned out to be scumbags. I can’t deny the influence these works have had on me and the ideas I’ve drawn from them, but I’m not going to implicitly recommend you give these scumbags your money by virtue of putting their names in the appendix N of whatever game ends up being produced at the end.
JR: That’s a very good answer, which I have a similar feeling about! As The Sun Forever Sets is one of my favourite settings for any RPG and I want to hear about the process of coming up with it, creating it, and then how it came to be being published by Evil Hat! Please tell us that story in florid detail.
RD: So as mentioned, As the Sun Forever Sets is massively inspired by the original War of the Worlds novel, to the point where it’s basically an adaptation. I listened to the 1978 musical version as a kid (I think my mom just really wanted me to get into musicals??) and it was… kind of terrifying? That was how I found out about the story. It’s such a neat premise for a roleplaying game, I was surprised no-one had already made it, honestly!
I kept the Victorian setting because limitations in survival or horror fiction are always interesting (why every mobile phone in any mid 2010’s horror film suddenly stops working when shit goes down.) So telephones or cars are luxuries for rich enthusiasts, it’ll take a few days to receive a reply to your telegraph, you can’t just hop on a plane and skedaddle out of the country, etc. The contrast between the level of technology that Britain has and the Martian tech – giant walking tripods, machines that fly, incredibly long range deadly heat rays – is a cool space to roleplay in, it feels like terrible magic when a row of houses get sliced cleanly in two.
One thing I changed was allowing the Narrator (the GM) to come up with their own Martian Machines in a very freeform way (with a few guidelines), so they can evolve the threat to the situation, and keep the players under pressure. If you know the story, you kind of know what the Martians are capable of. Letting the Narrator come up with whatever they want keeps things feeling alien. Maybe the red weed is reanimating corpses that all share a neural connection? Maybe the Martians are building a Half-Life 2-esque teleporter that brings in new Martians out of nowhere? Maybe along with the red weed, there’s more hostile invasive lifeforms besides the Martians that arrive to menace the players?
Another thing that was really important was allowing the Players to be anyone and go anywhere. The book is all about the journey, rather than the destination (again, similar to things like The Last of Us and Annihilation), so letting players decide where they wanted to go and what they wanted to do without constraining them by structure or location was a big deal. Giant alien tripods can really be inserted into any scene, so it’s fun to let the players decide where that is – it allows the table to build up their day to day lives, the people they know, their trials and tribulations, then blow it all up and ask them what’s next.
As I mentioned, the original book has a really narrow focus on the minute-to-minute of what’s going on, and I wanted to keep that intact. The game takes place over 15 days, and a lot of the game is working out what you want to spend your time doing. Time is a resource, every day the Martians advance and the situation gets worse. If you can’t stay ahead of the front of the Martian war, things start getting more and more desolate and otherwordly – you go from worrying about trying to convince people that “yes, Martians are real and we need to get out of here” to worrying about the strangeness that infects people as the landscape becomes more martian, as well as y’know… the Martians sucking all of your blood out if they find you. Plus, a realistic Victorian era that has fantastical elements without defaulting to steampunk was something I hadn’t seen a lot of when I started writing – ATSFS isn’t airships and brass goggles, it’s wrought iron gears that’ll tear your arm off because health and safety at work doesn’t exist as a concept.
I’ve kinda taken to describing the game as a science fiction revenge fantasy? Conservative fuckheads have this myopic reverence for “the good old days”. Exactly which days they’re talking about varies, but in Britain, reverence for Empire is always a key part of it. Honestly, mostly I just wanted to retroactively blow it all up – the Martians tear everything up and reduce the Empire to ashes, and the people left alive have to learn to be equitable human beings. That’s part of the reason for letting the players be anyone – outside of the action scenes, the game is about learning to work together and support each other, and how the Characters are changed by what’s going on. That’s interesting when up until recently, someone was the Lord Mayor and someone else slept in the Poorhouse. Part of their arcs usually involve reacting to the inequitable structure of society and its institutions suddenly dissolving. How do they deal with how they played that system, or were played by it? How hard or easy is it for them to let go of the past, and if they make it through the present, what do they want for the future? It’s the backdrop to the moment-to-moment action, and some of the roleplay that’s shown up in games I’ve ran that played in this space has been incredible.
As for working with Evil hat, I was extremely sceptical they’d be into the idea, or my execution of it! As the Sun Forever Sets is my first game, and it’s very mechanically different from their other Forged in the Dark games – there’s no action ratings, no flashbacks, no quantum gear, it’s a sandbox hex crawl, it’s literally a game about planning based on “Blades don’t-get-bogged-down-in-planning in the Dark”! They also don’t have a lot of explicitly horror games in their catalogue. A few people from the Blades in the Dark Discord were encouraging me to submit it, and I thought “ah well, when they reject it that’ll be a good motivation to run a crowdfunding campaign or something!” So I was kind of shocked when they were on board, and they’ve been really great to work with. They really get what I’m going for, and have been super helpful and supportive with the whole thing.
JR: A friend recently said to me that he feels like TTRPGs have hit some sort of event horizon where the state of creativity is accelerating, and I pretty much agree. We're entering some new phase, or are already in it. What's your feeling about that?
RD: I dunno! It’s exciting and cool! I’m not a big rpg theory girl when it comes to how mechanics and gameplay styles have evolved, but it feels like there’s a lot of cool new ideas floating around! I feel like this is connected to the big influx of new people (me included) getting into TTRPGs as a result of the pandemic, the popularity of actual plays like Friends at the Table and the Adventure Zone, stuff like that. All these new folks come with new influences, so it makes sense a lot of new feeling stuff is appearing!
I think a lot of newer (generally speaking) designers want to create focused experiences, rather than trying to create an “ur-system” that works for every conceivable scenario like GURPS or whatever, which lets you think about mechanics more creatively. Trophy Dark is a good example of this – you’re doomed, all we really care about is the story of your downfall, so what do we need to make that work? Well, not a lot! The objective is to have a satisfying, creative end for your characters, so that’s where all the mechanics are pointed. That’s not to say smaller focused games haven’t existed until recently, but I think they’re more popular to make now. It’s a lot more common for designers to be like “here are my 12 oneshot games” rather than “here’s my one game I’ve been working on for 5 years”, if you get what I mean.
The barrier of entry is also a lot lower – itch and drivethru let you put your game out super easily once it’s written, you don’t have to be beholden to a publisher if you don’t want to be. People who enjoy these smaller experiences care far less about the expensive, art focused book formats of something like DnD or Pathfinder, and people are routinely making fantastic games in print for a few thousand dollars after a crowdfunder. Plus, most designers either release SRDs or give explicit permission for other designers to utilise their rulesets, so there’s a lot more starting points for games available – you don’t have to come up with a completely unique system every time you start a project, unless you want to – grab whatever feels most relevant to what you want to create, and just go from there.
JR: Tell me about the TTRPGs that inspire and provoke you? Why do they have meaning for you?
RD: I don’t actually play that many games (something I’m trying to fix!) Most of what I know about games comes watching other people play them and trying to work out what they’re doing mechanically.
In terms of inspiration, I participated in an early playtest of Exiles – you’re a group of teen outcasts banished to the Below, a hell you’re working to crawl out of, and the way it pushes you to really lean into its emotional core (a lot of bittersweet heartfelt moments with your friends, screaming and crying while stabbing monsters with cursed swords, becoming more and more corrupted by your engagement with the power of the Below, etc) was incredible. It gets to my favourite part of these sorts of games, you get to a point where you realise the game has been playing you the entire time, and you’re being pushed towards an inevitable conclusion you hadn’t realised you wanted.
Reading through Slugblaster was also huge for me. Forged in the Dark games are kind of notoriously hard to explain, there’s so many moving parts that work well in play because you’re only engaging with a couple at a time, but can be kind of overwhelming to read all at once and fully internalise. This is especially true when it comes to putting it all down in a book, because all the different mechanics are competing with each other to be explained first (I can spend stress when making actions, so should the book explain stress first, or what actions are? But my actions are affected by my harm, so should I explain that before I explain actions?? But people want to know how to do stuff in the game, so maybe actions should be first???) Mikey strips the system down to the bare essentials for what’s needed, and his writing is so good. Not only is it super clean in its approach to explaining the rules, Mikey’s voice comes through as clear as a bell – goofy, funny and sarcastic with an edge of energy and enthusiasm, but also disarmingly earnest and heartwarming. I literally read the book and told Evil Hat I had to do a rewrite!
Twilight 2000 4e definitely provoked me! The game seems so mechanically cool for what it’s doing, but the theme is so dry! I don’t wanna essentially a Call of Duty side character! A lot of the early inspiration for how things should work on the survival and character creation side of things for As the Sun Forever Sets comes from my interpretation of the T2k mechanics. It’s cool! Building a character by describing your past is great! But it really incentivises you to be a “gun guy”, what it produces is a CV rather than a story about who you are. Sure, you’ll know what weapons you’re most proficient in, if you know first aid, what’s in your backpack, but as a player, I’m a lot more invested in a characters’ personal qualities, because it informs how I’m going to play them. That’s why the As the Sun Forever Sets character creation is the way it is – don’t just tell us what qualifications you got from university, tell us how your first love taught you empathy or compromise, how you became exposed to revolutionary ideas at a leftist rally, how your father taught you to shoot a gun and destroyed your sense of self worth on the same wet autumn afternoon in the forest! That’s the interesting stuff!
JR: Where do you stand on a) diceless RPGs, and b) GMless games?
RD: I like GMless games, I’ve made one! I think they’re a really good gateway into TTRPGs generally – you’re not asking one person to learn the entire game (and usually buy it) so everyone can play. GMing is a lot of work to give to one person, and if they like the sound of that (I often prefer GMing to being a Player) then that’s great, but when you’re just starting out, it can feel like a lot. Breaking the role up into lots of little bits that are then shared around the table makes things a lot more approachable. Plus, some games just work better without a GM! I can’t imagine the experience of Wanderhome or Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast being improved by having one.
A lot of games with a traditional GM do the dividing or responsibilities thing to great effect too, Forged in the Dark games in particular typically encourage the players to do a lot of what would be a GM’s job in a more trad style game, or tell the GM to ask the Players when they’re not sure what happens. The first game I ran was Scum & Villainy, and feeling able to just ask the table “ok, does anyone have any good ideas for what the consequence here is?” really took the self imposed pressure of making sure the game was fun off’ve me. I don’t know how much fun I would’ve had if I’d been running something that encouraged me to be the sole thing making the world we were playing in run.
I’ve not had a bunch of experience with diceless games honestly. TTRPGs kinda fetishize the clicky clacky math rocks, but they’re ultimately just tools to give over ownership of what happens next to chance, and there’s plenty of other ways to do that. Cards or tokens are great, Dread’s unbranded wooden block tower is great, just talking it through and having a conversation about what would be interesting as an outcome is also great!
TTRPGs are really given to experimentation because of the flexibility they have at the table. Some games have more, some have less, but ultimately something cool will come out of throwing away the default ideas like GM’s or dice of how they should work and coming up with something new.
JR: Recommend some stuff to the TEETH readership! It doesn't have to be a TTRPG, even. Just something cool you think they might care about. Tell us why it's important to you that it's known about.
RD: So something you’ll hopefully care about and realise the implicit importance of is that I’m raising money for my local trans youth group! Get a bunch of games for $5! So many people have donated titles, which is incredibly generous of them. Everything raised will be used to help pay the youth worker, and hopefully take the kids to Trans Pride this year, if we can!
As for TTRPGs – Foul Play. It’s loosely Forged in the Dark game based on Untitled Goose Game and it fucking rips, it’s so much fun. There’s something about roleplaying a bunch of naughty geese mildly fucking with a hapless group of rural folk that just inspires you to put your stupidest, funniest roleplaying hats on, and it works so well.
I’ve also been meaning to finish Signalis. It’s so good! The Silent Hill 1/MGS 1 graphical style is so on point, everything feels appropriately creepy and gritty whilst leaving enough space for the unknown. I've played for 10 hours and I still have no idea what's going on, I'm just enjoying the descent from dark sci fi into a weird wet red hell. I feel like most people know how good this game is by now?? But it’s cool and I just wanna shout it out. Less a recommendation and more a fixation!
JR. Tell us about your other games!
RD: So a lot of the other things I’m working on are on the backburner right now, until I get the As the Sun Forever Sets final draft finished up. Into the Blind has a free preview that you can grab that I think the final game will shape up quite differently from. It’s based on Trophy Dark and Gold, and started as a more straight sci fi version of those games, but it’s now a little more like a weird analog space game more generally. You might be salvagers, explorers, “solving” mysteries, or just having a good cry in space. I’m pulling in all sorts of inspirations for it – Hardspace: Shipbreaker, Solaris, Contact, Control, Half-Life, Inside, the list goes on – but ultimately it’ll be lethal, introspective emotional roleplay on the weird edge of analog space. And hopefully it’ll be compatible with all your Mothership modules!
Ghoulboys is done (for now) though! It’s a GMless game based on the Belonging outside Belonging system about a group of amateur ghost hunters who spent too much money on dubious ghost hunting equipment fucking around in supposedly haunted locales trying to make youtube videos. It’s kind of taking that push-pull between fear and laughs from things like Most Haunted, Phasmophobia and Ghost Files – with one player playing a sceptic of the paranormal, one playing a person who believes in it, and one just in it for the content – and throwing a bunch of random results from your dodgy equipment at you for you to interpret for your own ends.
If you like the sound of these, you can join my discord where I run playtests and post snippets of what I'm working on (right now: a super lightweight version of Blades in the Dark called Switchblades), which will hopefully get more frequent pretty soon!
JR: Now that sounds like our kind of thing! Thanks for your time.
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Next time: Mothership, Blades In The Dark.