Forever Plunge Inside A Pulsating Fractal
You are reading a newsletter about tabletop role-playing games. Why are you reading it? Who knows. Perhaps you lost your way, or perhaps you were cursed by a well-meaning but uncomprehending pond spirit. More likely, though, you are familiar with and excited about the life and times of Jim Rossignol and Marsh Davies, who are the handsome, genteel authors of this journal.
They are making low-prep tabletop games, and you can download/buy them here.
Hello, you.
It’s that time of day, week, month, or fortnight, where you receive an email from the TEETH newsdesk. It’s been a funny one, alright: Marsh has moved continents to be an American! A lot of work, that. But also congratulations are in order, because he is Home At Last, after a year adrift in the pandemic. We are so pleased. It also means we missed some sessons of Monday Night Dice Club. So there’s less to report on there than usual. Apologies.
Meanwhile I (Rossignol) went to Dungeness to see a nuclear power station. Less travel involved with that escapade, but there was a tiny train.
Nevermind, though, because the fantastic world of TTRPGs carries on regardless, uncoiling inexorably like one of those trippy videos where you forever plunge inside a pulsating fractal.
Deep inside the uncanny vaults of the fractal you find a desk with generic Windows 10 laptop on it.
On the screen is a list of TTRPG links.
LINKS
Mad keen on SABOTAGE. “You are workers in a factory that exploits your labor. You have decided that sabotage is the means to end your oppression.” This current spate of leftist political games fascinates me: it’s great to see expression of political thought (and action) outside of the gold-collecting framework we know and live. (I really did typo ‘love’ there, but I am going to let it stand, because yep.)
Relatedly, people have been enjoying this “you have two stats” random generator.
I mean, damn. It’s just like horoscopes, right?
Tricky-to-type RPG a|state blasted past its Kickstarter goals with great success. There’s a tweeted thread here related to one of their updates about why the game chose to reboot with our favourite system, Forged In The Dark. Some very interesting bits of design, if you are into that sort of thing. It’s the wider structure of Blades’ - and therefore Forged In The Dark’s - non-action sequences, how it manages crew, and downtime, and factional interactions, that I have been thinking about lately. It’s a thing we have had to introduce to our next game, Stranger & Stranger, in limited form. It’s that framework that decides how a campaign, rather than an individual session, really rewards or defeats play. So it’s interesting to see that considered in detail here.
Hot DAMN, three-player RPG GUN&SLINGER is looking weird and fine. Here’s the lowdown: “A Maestro and two players (Gun and Slinger) set out into a dead planet mutated by a god's forgotten child and hunt strange bounties, investigate the world and unlock hidden powers. During play, they seek to learn the nature of what’s hunting the Slinger, figure out why the Gun is sentient and discover how the world died.” Now that’s a pitch, eh? The pages are gorgeous, too.
Have oozes ever been a playable race? D&D players must know.
Comrade Bissette’s piece about Tim Hutching’s Thousand Year Old Vampire and its companion volume really goes places.
Comrade Gillen, meanwhile, has released a new version of the DIE RPG beta. We played this a while back, and it’s very good/meta.
I quite like the look of this D&D module for a small village. Classical.
Research this week took us to the extraordinary activities of bear-riding gonzo country squire John Mytton: “He had met an attractive 20-year-old woman named Susan on Westminster Bridge and offered her £500 a year to be his companion. She accompanied him to France and stayed with him until his death… Mytton kept numerous pets, including some 2,000 dogs. His favourites among them were fed on steak and champagne. His favourite horse, Baronet, had free range inside Halston Hall and lay in front of the fire with Mytton.” There’s much more, but you get the idea.
WHAT I HAVE BEEN READING AND WHY OH WHY
No interview or essay this week, apologies, but I am obviously not going to leave you empty headed. Rather, I shall talk books. Not zines and things that I have been picking up all over, but Big Old Books from my shelves.
Having secured myself in my remote laboratory, this summer has been one of a number of such books. Here are some thoughts:
(The most recent edition of) VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE by Kenneth Hite and Karim Muammar
Why have I been reading this?
FOR SECRET REASONS. I picked this up because it was related to one of 2020’s sadly cancelled secret projects, and haven’t fully got around to doing more than browsing it until now. It’s such a large and lavish book on my shelf that not reading it felt like being rude to myself for buying it. Also, research is important. How am I going to write anything if I don’t read? Gotta put words into the mincer.
What did I make of it?
It made me feel funny. It’s a very fancy book, with a tremendous amount of art to back up its cool urban chops. As a system it's richly developed, of course (this is a huge, heavy hardback of the Old School) but I don’t really have many comments on that stuff without actually playing it, or being familiar with the legacy of previous editions. More importantly, perhaps, I can’t see myself playing (either as player or GM), not because of any rules stuff, but because I just don’t buy into the Vampire fantasy. Perhaps the conceit of the monster-world-behind-our-own has become stale after a thousand movies and TV shows on the topic, but I personally don’t feel the allure of the vampire. I believe myself, perhaps erroneously, to be simultaneously both too cool and not cool enough to play a game like this. That makes sense only if there are different vectors of cool, and cool is measured within a sort of 3D space. I hope that helps.
NUMENERA: THE NINTH WORLD GUIDEBOOK by Monte Cook and Shanna Germain
Why have I been reading this?
The Numenera games are one of my collectable series of game books that I will always buy, but probably never run as intended. It’s an odd one: I really like the system and absolutely love the ridiculously ostentatious world design, but I find it difficult to imagine writing for it as a campaign, or dipping into it week after week. It’s like trying to imagine having a very rich cake for every meal. Additionally, this feeling is partly because I am not certain the groups I run with are the audience for it, and also partly because it requires a certainly level of buy-in to the concept that I am not sure I actually have myself. So I have been reading The Ninth World Guidebook to see if I can shift that perception. And because these books are so lavish, and so packed with ideas, that there’s seldom a dull moment.
What did I make of it?
Given this is an expansion of the existing gloriously-over-the-top science fantasy core system of Numenera, it is really more of the same, but there’s so much good material in here it’s hard not to just sit with it and dream of tabletop campaigns that would satisfy urges to create some vision of ultra-high science fantasy that you seldom see elsewhere. It’s just too High Budget. There are lovely maps of weird places, and a mass of sidebars, boxouts, and other page elements which burn layer upon layer of additional detail into the Numenera world. The delight for me, as just as reader and a GM, is all the little bits of flavour and hooky adventure angles that these books provide, and this beast is rich in them: crashed biomechanical craft, haunted dolls on the loose, monstrous insects trying to found a new civilisation. I have a powerful fondness for this sort of genre-hopping frivolity, and it makes me a little envious that Cook and team have had so much freedom to be wildly creative. In fact, it does feed into something I want to rescue from disaster year 2020, and might inform a future book.
d20 Modern by Bill Slavicsek, Jeff Grubb, Rich Redman, and Charles Ryan.
Why have I been reading this?
I bought this a couple of years ago and I cannot for the life of me remember why. I think I had a brief flirtation with setting-agnostic “modern” systems (Genesys being another) and then forgot all about it. Still, it was there, glaring at me, so I picked it up, and made soothing noises. Poor book.
What did I make of it?
d20 Modern is part of an entire line of d20 powered books from around 2000, where it was clear people wanted to keep the twenty-sided emblem of D&D, but play other stuff. There’s a huge catalogue of these titles that I have an urgent and irrational need to obtain and browse, but would never, ever use as part of a game. These are rulebooks in the heaviest sense: they are almost gravitational in the sheer number of instructions that they supply for various situations. Which is not necessarily a bad thing for a designer to expose themselves to. A few systems do this, but d20 Modern was the first time I had seen wealth done as a skillset, rather than an actual currency, for example. So in d20 you can be a wealthy type character, where you main ability is riches done as dice checks. This attempts to create a game of how money isn’t necessarily about gold in your purse, but can be about credit, assets, contacts, and knowhow. It opens the door to one person in the party basically being the wealthy one who funds the operations, pays off bribes, deals with other super wealthies, and generally pays for dinner - a character archetype that turns up in a bunch of books and movies, but rarely makes a showing in RPGs, for precisely the reason that it’s boring to just spend money. When it’s a role-playing scene and a skill check instead, well, that makes it infinitely more rewarding.
Gosh, there’s really something there, isn’t there? A game about using your powers as a wealthy, connected individual with not a single iota of combat or magic. Hmm!
LEGEND by David Gemmell
Why have I been reading this?
Why oh why.
Okay this is not an RPG book, or even sourcebook, but it might as well be. This is a book I am read to my boy, because he likes sword & sorcery fantasy. It was a big influence on me as a young ‘un, and so it seemed appropriate to dally in nostalgia while I had the opportunity. And actually, there was something to be taken from it.
What did I make of it?
The book is showing its age, and its arse, with some dodgy moments here and there, which I have edited on the fly, but the structure and intended drama remain pretty good. There are some parts I had misremembered and made better in retrospect (when Rek and the knights arrive should have had more drama, I think) but - oh no! - I absolutely need to run a siege as part of an upcoming TTRPG campaign. Surely this is the one to copy.
And so of the books I read this summer, it’s a novel that is the most likely to actually be something that ends up at the table. I’ll let you know how that goes.
More soon! x