Gold Teeth: Recounting AGON, more links, and more maw.
Sorry.
This week has been a busy one for team TEETH and Marsh has been drawing the illustrations for BLOOD COTILLION, our next one shot. In case you missed it last time we announced the second one-shot, which is in the final stages of prep now, in the last last newsletter. And we’re having a ball with it, if you catch my drift.
Speaking of those one-shots: venerable comrade in righteousness Kieron Gillen ran our first outing, NIGHT OF THE HOGMEN, over at The Gauntlet and recording the proceedings. You can watch that over here. It’s a delight to see this stuff working in the wild.
Also, this week I’ve broken up the threads in this newsletter to make it a bit more digestible after last week’s braindump download: so below there’s a brief section continuing to catch up on what we’ve been playing in 2020/2021, and I shall continue to talk about that stuff until we exhaust that thread. However, next week I shall do continue that and ALSO get back to tackling an explanation of TEETH itself; with a detailed introduction the full setting and the book (BIG TEETH, if you will) with some talk about what it is and where we’re going with it, which will also continue over several weeks.
Other Things
Possum Creek Games’ latest, Wanderhome, is not like TEETH. But don’t let that dissuade you. It’s a completely sumptuous animal TTRPG with some of the finest production values we’ve seen.
I’ve been meaning to link to Wyrd Science for a while: a magazine publication dedicated to their stranger bits of the pen & paper or tabletop gaming. It even has a interview with Kieron Gillen in it, and who wouldn’t want to read an interview with Kieron Gillen? He’s certainly one of the stranger bits of the pen & paper scene. (That’s all for Kieron Gillen links this week, I promise.)
We’re really into maps this week, and most weeks, and in fact all the time, so solo map-making game DELVE looks like a good bet to us.
Ten Million HP Planet. Probably best to check this one out for yourself.
Research is going really well this week.
Agon
So yes, rewind back to the summer of 2020, and The Catfail Club are playing AGON, hosted by Failbetter’s Chris Gardiner. AGON is a game of Greek myth and legend, but it is, more abstractly and, arguably more importantly, a co-operative game about Who Is Best.
So who is best? And why? Well, it’s at this point where I begin to be convinced that John Harper (and Sean Nittner, in this instance) has in fact made some sort of crossroads pact to understand the link between narrative systems and mechanical systems better than anyone else, because the underlying theme of AGON (explored for different themes and settings in a couple of other playbooks) is one that can be separated from the main Greek hero theme, but also absolutely articulates and enables it to a point that I found startling. The ruleset facilitates the idea of playing a myth-person of antiquity via a bunch of procedure that I initially found daunting and then found vital: to my delight we had created Greek heroes and the legend they were moving through within a few questions from the “Strife” player (GM). By the start of our actual quest we had already razed Carthage and become lost in the Mediterranean, each of us already in thrall of our various patron gods. The game sets all this up with some ripe questions, and prompts that bring the Greek hero stuff out with a gleam.
AGON is, again, a dice-pool type game where you describe your actions and then roll the dice to see what happens. But how and when that description happens is not quite like Forged In The Dark. Nor is it doing things with a faintly conservative fistful of d6 this time, no, because the various dice are upgraded through d8 and its larger platonic cousins, to give you greater capacity to roll high individual numbers as the game moves forward. Nor are these dice linked solely to trad type ability stats, but instead are also linked to your name, your standing with the gods, your relationships with other players, and so on. In taking an action you will, as you might expect, describe your actions, but the structure here is one in which we describe after the dice roll, because how well each character did actually matters for deciding Who Is Best.
For example: we fought some harpies, as you might when you stumble across a cursed isle in the Balearic blue, and that action saw two of us succeed, and one fail. Of those that succeeded, one rolled highest, and that hero was best. (The failure was one of standing: my hero embarrassing herself as she tried to match the others.) So although we worked together to defeat our enemy, and did defeat them, it was that player (I think in that particular case James Hewitt’s robust warrior Kyriakos) who finally vanquished the monsters, and who took the glory. He got to describe his ultimate victory, so that they other characters were, for that scene, relegated to supporting actors in the action.
Who did what and how really matters to the round-by-round action of AGON, just as it does in the telling of, say, a Greek epic. The way that become narrative currency is that glory is XP: it eventually allows your character to develop more, and to unlock better dice.
That might sound exponential, but there are so many other moving parts, and so many different structures through which players pass (and resources which they can expend, such as calling on the various gods to assist them in their moment of need) that it ends up being a fairly close-run thing.
As I said last time, I think the exciting thing for me about Harper’s rule systems is that he’s adept at building frameworks which match the kind of story, theme, and action that the games are about, and AGON feels like an extremely example of that. It’s supremely rulesy, with diagrams for the big moments of facing off against the story’s major challenges (be that monsters, or landslides, or social dilemmas) and an intricate web of cost and reward, angering gods, and earning a better name for yourself, which you map on your sheets as you go. But the end result, the feed which the computation spews out, as it were, really feels Greekly mythological in a way that completely surprised me.
I recommend AGON with reservation: it’s a lot, and both the GM and the players will be doing some work to make it sing, but the pay-off is magnificent.
Did that influence the development of Teeth? Perhaps a little, in the way in which we’re asking players to think about their personal agendas in the game world, but stewing on what co-op means in such games really did give me a fresh perspective on the dynamics of a group, and how personal glory (and individual victories achieved as part of a group) might factor in to how the story finally comes to pass.
(And hell, I am truly anxious to see where Harper goes next.)
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Love you! x