I Shall Never Build A Fine Tower
You are reading the TEETH newsletter, a series of delightful missives related to, although not exclusively about, our TEETH tabletop RPG series. If you are enjoying this, please share it with others, so that they might join with us in the splendour of newslettering.
Hello, you.
Summer holidays are here at Teeth Towers, and that has meant all kinds of activity, including some on-the-ground research for TEETH (which is, we should not have to mention, a series of games of 18th-century monster hunting). This took the form of walking around the gardens at Stourhead in a thunderstorm. The path around the lake “is meant to evoke a journey similar to that of Aeneas's descent in to the underworld,” which was made entirely more believable by the heavens crackling and boiling overhead. That’s exactly how the fine ornamental gardens were supposed to be experienced, I am certain. Although we did not, you can also visit this tower. What a fine 18th century tower to commemorate a recent war, on the site of a 9th century battle against the Danes, that is! It shall always be one of my great regrets that I shall never build a fine tower, to commemorate a recent war, on the site of a 9th century battle against the Danes.
I digress. This week we see the second, although surprisingly not concluding, part of Jim and Marsh’s chat about TTRPG feelings, as well as a small account of our most recently embarked-upon campaign, based on the excellent zine, The Vast In The Dark.
But first: Links!
LINKS
The Kickstarter for The Price Of Coal isn’t live yet, but you can and should subscribe for a notification for when it is. A game based on real life labour disputes really captured our imagination: you should at the very least know about The Battle Of Blair Mountain, if you don’t already. How will a game if it work? We are fascinated to find out.
Oh, sorry, this is another link for an unstarted Kickstarter, but it’s by TEETH interviewee, the excellent Chris Bissette, and you won’t want to miss it. Down In Yongardy is Chris’ solo-play supplement for the weird and wonderful Troika, a funny and dark thing which we played a bit of last year as a dream sequence within our Blades In The Dark campaign. I mentioned that briefly in this account of 2020’s dense TTRPG experiences.
For something you can get your, uh, teeth into a little sooner, have a look at The Thawing Kingdom.
Our colleage Mr Gardiner has been telling us all about the Beowulf RPG, which really does command the attention: a two player D&D 5e hack thing where one of you is the GM and the other the hero and his band of henchcharacters. I am sorely tempted by the idea of a wading into a romantically bleak fenland to fight mythic European monsters. It’s also an impressively beautiful book, which alone lures and beguiles us.
Also, consider DODECAHEDRAX.
Five Against The Sea King is Enid Blyton vs Cthulhu. You can play it in your browser.
Bill Roper talked about fudged dice. It’s a concern of ours, too, Bill.
Research this week led us to the 1912 Olympics pistol shooting event. Just look at that formally casual pose! Gangster af.
Monday Night Dice is playing THE VAST IN THE DARK
We played this! The Zine seems to imply the use of Knave, which is the tightest and most effortless OSR system I have encountered (which, helpfully, is also implemented on Roll20). We used this to create characters in a few minutes, and set off into the megastructural desert. (We could have used D&D of course, but we did not.)
Our heroes awoke under an abyssal black sky in a rolling waste of pale sand dunes, dust, and shattered rock. In their sleep they dreamt of another world and another life. Was it their life before this? They recognised each other, although they could not say how or where.
The team explored a nearby megastructure, eventually finding an object from Olly’s character’s dream (or former life) half buried in an ossuary.
Later the team encountered men desperately searching for a kidnapped child, and followed them to a troubled settlement in trouble: the food was running out, and their lost sorcerer child, born in The Vast, had been abducted by bandits. A call to action, in this alien place!
We played the session with no combat and few actual challenges, but the sheer oppressive weight of atmosphere that the Vast setting provided us with meant that those things felt a hairsbreadth away, and the outline or lore and rules it provides mean that things are going to get interesting very quickly indeed. There are survival elements here, as well as insanity aspects, and some fascinating stuff thrown in with people and monsters for good measure. I’ll let you know how we get on as the thing gets deeper down.
IDLE CHAT: Our Meandering TTRPG Conversation Part 2
You can and should absolutely read Part 1 in this previous newsletter!
JR: Have you ever been emotionally attached to an imaginary object, Marsh?
MD: It's best not to become too attached to anything—people or objects—in the kinds of TTRPG campaigns we play! Pets tend not to fare well, either. A beloved ferret was ushered to the great beyond as it clung to the back of a burning hog. Did the last owl we befriended survive? Probably not.
I get slightly more attached to items in videogames than TTRPGs, perhaps for the crass reason that they are readily visualised and we tend to play TTRPGs without miniatures. I get very offended when I find a Common Dagger that, simply because of the level curve, is ten times as powerful as my Legendary Stiletto. As an aside, I think it's amusing that, increasingly, games like Assassin's Creed have acknowledged this attachment, and sought to engineer ways round the obsolescence that the game's own enervating Loot Grind creates, such that you can now keep weapons and simply upgrade their stats to match the power level of the new gear you are finding. This seems like a mad way of doing things, rather than just removing the Loot Grind, but I suppose it clumsily appeases both people who obsessively hoard shiny things and people who are simply addicted to numbers going up.
Anyway, something in TTRPGs that I do get strongly attached to is the character I play. I think we've discussed before the merits and drawbacks of briskly killing characters—and my sense is you are keener on it than I am! We've dabbled in games where individual characters are disposable, and you are encouraged to burn through them fast, rolling new ones to tell the story of the larger group. That doesn't work well for me: the very appeal of TTRPGs is the investment I make in a character. It should be very possible for them to die, of course, or the stakes aren't real. But if they become something one easily discards then I don't think I'd be able to maintain interest. Am I right that you feel differently? What do you invest yourself in when playing such macro-focused games?
JR: I have to admit I am not ever really invested in characters. This might be to my detriment as a writer, or it might be that I have spent most of my TTRPG career as a GM, but I feel like the disposability of characters is often what makes them interesting: that they can suddenly be gone. Occasionally I create a really good NPC that I mean to use again and again - the sinister is-he-a-demon Mr Kemplen in our Blades campaign was a favourite creation, while I had a helpful-but-brutal hill giant called Mungo in an old D&D campaign who became an ongoing mascot for the adventure - and I would probably be sad if I couldn’t reuse those.
That said, I do recognise that people want the journey of their characters to be a big part of the experience of campaign TTRPGs (worrying about characters perishing perhaps makes less sense in one-shots or short run games). There was an old D&D campaign we played where a situation came up where someone could die instantly due to a monster’s poisoning powers, but they had to roll something like three 1s in a row on a D20, and of course they did. I was powerfully torn over whether to fudge this and bend the rules, not least because that that player had put SO MUCH work into that character, but it seemed more dramatic to face the sudden death. The trickier thing was that there was no way to insert a new character (they were trapped in an alien dimension) into the campaign, which was a real headache for a while, and the solution still didn’t make a lot of sense when it came along.
In the present, though, I am wondering whether we, as in the group we are currently playing with, need to do a character-focused campaign. Something with real space for growth and development. We’ve been playing a lot of single scenario and one-shot games this year, and I think actually the one I was most keen on continuing was Mothership, because the characters you guys created were great. (And the game is good for providing that.) However we didn’t really click with the system as a whole, so that was a difficult one to commit to continuing. I do really like the idea of doing a crew-of-ship game, as it’s a classic setup, and one we’ve never really made work (with Mothership being the closest to a successful campaign in that genre.)
What would you like to see our group explore next?
MD: I've been mulling over crew-of-ship games, too—though in my case these were specifically nautical, perhaps piratical adventures. But I suspect I'd have to invent my own to scratch the exact High Seas itch I have. I love a good naval tale, but despite having read and loved every book in the Aubrey-Maturin series—despite having been sailing, in fact—I've gained almost no practical understanding of how sailing works whatsoever. So the TTRPG I want about it would be very particular: a precise blend of light-touch, accurate-but-not-technical cooperative naval simulation and crew roleplay. I don't think this exists anywhere but my head currently, and perhaps not even there, but maybe readers will have ideas of where to look.
Short of that, I've been looking lustily at the Silks add-on for Blades in the Dark, in which you play not as a band of reprobates, but the lawyers who must defend them. I expect they are also reprobates, now I come to think of it, but they'll be wearing wigs too, and that's important.
Do you have any half-conceived fantasy-fulfilling TTRPGs you wish existed (and may one day wish into existence)?
JR: There’s a huge list, to be honest. I want to do a xeno-archaeological spaceship RPG where you play competing AI intelligences aboard a lost ship. Jon Harper’s Paragon system (used for Agon and a few others) fits this idea now that I am aware of it: the AIs struggling to be The One Who Is Best, in the competitive co-op dynamic that makes Agon so interesting.
I also want to do something horror based set in contemporary England. A small town where things get cosmically threatening. I have some notes for that and it might end up being a thing sooner rather than later. I also have a couple of system-agnostic settings that I would like to work on, at least one of those I want to persuade Another Artist Friend to contribute art for, because we’ve been working together forever and have yet to release any of that stuff into the wild!
I do like that pirates idea though, Marsh. Oh how you tempt me. Hmmm!
Your mention of the Aubrey-Maturin stuff gives me a near signpost to one more topic of discussion though: are there any other books you have ending up want to see in a playable form, whatever that might be? I’ve always wondered what a Ballardian game might look like. Dueling psychopaths in some weird apocalypse trying to make each other crack? It’s worth thinking about…
—
More soon! x