Insert The Vial! Plus: An Interview With Ken Lowery & Kelsea Zwerneman
Welcome, emboldened webtreader, to the TEETH newsletter! This is a regular transmission concerning our adventures in the very secret land of Tabletop Roleplaying-Games. We have published a whole series of our own TTRPGs. (Also on DriveThruRPG!) And that series is expanding. In this regular publication we also look at other RPGs, play stuff, interview people. It’s a whole lot of newsletter.
What’s within is written and compiled by significant other, Jim Rossignol, and mysterious connection, Marsh Davies. Come and join us over on the TEETH Discord! Free tooth emojis for everyone.
And hey, if you can wish to support us and also get a fantastic 320-page RPG, you can BUY OUR BOOK. If you aren’t already a member of that rather cool and highly exclusive club.
Hello, you.
Links!
Ken Lowery & Kelsea Zwerneman tell all about No-Tell Motel.
Hello, you.
This week we’ve been developing the next Marsh & Jim game, GOLD TEETH, which we talked a little about last time. We will have a chunk more on that to download for you next week.
But also: we would really like this newsletter, and news of our exploits, to reach more people! In time we want to develop it into a resource that isn’t simply about promoting our own work but is also about lifting up the work of those around us with links, discussions and interviews, such as we have already been doing. But to do that we need more people to see it! If you know someone who might appreciate what we do here then please share. Forward it on, or link the archival entries on your socials. We really do appreciate your support in this.
And if you want to say hello directly, there’s always the Teeth Discord.
Now go read Marsh’s enormously erudite chat with Ken Lowery and Kelsea Zwerneman! That’s the good stuff.
Love,
Marsh & Jim
OBLIGATORY PIRATE PARTS
LINKS!
THING OF THE WEEK: It’s impossible, IMPOSSIBLE, for us not to highlight perennial-joke-idea-made-real, ScentedRealms. “52 ultra-realistic fantasy scents to immerse you in the adventure like never before.” Yes, it’s actually the smell-o-vision gadget for RPGs that I think was a cartoon gag in the back of Dragon magazine in about 1989. I sort of want one so that I can say “that? Oh, that’s just what an elf smells like. Don’t make me pump out a troll.”
Comrade Wallace has put out a card-driven narrative game, Love & Darkness. It is a collaborative work of creating a family. Oh, and this too! He’s been busy.
If you do Call Of The Cthulhu then you might want to check out Kev Walsh’s adventure In Dark And Lonely Waters. A “working class” scenario set in England, which is all we need said to pay heed. And it’s not for the faint-hearted, by the sounds of it.
Big fan of Does What It Says On The Tin naming conventions, like this one for Unbelievably Simple Roleplaying 3rd Edition. That said, I can believe it.
Shhh! INTERVIEW: Ken Lowery tells all about No-Tell Motel
"Whodunnit?" may be the central question in No-Tell Motel, but it might not be the most important. A solo RPG set in the wake of a grisly crime, it tasks you, the motel's clerk, with observing the coming and goings of a cast of shady patrons, and assembling a theory from inference and scuttlebutt. But who killed who is just one of this seedy stopover's many secrets — it is, it turns out, a crucible of noir narratives, which quickly sets to boiling its cast of corrupt cops, philandering senators, doe-eyed runaways, thugs, crooks, creeps and weirdos.
My first playthrough involved a ring of highschool drug-dealers getting way out of their depth in the criminal underworld—a story with plenty of tragic potential on its own, but here given a leftfield spin via the chance encounter with a former movie star, driven mad by prophecies of his own death. My second playthrough involved a honeytrap blackmail scam backed by the mob, and an extremely unethical FBI sting to catch the scammers. In each case, the murder was a result of calamity as much as malice: the collateral damage from a dozen bad-luck stories colliding: illicit love affairs gone sour, men shattered by their experiences of war, embezzlers on the lam, compulsive gamblers down to their last cent, and many more.
The game structures its discoveries with a six-sided dice and a pack of cards, and you gradually build suspicion across multiple shifts until you have enough evidence to point the finger at someone—but whether you will is another matter. How sure can you ever be? Did you really see what you thought you saw? Did it mean what you thought it did? No-Tell Motel gives you just enough information to let your imagination run away, and then pumps the remaining space full of doubt. And even when you think you have the facts straight, what you do with them is a different question. Is there any justice to be had in the twilight world of No-Tell Motel? If noir has taught me anything, sometimes it's better to keep things off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush.
In an effort to blow the whole sordid affair wide open, I fired a few questions over email to the game's creator, Ken Lowery, and its layout designer, Kelsea Zwerneman.
Marsh Davies: No-Tell Motel is an extremely powerful, perhaps even exhaustive, generator of sleazy noir. What kind of research went into compiling all these story hooks? What's the reading list look like?
KEN LOWERY: I would call No-Tell Motel a byproduct of the research for another game I’m working on, a FitD noir nightmare called Saint of Blades. There’s a laundry list of books and movies I took in to find the right headspace for the latter title: primarily Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, Jordan Harper’s Everybody Knows, and especially James Ellroy’s LA Quartet on the book front, and staples like In A Lonely Place, The Third Man, and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing on the film front. I heartily encourage all Blades in the Dark enthusiasts to watch the Kubrick as soon as possible.
Throw in The Conversation, a dash of A Serious Man and two scoops of Errol Morris’s Tabloid and you have – hopefully – a story engine that constantly presents you with things to witness and then immediately casts doubt on any conclusions you draw.
On the RPG front, the single most important influence is the Second Guess System by William Lentz. Second Guess is an engine for solo games that relies on a single d20 table, and addresses the problem of rolling the same prompt twice by introducing a complication on something you thought was settled.
I first really played with this mechanic as a way to blur the truth in Axe Wielding Priest, an homage to John Carpenter movies that positions you as a priest protecting his parish from infernal evil. Any time you roll doubles in AWP, you further an alternate theory to the story’s events: there’s a perfectly rational explanation for what’s going on and your priest is losing his mind. It is, in a way, a race against the clock of your own unravelling. No-Tell Motel is an even more basic expression of this idea: “did you really see what you think you saw?”
Lovely character cards. MD: What's the key to making these hooks evocative of noir while being just non-specific enough to be malleable and multi-purpose?
KL: All through the process I wanted to hit the halfway point between suggestive and lurid, with lots of cues that imply the nasty or lascivious without actually committing to much of anything. The bare text of the book is PG-13, but I want it to sit beside you on the table, forever nudging you toward the worst (and/or most fun) conclusions.
I think much of the game’s layout and design helps here. It’s obviously a mid-century pastiche, and many elements suggest the story is set “last century.” But answers to simple questions like “are there cell phones?” are entirely up to the reader.
MD: Each playthrough generates so, so many story threads, and it's on the player to decide which ones are relevant, which ones contradict the narrative they've been assembling and whether there is any possibility of determining the truth at all. What was your thinking behind how much you define for the player, and how much you even permit the player to define for themselves?
KL: Every time I wrote a Guest bio or a card prompt, I asked myself the dead-simple question: Could this be interpreted at least two ways? My favorite example of this is the Ten of Hearts, which feels like a culmination of the previous prompt and says the Guest and their visitor “barely get the door shut before things get loud and graphic. No need to draw conclusions.”
Well, obviously they’re having sex, right? Maybe. Maybe not. They could have a LAN party going. They could be doing karaoke in there. It’s arguably the most leading card in the deck, but it still fully implicates you in deciding what there’s “no need to draw conclusions” about.
In a phrase, my line was giving you enough rope to hang yourself with. There is no objective reality to define here, no pre-set “right” answer, and really no right answers at all. So it’s all a read on you, and (hopefully) a meditation on why your mind goes to these places.
The exceedingly handsome pages. MD: How much of that murky ambiguity is service to the noir genre, and how much is your philosophy of how a solo RPG should work in general?
KL: I hadn’t actually drawn this parallel myself, but I love how much it dovetails. I do think many prompt-based solo games rely on player projection to complete a story: I give you half a story, you fill in the second half, and something greater than either piece emerges.
But what a lot of those games do is assume whatever you say is objectively true, and I think in crime and matters of the heart what is “objectively true” is elusive at best, destructive at worst. So in that spirit, No-Tell Motel just takes that assumption and says, well, not so fast.
In The Ink That Bleeds, Paul Czege broadly puts solo games into two categories: ones with a heavy authorial hand that force sometimes character-altering circumstances for you to react to, and those that create a sandbox in which the player assumes agency over the story. It’s, in a way, a question of who the game is about. (If this dichotomy is too reductive to you, blame me, not Paul.)
I don’t think either approach is “better,” but I will say I’ve trended toward the second group over time, both as a designer and as a player. My first big solo game was Lighthouse at the End of the World, which was pretty much just an engine for throwing hardships at you in a Gothic horror setting and asking how you react. VOID 1680 AM was going to be the same, but I realized early in the process that love of music is highly idiosyncratic, so it would be a lot more fruitful to let people set their own tone. What I thought of as “the” way to play a given solo game was just my way to play that solo game, and that isn’t the only right way to do it.
No-Tell Motel is an attempt to thread this needle, providing heaps of suggestive tone while still leaving plenty of room for you to invent what’s “really” going on.
MD: A couple of times the cards created a story prompt which didn't chime with the narrative I felt had been established. I just ignored it, framing it within the fiction as some outlandishly conspiracist tittle-tattle. Firstly, have I committed a solo RPG crime? And, secondly, how do you personally deal with improbable and discordant outcomes when you play solo RPGs?
KL: If that’s a crime, just flip on me and they’ll put me away for life. Problem solved.
As for how I deal with it, I take instruction from one of my favorite pieces of fiction ever: the “Pine Barrens” episode of The Sopranos. I won’t go into the details of the plot; suffice to say a weird and inexplicable thing happens, the characters go through a strange personal journey, no explanation emerges, and the characters eventually just move on with their lives. Sometimes life is like that. Shit happens, especially at the Stellar Motel.
MD: I love the way you match cards to characters. The Spades are all in the business of burying secrets (and sometimes people with them) or digging them up. The Diamonds have money or power. Clubs are folk who exist on the fringes of society. Hearts are all emotionally vulnerable in some profound way. Was this a matter of simply needing to categorise the cast, or does a pack of cards speak to you in a deeper way?
KL: A little from column A, a little from column B. My dad taught me poker and blackjack when I was young, and the math of those games has always made a lot more sense to me than a jumble of different-sided die. I am a vibes-forward game designer, I’m sorry to say.
But those categories did help me refine what kinds of archetypes I wanted to include, and pushed me to reach beyond the obvious by the simple need to fill out a suit with four people per. I also figured that if I was asking the player to keep track of 16 people, that kind of categorization would lighten the psychic load. Even if you don’t remember off the top of your head who the Jack of Diamonds is, the suit is going to give you an idea what their deal is when you go hunting for specifics.
MD: No-Tell Motel is a gorgeous production, with parts of the manual styled as 50s era postcards or advertisements. It creates an awesome unity of effect (and is an enormous credit to layout designer Kelsea Zwerneman). How did you arrive at that final look? Was there much negotiation between the needs of the rules and the needs of the layout?
KELSEA ZWERNEMAN: Ken's writing established the setting of a 1950s seedy motel, which made the visual direction really easy to pursue. We've worked together in the past, so we already had a great working relationship. I showed him a rough moodboard, he gave me the thumbs up, and it was off to the races from there.
I looked at midcentury employee manuals, signage, movie sets, and branding for inspiration. The biggest challenge for me in the layout was making every page readable and approachable because there's a lot of text to digest and I didn't want the reader to ever feel overwhelmed. The type did a lot of heavy lifting for the style, while letting the layouts be clean and readable so the rules didn't get lost in the design.
That layout. MD: Talking of unity of effect—the game comes with a playlist to set the mood. And of course, one of your other games is VOID 1680 AM in which you play a DJ and build your own playlist. How important a part of solo RPGs is music, and what's your relationship with music outside of RPGs?
KL: Oh, I’m just an enthusiastic fan. I played a little bass in high school and a little piano when I was a kid, but nothing serious. I can’t point to any one reason why music is so important to me, but I’m sure I owe a lot of it to my family. My older sister started making mixtapes as a Mother’s Day gift in the mid ‘80s, which my brother picked up shortly after and which I carried from the mid ‘90s to the present day. I think the idea was that my mom wanted to stay in touch with what her children were into, but she also just has good taste; this is the woman who took me to see the David Bowie/NIN Outside tour when I was 14 years old.
For me, at least, music is invaluable to both the design and playing of solo RPGs. I feel like tone is the first thing I have to nail down before I seriously start putting words on the page, and building a playlist is one of the most fruitful ways to both find that tone and procrastinate about the blank Word doc in the other window. Win-win, really.
I typically fixate on a song when I’m working on something new, and my frequent refrain throughout the writing process is “I want reading this to feel like this song.” These playlists – Lighthouse has one too – are just a collection of songs that got me through the process. They’re a kind of telepathy conveying concrete movements that each person makes their own. In that way, solo games and music are very alike.
MD: Thank you, Ken and Kelsea!
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More soon! x