Mists and Shadows: an interview with Kim Richards
You are reading the TEETH newsletter, written and compiled by vengeful spirit Jim Rossignol and the gremlin Marsh Davies. This is a newsletter about table-top role-playing games: our own—that we’re publishing over here—and some by other lovely people whom we link below. Want us to see your work? Get in touch!
This week we have an interview with TTRPG creator and Twitch roleplay star, Kim Richards 柯金宝丽 about her most recent Dungeons & Dragons 5E module: the spectacular Mists and Shadows! It's an unsettling tale of spectral sedition, steeped in Malaysian-inspired myth and set amid a rainforest. (Which is, as you can see from the images here, also lavishly illustrated by Mark Mitchell.) More of that down the page, but first…
AN OBLIGATORY PLUG FOR OUR TRIO OF STANDALONE ADVENTURES:
STRANGER & STRANGER, a 63-page, campaign-length adventure in which a group of hapless bumpkins attempt to save their village from abomination, while undergoing a series of grimly amusing mutations.
BLOOD COTILLION, a 45-page one-shot in which assassins dress-up in fluttering petticoats, attempt to infiltrate a society ball and murder the cultists therein. Think: Pride & Terminate with Extreme Prejudice.
NIGHT OF THE HOGMEN, a 23-page one-shot in which an assortment of travellers are forced to flee a massive horde of monstrous pig-creatures. It's name-your-own-price, so you can dive in without onerous financial risk!
They're all low prep, rules-lite and easy to get into. Hogmen is particularly ideal for newcomers! Please do check them out, and, if you are interested in supporting our exploits, please do buy a copy!
LINKS
As discussed in previous newsletters, Jim and I are really into blue-collar space gloom, and Through the Void looks to promise the exact kind of lonely death among the stars that our souls crave. After aeons of war, humanity's surviving members have retreated to a single space-station, which exists only thanks to the exploratory exploits of Drifters—salvage crews willing to brave the dangers of decaying space hulks and abandoned asteroids. Sign us up! The game is also paying for its creation through itchfunding: "a more humane way to crowdfund the development of a game" which, unlike Kickstarter, permits the incremental release of content, funding the development of the project as it moves towards completion. Kickstarter may be where the big bucks are still, but it's vitally important that devs support and grow alternatives. We salute these brave explorers of the unknown!
Game design lecturer at NYU's Game Centre, Alexander King, has collated his students' efforts to make games in Google Sheets and Excel. I have almost lost my mind just trying to lay-out our playbooks in Sheets, so this is beyond impressive to me. I particularly like the idea of playing an undead accountant, managing the evil spreadsheets of a necromancer!
I am a fanatical convert to the games of Hideo Miyazaki, which, in my opinion, reached their apogee in Bloodborne. An ingenious fusion of gothic and celestial horror, you say? With capes, tricorn hats and a cane that transforms into a barbed whip? Oh go on then. Bloodstone, meanwhile, promises to mesh that delirious premise with my other great love: the Forged in the Dark roleplaying ruleset. Just plug it into my veins!
This one's a roleplaying game about roleplaying. Faire Season takes place during a weekend of medieval reenactment, which sees the players sucked into a mythic quest spun from the very power of imagination itself. Meta!
The Caltrop Core is a "rules-lite RPG skeleton using the humble and sharp d4". It really couldn't get much streamlined than this and it's nice to see the littlest platonic solid get its time to shine.
Vincent Baker of Lumpley Games has thoughts on how we frame our conversation about RPGs, both in relation to other RPGs and games more broadly. It's tempting to think of RPGs as special and distinct from other forms of game, but is that really true? Equally, in our discussion of different rule systems, it's sometimes tempting to imply that there's some underlying universal experience of roleplaying that these systems evoke or inhibit to varying degrees. But that's not the case: D&D and Blades are different roleplaying experiences by dint of their systems, and that's the very point of them. RPGs have varying qualities that "aren’t interchangeable, but they aren’t fundamental either" says Baker. It seems like an obvious point when it's stated with such clarity, but I think the human brain is wired to categorise things, perhaps overzealously sometimes, and its useful to be reminded that we put things in boxes for our mental convenience, not because of some stark law of nature. Let things be fuzzy round the edges! It works for cheese, after all.
"This is completely worthless and should be avoided. You do not need a haphazard and random selection of mimic ideas, right?" So begins the pitch (?) for Mimics, An Unnecessary Work, for Use With Fantasy RPGs. Sounds like the kind of reverse psychology that a dastardly mimic would use! There must be treasure inside!
Hacked in the Dark is a fab podcast which mixes actual play with interviews and news about adaptations of the Forged in the Dark ruleset. This episode is particularly meaty, with special guest Karl Sheer (admin of the RPG-talk Discord) discussing his awesome dwarven settler game, Mountain Home.
Given the response to Covid, it seems like a good bet that, were the zombie apocalypse to befall us, it'd be about two seconds before Iain Duncan Smith was braying that people should to get back to work and learn to live with the living dead. Unlike corpses, those share prices won't raise themselves! Paranormal Inc. is a GM-less game for 2-5 people "about solving mysteries, struggling under capitalism, and making connections with living and dead alike". Scooby dooby doo, comrades!
Research this week has focussed on what the British nobility did in the wake of American independence. Apparently the ex-governor of Virginia was so bereft at its loss that he came home and built a giant pineapple. Grief has many faces, I guess.
Bonus research this week includes a very big man, in the shape of Frisian rebel and pirate, Grutte Pier, and a very hairy man, Petrus Gonsalvus, who may have inspired the legend of Beauty and the Beast. Both legends in their own way.
KIMTERVIEW RICHARDS
You may know Kim Richards 柯金宝丽 from the deeply entertaining High Rollers live roleplay channel, or from the ceaseless japery of the Yogscast, or indeed from her bylines in beloved videogames magazines of yore. But it's particularly her brilliant and unsettling TTRPG module Mists and Shadows that I wanted to chat to her about, as it shares an interest in the horrific intersection of folklore and geography with our own project, TEETH. And, as a creator bringing non-Western culture to D&D, she has really interesting thoughts on how to address the colonial attitudes that still prevail in the fantasy space.
(Disclosure: Kim and I have been friends for 15 years, which should give you some idea of what a profoundly tolerant human being she is.)
Marsh Davies: Give us the pitch for Mists and Shadows—what is it and what were your ambitions for it?
Kim Richards: Wizards of the Coast brought out Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft last year, which was an expansion of Ravenloft and the world of Curse of Strahd. And as part of that, it created these pocket Domains of Dread, self-contained horror scenarios that you could fit into your Ravenloft adventure. Mists and Shadows is framed as a Domain of Dread: a Malaysian-inspired horror adventure that will fit nicely into your horror world. I very much wanted to feature a classic horror monster of Malaysian folklore: the Pontianak—the lady in white with long straggly hair. I also wanted to showcase Kampung life—rainforest village life—and Malaysian culture, and allow people to bring that into their fantasy adventures. I hope I've done that!
MD: It's genuinely quite an unsettling read—and feels fresh, too, quite distinct from the horror tropes that Western fantasy and particularly D&D often rely on. What do you think Malaysian folklore brings to the horror genre?
KR: I think a lot of older Malaysian folklore, especially with a lot of the monsters I've brought in—I keep saying monsters, really I should say ghosts or spirits. The word is Hantu in Malay. There's a whole pantheon of Hantu, from gremlins and spirits, ones that you can barter with, ones that you can literally employ to do tasks for you, ones that you can create with your blood. There's such a rich variety of Hantu in Malaysian folklore and I think one of the reasons they feel quite unique is that they are very expressive of life in a rainforest. And especially the female Hantu, many of them have deeply sad origins where they are the result of child mortality, or mortality relating to pregnancy and birth. There are a lot of vengeful ghosts who come to feast on babies or a woman when she's most vulnerable. And there are a few Hantu who revolve around disease and illness. It's very reflective of a society which doesn't have advanced medical science, where pregnancy and infant mortality is very high because of that. I think that's what is fascinating to me: you can really see the connection between this spiritualism and the rainforest. There are water spirits, tree spirits, banana tree spirits: it's very specific to the geography, the kinds of things people would encounter living in rainforest villages since way back when.
MD: But even though that folklore reflects historic anxieties about medicine, or the lack of it, it's really clear that this culture is not "primitive", to use a very loaded term. Which I think sets it apart from some of roleplaying's less informed efforts to depict non-Western cultures, right?
KR: Right. There was something about Mists and Shadows that was very important to me, and that was, when a lot of people think about fantasy settings, a village in a rainforest, they think "savage" or "barbaric" or "basic". Huts on stilts. And that is not the case. Malaysian Kampung architecture is very beautiful, very intricate. The carpentry required is very advanced and specialised to deal with living in a swampy rainforest, with the humidity, the rain, the threat of lightning. And in Mists and Shadows, I was very careful to describe the village, to emphasise that these are very carefully put together. These are beautiful buildings that have significance in their detailing and architecture. I really wanted to hammer that home and challenge the stereotype that people who live in rainforests are living primitive lives.
MD: That stereotype comes from a very colonial mindset—"these are the places we went to and civilised!" It's an assumption that runs so deep in Western fiction that it's hard to escape. But right now it feels like a great time to question our inherited ideas and look again at the past with fresh eyes.
KR: Yeah! I know this is a strange thing to go on about, but the level of detail of these buildings in Malaysia, if you took a picture of them you should be able to tell which village they are from because of the subtle differences of the architecture, the roof shape, the fret work and decoration. That's how intricate and sophisticated they are! It's not a straw hut on stilts.
MD: It feels like there's suddenly a lot of great TTRPG stuff coming out of East and Southeast Asia at the moment. Is my perception right that there's a boom, and what do you think is driving it?
KR: I couldn't explain why exactly there is a boom right now—though I do agree with you. It's wonderful! I was reading Balikbayan, which is the TTRPG by Rae Nedjadi. It's an Indonesian cyberpunk which takes cues from Indonesian god myths. It's brilliant, I want to run it. And then famously last year Banana Chan released Jiangshi the boardgame, and then Daniel Kwan from Asians Represent was featured prominently in Wizards of the Coast, in one of their Candlekeep Mysteries. In the last few years, we've been having a lot more conversations about diversity, and diversity in spaces that are classically white male dominated spaces, and I do think there's now a lot more attention paid to POC creators. I wouldn't have gotten as many eyes on my work, if I'd written this a few years ago. We were always here! But it feels like we are now being spotlighted and brought to the forefront a little bit. I myself am discovering other people who have been in the industry and writing TTRPGs for a long time, but suddenly I can see them now. I honestly think that fantasy adventures can only be better if you draw from a pool of diversity—as many cultures and voices and histories and stories as possible.
MD: So you are not only a TTRPG creator but also a famed player of TTRPGs on the internet telly…
KR: Yes, High Rollers is coming up to six years now!
MD: Does that absorb all of your bandwidth for roleplaying? Do you still play privately, and if so, how does it differ playing on stream?
KR: I don't play as much in my spare time as I'd like to, just because High Rollers consumes a lot of our time and mental energy. And it's that classic problem of it being really hard to get six people together at the same time, consistently. This is how we managed it for six years: we made it our job! We've tried private games where we run one shots and shorter modules. We started a Vampire: The Masquerade private game—that didn't get anywhere. I really want to run Tales from the Loop. I mentioned Jiangshi the boardgame earlier. I finally got it, having Kickstarted it years ago, and I still can't find the time to play it. But I will say from the little bits and pieces we've played, especially when I've done a one-shot that I then play on stream, I almost treat that private game as a dress rehearsal. I definitely say I'm a lot more relaxed. If you need to check the rules on page 134, you feel a lot less pressure, you don't feel the need to fill dead air. When we're online, we're performing, trying to ensure that it's a smooth experience, that we're not spending ages ruminating over the interpretation of a rule. We try to make our dice rolls and the maths behind that quicker. That's definitely the biggest difference. But I'm a lot sillier as well off-camera. I play very stupid characters in private.
MD: I remember back in the day, when we were both game journalists, god help us, we had a little horror movie watching crew. Are you still well into horror films—I imagine you are—and if so what are the hot tickets in horror media at the moment?
KR: I'll be honest, I'm out of touch with what is hot right now. I do have a Shudder subscription, but I mostly have that for Dragula, which is a horror drag competition. It's brilliant. I highly recommend it. But I think this is the thing: back in the day we were very movie-focused, but at this current point in my life there are so many different avenues: audio books, podcasts, TTRPGs. Things like Beyond the Night Vale. I love Tales from the Loop—which is perhaps more dystopian than horror—but the artist, Simon Stålenhag has created these art books, which are almost visual novels set in that universe. I love that as a story medium. Things like the running app Zombies, Run! where you run while listening to a story about living through a zombie apocalypse. And the developers, Six to Start, have done a bunch of horror spin-offs. My favourite one at the moment has the podcast being taken over by a ghost. You start hearing ghostly snippets of another story infiltrating the story you're listening to. I thought that was really, really clever. I love it a lot. Also yer girl here might have written an adventure for Zombies, Run! that's coming out…
MD: Wait, what? Can you talk about that?!
KR: I've not actually written anything on the horror side of it yet. I got commissioned to write a new adventure, a non-zombie-based standalone thing. And true to type, the one that's coming out on the 25th of January is based on the Great Zodiac race, so it's about how the Chinese Zodiac Calendar came to be, and the race set by the Jade Emperor.
MD: Wow! I'm so glad they picked you up. That's a great match!
KR: Yeah, Six To Start are so nice to work with, such a good company. Ethical and moral and supportive.
MD: What's next for you in the TTRPG world? Anything else you'd like to plug?
KR: Well, it's coming up to Lunar New Year on the 1st of February. This time last year I wrote a one-shot based on the Lunar New Year called the Jade Emperor's Invitation —which is now free on my Patreon! You're invited to the Emperor's New Year banquet, but there are shenanigans afoot! Only you can save the banquet from disaster! We ran it on High Rollers. It's a lot of fun and very silly. If you want to learn about Lunar New Year and specifically Chinese New Year, it's got a lot of information in there about why we celebrate in specific ways. Why do we eat fish? Why do we eat oranges? Why do we wear red? So if you're interested in the customs and culture behind Lunar New Year, I highly recommend it. Well, of course I recommend it! But there's also a sense of fun to it. I really wanted to reflect how fun Lunar New Year is and get that celebratory experience.
MD: I miss your New Year steam boats and eating myself into a coma, Kim. Thanks for A-ing these Qs!
TEETH TEETH TEETH
This week at Teeth towers, we've been mulling over the starting scenarios that we will present to players of the forthcoming full-fat TEETH setting, and how these will need to connect to both the universal themes of TEETH and the particular agendas of individual outfits, all while being terribly, terribly exciting. No small order.
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More soon! x