My Own Dark Forest: An Interview With Jesse Ross
Twenty Twenty Three! The secret year that no-one expected.
Welcome.
You are reading the TEETH newsletter, written and compiled by the guiding light Jim Rossignol and shrouding darkness Marsh Davies. This is a newsletter about table-top role-playing games: our own—that we’re publishing over here and also here —as well as interviews, links, and general noodling. Want us to see your work? Get in touch!
Hello, You
Links!
An interview with the creator of the Trophy games
Hello, you.
A fresh year has come along for us to despoil and poison, and so it shall be on all vectors of Earth and Heaven, with each of us condemned alone in the dark corners of the universe! Tremble ye.
Too much? Okay fine, I didn’t actually mean to get all biblical there. I just wasn’t sure how to start this intro blurb. It’s totally alright! It’s fine.
Nothing cosmic will happen.
Not yet.
LINKS!
I am not actually going to link to any of the Wizards’ OGL discussion, because if you have seen it you have seen it, and you have certainly seen it; and nothing seems definitive, except, perhaps a concerned email from my mum. If even she’s aware of it, then Wizards are definitely in trouble.
With Mothership 1E now an omnious blip on everyone’s motion detector, there are lots of fun materials coming out, for example little things this and and adventures like this. Or wow, whole new Panic Engine games like this. It’s also worth following Sean McCoy’s mailing list if you are not already.
Oh and speaking of Panic Engine stuff, Marsh and I have both been reading horrible biblical medieval fantasy novel Between Two Fires, and by sheer coincidence Ruination Pilgrimage is an extremely similar setting: “The Ruination Pilgrimage system is based on the mechanics of the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG. It uses a percentile roll, aka d100, for tests and saves, and runs on the Panic Engine. The setting is a medieval time period in a place similar to historical Earth with a lot of horrific situations like disease, demons, and debauchery.” Horrible! (Thanks to Chris Gardiner for this.)
Remember my nostalgia thread including old Play By Mail games such as It’s A Crime? Well, It’s A Crime is still a thing after all these years. (Thanks to Gillen for this!)
You might, like me, have first encountered the story of The Potsdam Giants in an Usborne book about giants, but it was interesting to find them again and read their sad story. Giant sigh.
An Interview with Jesse Ross
This time we speak to Jesse Ross, who was the creator of one of our favourite experiences in the past year, Trophy Gold, which in turn is builds on Ross’ success with the horror one-shots of Trophy Dark. Go back and have a read if you want some context for what all the fuss is about. Or better still, play a few games of the Trophy games, I am fairly certain you won’t regret it.
Anyway, here’s a (very slightly edited) transcript of the correspondence between myself and Mr Ross. (And we’re now very excited about The Piper’s Call…)
Rossignol: The Trophy books have been arriving in people's hands in the week prior to me writing this, and there's a fair bit of excitement: how does that moment feel to you?
Ross: It's been incredibly exciting! Trophy got its start in the spring of 2018, and I had dreams of the rules ending up in a beautiful hardcover form early on. To be here, just under five years later and with three (!) hardcover books in the hands of folks all over the world, feels great. One of my good friends called creating and publishing my own hardcover RPG a true "bucket list item" and he wasn't wrong.
Rossignol: I'm particularly interested in the creative journey that led to Trophy Gold. What were the starting conditions? What inspired it along the way? And to what extent do you feel like you are making games in order to create the kinds of experiences you want to have when playing games?
Ross: It's funny you bring that up, because Trophy Gold was literally the result of me wanting to play all the great old-school modules that were out there, but not wanting to use any of the default D&D-like systems. So I made a list of what my ideal old-school-feeling fantasy mechanics would be.
Here's the list I wrote, verbatim:
==================
Wants:
- only d6s
- player-facing rolls
- level-less spells
- conditions over HP
- no levels
- no rolling for damage
==================
I looked at a bunch of games to see if there was already something that could work, but nothing was close enough to what I wanted. Then I thought, "well, I already have a game that does a bunch of that... could I just adapt Trophy?" Recall that at that point, Trophy Dark was still just called Trophy, since Trophy Gold was what prompted the renaming of Trophy to Trophy Dark.
So I took that chassis, then tried to make sure the mechanics reinforced that old-school feel. I grew up playing AD&D 2e, which is arguably old-school, but the way we played was always more "heroic fantasy" than "dirty and dangerous", so I didn't have that nostalgic frame of reference to fall back on.
Instead, I took to heart the thoughts in "Principia Apocrypha" (a collection of old-school advice from Ben Milton, Steven Lumpkin, and David Perry) and "A Quick Primer on Old School Gaming" by Matt Finch. And, of course, I had already read and played and run a ton of old-school games: Old School Essentials, Maze Rats, Knave, Whitehack, Black Hack, Swords & Wizardry, Whitebox, Basic Fantasy, and on and on.
Throughout it all, I just tried to keep the idea of "desperation" top of mind, and lean hard into the idea that if these characters were constantly pushing their luck, then the players should be doing that throughout the game as well.
Rossignol: As a related point to the above, I am obviously heavily into the Forged In The Dark games and consequently I see the Trophy games through a Forged In The Dark lens, but I can see that's highly subjective, so did they really have that much influence? Were there other games which were a more profound inspiration?
Ross: The precursor game to Trophy only took the 1–3 / 4–5 / 6 success tiers from Blades in the Dark—mechanically, the rest of it was Cthulhu Dark, and the setting was the dark forest that features prominently in the game Symbaroum. I love the setting of Symbaroum, but I never felt like the mechanics matched the "forest as cosmic horror" idea that I felt like Symbaroum was trying to sell. Cthulhu Dark, a game which I have loved for a long time, does cosmic horror and the downward spiral of doomed characters so elegantly, so it felt like a natural fit.
I played a bunch of sessions of that Cthulhu Dark-in-Symbaroum game, and with each game I shifted it further and further in its own direction, creating my own dark forest and characters, and it eventually became Trophy Dark.
As I playtested it, I kept feeling like something was missing. Thematically, Trophy Dark is about hubris, but there weren't a lot of mechanical opportunities for the players to opt themselves into bad choices. I decided to try importing Devil’s Bargains, which is one of my favorite mechanics from Blades. In the original Trophy, Risk Rolls always started with 1 light die, no matter what. By replacing that with the Devil’s Bargain, I found that it met my initial goal, but had the side effect of making the game much more collaborative, which is something I love and has become a key selling point of the game.
Rossignol: What influenced you that wasn't an RPG? Any other books, movies, or experiences you would want to mention?
Ross: Prior to working on Trophy, I was never a huge fan of horror. But one horror film that got deep into my psyche was The Blair Witch Project. That idea of a small group of people thinking they could reason their way through a haunted forest, only for it to make them turn against one another... well, that’s the plot of a game of Trophy, isn’t it?
Rossignol: Can you tell me about the Hunt roll and, beyond that, the Hunt token? I don't think I have ever really seen anything quite like it in an RPG. A random encounter roll meets perception/exploration (except not really) that is also tied into a sort of narrative currency! Can you tell me about how it came to be? How do you feel about your implementation now?
Ross: The Hunt Roll exists because I am just terrible at tracking time in old-school games! I don't want the ticking of a clock to be something that I manage—I want the actions of the players to drive the pace of encounters.
The actual mechanics of the Hunt Roll came out of my experiences with Jason Cordova’s Labyrinth Move for Dungeon World and Brendan Strejcek’s Overloaded Encounter Die for old-school D&D.
Powered by the Apocalypse games (of which Dungeon World is one) have the idea of "hold", which is typically a bonus you get to future rolls. In Jason’s Labyrinth Move, you collect hold on your roll, but use them as a currency. You can spend 1 hold to find a treasure, or spend 3 hold and find the center of a dungeon or other maze. I always turn hold into tangible tokens when I play, so when I made the Hunt Roll, I just formalized using actual tokens.
So with the Labyrinth Move, we have a roll for navigating and finding treasure—my twist was to use that for any kind of exploration or information gathering, tie it to additional dangers/encounters (a la the overloaded encounter die), and generalize it so that instead of seeking the center of a maze, it could be used to achieve narrative goals, including overcoming Set Goals.
Rossignol: Can you talk a bit about the Set/Prop structure of an Incursion? It's quite sort of writerly and theatrical to my mind, how intentional is that? (The players knowing the goal strikes me as a fascinating position to take, as if everyone is in on the plot and it's the details that matter?)
Ross: Yep, it's very theatrical! That's why I use those terms! When I think about RPGs, I often think about them like a TV show: which actor is playing that character, or what is the big set piece that the producers are spending this week’s budget on? I like the term Set because it tells you that it's not just a location, but it's a *meaningful* location *where the action happens*. We're seeing the characters in this spot because they're on stage and doing something worth watching (which is often related to what the Set Goal is). And Props are just all the things the characters can interact with that help *drive that action*.
To your point about Set Goals and knowing the plot, that comes directly from my experience with Lady Blackbird (by John Harper, creator of Blades in the Dark). In that game, there is a destination outlined in the very beginning of the game (to get the Lady to her lost love), and having that north star helps all the players orient play to that goal, even when their characters aren't supposed to know about the lost love or the Lady's backstory). It's explicitly meta game knowledge, and I find that most players enjoy living in that tension between what they know and what their characters know.
TTRPGs are so special for their ability to let us be both performer and audience member in the same moment. The dramatic irony of meta knowledge is one of the ways we can tap into that unique feature of this art form. And, as a practical matter, Trophy Gold’s Set Goals streamline play and helps minimize some of the meandering that I sometimes find happens in other systems.
Rossignol: How much have people used the Trophy games - to your knowledge - to navigate social settings? (I was struck by how what you encounter definitely doesn't have to be a monster or a trap in the traditional sense, couldn't it be embarrassment in a social setting? The Ruin you suffer to your standing and personality?)
Ross: I think that happens a fair amount! I know Tom McGrenery’s game The Merit of All Things (which is based on Trophy), allows for a fair amount of social drama, and social challenges directly impact Ruin. By using an expansive definition of Ruin (it’s not just hit points!), the system—and the GM and players—can be flexible.
Rossignol: Do you have much time to run anything other than Trophy? Are you in or running a regular game of anything?
Ross: I do! My biweekly home group typically cycles through 2–4 session campaigns of different game systems so I get to play a lot of different things, though I am currently running Vampire the Masquerade with them. We also have a game of Masks for when the whole group can't make it.
And then I have my game of a B/X variant I've been playing with my youngest daughter off and on since the pandemic started.
Rossignol: Which games are you most excited about in 2023?
Of my own projects, I've got a few irons in the fire that should come out this year:
R’lyehwatch, a campy rules-light mash-up of Baywatch and the Cthulhu Mythos.
An eco-horror anthology of Trophy games each co-created by a game designer and a climate-focused academic.
The Piper’s Call, a new Trophy game answering the question "What if Robin Hood’s merry band of outlaws made their home in a haunted version of Sherwood Forest?"
Of others’ games, I'm really looking forward to:
Dolmenwood by Necrotic Gnome
The Silt Verses RPG by Gabriel Robinson and The Gauntlet
The new version of Swords & Wizardry by Mythmere Games
Arkham Herald by Oli Jeffery and The Gauntlet
And I hear there is this cool game called TEETH coming out soon?!
Rossignol: Aha, yes. And also, while we are doing regular questions for creators, what do you want others to play? What would you thrust into the Internet's hands and say "play this!"?
Ross: I absolutely adore Lady Blackbird and think everyone should play it a few times. It's such a lovely system for both beginners and veteran players!
Rossignol: Finally, and this is for personal interest as much as any interview stakes: we're obviously about embark on our own Kickstarted book journey with TEETH, what advice would you offer to people heading into that territory for the first time?
Ross: Have a solid email list [that you, if you’re reading this - Ed], finish your book before the Kickstarter (something I'll do for all my future campaigns), always have a back-up printer option (I've had to switch printers on both of my Kickstarter campaigns!), and don't get swept up in stretch goal fever.
Rossignol: Thanks for your time.
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More soon! x