Narrating The Flashback: A Year Of Taking TTRPGs Online (Part Two!)
Hello! Welcome to another TEETH newsletter. Thanks so much for coming along with us on this bold journey that Marsh and I are taking, and doubly thanks for all your generous support of the first TEETH one-shot, NIGHT OF THE HOGMEN. We’re overwhelmingly pleased with the response to it, and that wouldn’t have happened without so many of you replying to the announcement and sharing it with your own friends. There was even a story on Dicebreaker. Humbling!
Anyway, just to reiterate: please be EXTREMELY READY to plunge, trepidatiously or otherwise, into our little world of pen and paper fascinations. We’ll be talking extensively about our own pen and paper RPG projects in this newsletter, but we’re also going to be talking about the TTRPG world in general, with links to stuff that interests us, and some flashing neon signs in the vicinity of things our friends and allies are doing. To catch you up with where our brains are in the great boom of TTRPG playing in the past few years, we’re continuing with my glance back the past year of taking our Dice Club online — looking at the games we’ve played, and thinking about the ways in which they freed and inspired myself and Mr Davies to fashion TEETH: A Role-Playing Game.
As ever, please do actively share this newsletter, or any of our work, with anyone you think might be interested. We’re keen to build something here, and we’ll need all kinds of help to do so.
-jim
LINKS AND THINGS
Some stuff that caught our flighty attention in this difficult week:
Rebel Crown began sending out physical print copies early this month, I think. This is a game quite close to our hearts, being a Forged In The Dark title in which you play the former heir to a fantasy kingdom and their gang of stalwarts, as they try to reclaim the throne. I intend to run our own campaign of this as soon as time allows. You can also buy the downloads on itch!
Internet Friend Johnny Chiodini has left Dicebreaker to run a Patreon, with a focus on a lovely community and pen and paper adventures. It looks like that’s already heating up spectacularly and we wish him every fortune with his future exploits.
D&D appeared in the Times Literary Supplement this week, with an exploration of its, yes, literary roots. That means you get sentences like this “The Dungeon Master is certainly more demiurge than deity. He fashions the playable world after an established gallimaufry of Ideas, embellishing it with his own concerns.” And you know what? He really does.
Research is proving fruitful this morning.
FLASHBACK TO 2020
(Part one here.)
Oof, what a loaded subtitle.
Fear not though, blessed reader, for this retrospective dive is about what happened a couple of evenings a week with some computers and some brains and a few delightfully conceived PDFs of pen and paper clarity. Cocooned in our internet world, we played many new games, and, as I mentioned last time, some of those were played with James Hewitt (Needy Cat Games), Chris Gardiner (Failbetter), Kieron Gillen (DieRPG) and myself, Jim Rossignol. Let’s call this group The Catfail Club. They’ll like that.
As a key instigator of The Catfail Club, Hewitt had decided the time was ripe for BAND OF BLADES, which was one of the first Forged In The Dark games to appear, and an inspiration for our own work on TEETH.
I had not RPG’d with Hewitt and Gardiner prior to this, but the experience was a treat: everyone round the table (so to speak) was a GM and an experienced RPGer. And that was clearly going to make things interesting. (And tense for the brave Mr Hewitt, I’d imagine.)
In Band Of Blades you play the role of a maimed mercenary company, The Legion, retreating before a tide of undead horrors, having lost the big battle against The Cinder King. We didn’t get to meet him, but The Cinder King is one of those people for whom nominative determinism is doing a lot of work. Unlike the more freeform city setting of mother-game Blades In the Dark, here the retreat across the kingdom to a strategically-significant castle is more structured, with a clear end: your arrival at the fortress before winter, and the defense of it before that winter sets in. Along the way the game provides locations, villains, monsters, alternative routes, and a gameplay structure based around not just role-playing individual characters, but in role-playing *as* the mercenary company as a whole. You play both the martial specialists who have to make sure the missions are successful, and the officers who make the decisions about where to go, how long to stay there, and how to run The Legion as it falls back from the necromantic advance.
Eschewing deep attachment to a single character is something I’ve played around with in a few different campaign systems now, but that you are explicitly playing the entity of The Legion, its officers, specialists, and grunts, was truly foregrounded in Band Of Blades, and I loved that sense of flexibility, as well as the procedures of collaboratively building the personalities of these characters. There was a richness to that disengagement or dispossession of characters which really surprised me, and I think that it is quite possibly one of the most important perspectives on these kinds of games that I had in the past few years.
Anyway, the clearly delineated campaign structure was both a boon and a handicap for our overall enjoyment of Band of Blades, I feel, because while it gave the thing momentum, a goal, and a clear arc, we also misunderstood some of its intentions. Surely, I reasoned, it would be best for us to reach our goal well before winter arrives? Surely we should stay well ahead of the undead horde, and not spare the horses? Well... not so much. What we all failed to realise was that gathering artifacts and so forth from the special missions unlocked by dawdling longer in any given location was actually what defined the resolution in that final battle. Consequently, while we were seldom pressured by the inexorable armies of The Cinder King, we weren’t prepared for the climax, and things at the castle (as well as the final totting up of achievement) could have gone better.
This realisation fed directly into how Marsh and I wrote HOGMEN, of course, where pursuit by an enemy is a key motif. But you can’t run forever, and so filling a clock to describe your preparedness for the ending is a key mechanism. Allowing players to explicitly consider how they might stay longer to better prepare themselves for what is to come, rather than rush ahead to stay safe from snapping jaws, as I did in Band Of Blades, is an important procedural instruction. As Hewitt has observed numerous times this year, a rulebook being really clear about how things are intended to be run is often the most important thing it can do. Even if it makes mistakes elsewhere, GM and players can patch things up if they know what they’re supposed to be aiming for.
We completed our campaign with an astonishing flourish: the interlinked missions of the finale, all taking place at the same time with different characters from the cast, led to a monster killed on the battlements to come crashing down to the ground in a following mission. Again emphasizing how that enlarged cast, and playing multiple characters, really brought the theme home.
Playing with The Catfail Club had, by the time Band Of Blades came to a close, given me an improved insight into how people could successfully adapt the Forged In The Dark system into something that was both structurally and thematically quite different to Blades In The Dark. It really had me thinking. I’d already been tinkering with a system of my own, but… yeah, the temptation was now obvious, and the path towards a Forged In The Dark adaptation was now clearly signposted ahead of me.
It was then Gardiner’s turn to take up the awesome, scintillated mantle of GM, as we were going to continue with another, related title: Jon Harper’s magnificently-conceived AGON. More on that Hellenistic singularity next time.
IN THE GRIM FUTURE OF THE 41st MILLENNIUM THERE IS ONLY NARRATIVE
Meanwhile, back at Dice Club, having run ourselves a quick early TEETH playtest, we were trying something different, and it really was quite different. It was this: the Genesys RPG system, which is a mildly esoteric dice-led system used to power games such as Fantasy Flight’s STAR WARS roleplaying game. Here, it was the basis for a fan-made conversion of DARK HERESY, the game of Inquisitors and their acolytes in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. The original Dark Heresy rules are… a little fiddly, let’s say, and that d100 system threatened to be more stat-crunchy than our band of story-juggling minstrels was liable to be happy with. And yet the Dark Heresy books compelled me: calling out with warped gothic maximalism from the shelf just here to the right of my head. The fan-made conversion was so ostentatious and such an accomplishment that it just demanded to be given some table time.
Some context, though: we’d failed to really get into Scum & Villainy back in 2019. That’s the Other big Forged In The Dark game to have arrived after Blades In the Dark. I really wanted to run a Crew & Ship type game, where people planet-hopped and did sci-fi stuff, but somehow that campaign didn’t stick, and we soon drifted away to focus on the shockingly gorgeous Symbaroum (which also didn’t stick, and which I’ll talk about elsewhere). This initially led me to consider the (out of print) Rogue Trader RPG game. I am a monstrous Warhammer nerd, and it seemed like a neat way to both play a game in that universe, and to indulge some spaceship melodrama. The problem, I felt, was that half of Dice Club were NOT Warhammer nerds, and in fact knew almost nothing about it. How best, then, to introduce them to the universe?
I opted for Dark Heresy, and for making them Inquisitorial acolytes, drafted into the Imperium precisely because they knew nothing and were uncorrupted. I made that critical to the storyline: the Askellon Sector in which their boss-inquisitor was purging heretics was so corrupt that only outsiders from remote or uncontacted worlds (like our players) could be trusted with inquistorial tasks. If it worked, I reasoned, and they fell in love with the 40k world, then they could become hard-bitten Rogue Trader crews on the next sortie. It only sort of worked.
We also desired these dice.
The Genesys system has a dice set of esoteric symbols which you interpret, juxtapose, and “spend” to tell the story. Who wouldn’t want to try that out? And so we used the (honestly incredible) total conversion of the Dark Heresy system to do precisely that. Irritatingly, the constraints of remote play meant that it was easier to use a dice-rolling bot in Discord (this one) than to get bag of Genesys dice their own webcam. I think this possibly took some of the wind out of it, because I can see how game-feel might be enhanced by building the dice pool and actually rolling the bones, but, regardless, we soon got the hang of it.
We were not, however, entirely sold on it. I can’t remember who said it, but one of the group observed that the system felt “complicated without actually allowing for complexity”. (I paraphrase.) I think that came from our time in Forged In The Dark systems encouraging improvisation and narrative, rather than offering a more simulationist approach as offered by the extremely detailed Genesys rules. (There is, at one point in the generic rules, a chart which explains the comparative sizes of things, such as a cat and a starship, and how that factors into the game’s variables. That seems emblematic of the system’s rule-for-everything approach.) You really can do anything with Genesys, and yet the feeling from the group was that the system, combined with an unfamiliarity with the setting, and a prescriptive skill-book provided by Dark Heresy, meant that the team really weren’t sure what they should be doing amid the many systems and possible applications of rules. Consequently things were not as hell-for-leather as they were in our other games.
Worse, I think I made a mistake in GMing, too: there was too much travel, and not enough building up of NPC relationships. Critically, perhaps, there wasn’t a useful villain. (The obvious baddie wasn’t a baddie at all, and I feel like unfamiliarity with the setting made some folk see the nightmarish good-guys as being bad, too.) A tricky thing to get right, but there we are. We finished the tale of buried divinatory machine-towers with a couple of nukes going off and everyone living happily ever after, or something like that, and then moved on.
We weren’t done with space though: because the next thing on the roster — after a little palate-cleansing CBRPNK game — was flavour-of-the-moment, Mothership. And I’ll talk about that another time.
NEXT: Trophy, DIE, Agon, Thistle and Hearth, CBRPNK!