Nine foot of snapping, snorting sea-monster with a glistening musculature
It’s the TEETH RPG Newsletter! By Jim Rossignol & Marsh Davies.
Hello, you.
Links!
That’s it!
Hello, you.
Yes, it’s been a good while since the last newsletter, but not without adequate reason! Life has been full, it has been hazardous, and it has been exhausting. Undaunted, your brave protagonists, Marsh & Jim, have continued their struggle, surmounting dreadful domestic, medical, and clerical challenges to continue making their fantastically cursed piratical TTRPG game, GOLD TEETH! Heroic. Mythic. One day to be fabled.
Anyway, today’s newsletter is a general update for where we are at, with an unpatched eye cast over the work we’ve been doing this past month. We’re going to release a beta PDF soon, so let’s get into a bit of what the hell we have been doing.
So, as you likely know, GOLD TEETH is an adaptation of the Forged In The Dark system which powers Blades In The Dark. There are many games now influenced by this fantastically well-judged piece of rules writing, and we’ve certainly published some of them ourselves! Our first work, NIGHT OF THE HOGMEN, was a gloriously stripped down version of the game, and turned out to have been many people’s first encounter with this sort of RPG (as opposed to a more traditional, D&D-derived system, more on which later…). This being people’s first time in the FitD yard was also true of TEETH, our big book of core rules, which was a rather more fleshed-out adaptation, where we added back in the procedures and processes that made the campaign-level game work, but adjusting them to the needs of a game which pitted conniving weirdos in the 18th century against a monster-infested wilderness. Investigation! Magic! We did some work, and it was good.
But it’s this process — finding a way to make the rules we’ve based our games on fit the feel and atmosphere of the theme we’ve chosen — that dominates much of what we have to do to make these RPGs happen at all. And for sure there’s a tonne of work to be done on world-building, lore, art, and physical book design, but the big beating heart of this thing is playtesting the new rules we’ve created. In GOLD TEETH this has meant creating rules that facilitate sailing-ship battles in a way that’s distinct from the individual action rules of being a human character. Our challenge is doing so in a way that feels coherent to the whole: you need to feel like a wretched sea dog, and also a frigate on the seven seas. The approach we’ve taken in this, which has absolutely been fuelled by Marsh’s enthusiasm for the age of sail and his incredible dedication to designing systems which express this in a FitD ruleset, has been to create a set of rules where there are two distinct modes of play: one as your individual pirate characters, a mode which will be familiar to anyone who has played an RPG before, and one, collectively, as the ship.
We’ve talked about this before, but I wanted to specify how this has been a major aspect of the time we’ve needed to make this book since funding. In GOLD TEETH players take on (and share) the responsibility of being a sailing ship and its crew. Finding a way to do this which uses a version of the FitD rules was something Marsh achieved before we launched the Kickstarter, but we’ve also been aware that rigorously fitting it into the phases of play in the wider game would be a deep focus for us. And so it has been. One of the things we’ve discovered in play is that there is a real subtlety to this: the player characters are part of a crew, which is part of the working system of a ship, which itself is a sort of active entity in the world. And it seemed straightforward to simply put a hard line between actions made in person, and actions made as part of the functioning of the ship. Indeed, that’s what we did!
And it didn’t feel quite right.
Look, I am not saying anyone should design on vibes, but there’s a point at which your systems and your fiction are rubbing on the imagination of your players and that friction needs to have the correct psychic abrasion. That’s a big part of playtesting. We soon knew that what we had wasn’t quite right, and that it needed to have some sort of systemic connective tissue between the sea dogs and their crewed vessel. This had radical consequences for the system we’ve based it on. Initially, we faithfully duplicated the FitD setup we had in Teeth, with individual stress tracked for each of the players. Then we had a pool of what we called Luck, which worked a little differently, but was a narrative currency for your vessel and its crew. We played the game like this. It worked. But there was something strange there. They needed to be woven together.
So we’ve merged them into a shared pool. The ship and the individual characters now share a quality called Luck, and the Luck of the ship is now the Luck of the sea dogs, and everyone sinks or swims together. This is a big change, of course, and one we’re a little trepidatious about, but it works and it feels right. The shift to this shared idea of Luck suits the fiction: a ship’s luck, a pirate’s luck, the idea of fortune and chance, it’s all so expressive of this sort of fiction. So much of what sailing is about, let alone the warfare at sea that we’re depicting at the very twilight of the piratical era, is based on these themes, and steering to them seems like a faithful recombining of the game and the theme.
And while keeping the ship and the crew attached to the same pool of narrative currency gives the whole experience a systemic and narrative central gravity, it also makes some of the other stuff, like the Pirate’s Curse track (the central ticking timer of the individual characters) make even more sense. A stressed pirate? Sure, but aren’t they always? An unlucky pirate? Now there’s a thing. A pirate genuinely struggling with the physical and psychic fallout of his terrible curse? Yes, that is a more interesting and thematically coherent engine to run this game on. And so that is what we have done.
Of course Luck works a little differently to FitD’s stress, and the way it is generated is changed, making the system even more dynamic. This will require further testing, and we’re hoping some of you diligent, intelligent souls will ponder on that when we circulate the rules in the coming weeks. We’re excited about it! We knew there was work to do when we had funded, and this feels like we have identified and delivered on the big crunchy rule bit that we needed to do to pin together the barnacled planks at the heart of it.
[Our regular tester Alex has gone even further, with a design that might even show up in other games. Playtesting, as a conversation, just keeps on spontaneously generating ideas, and nothing is wasted.]
That’s not all, of course! The way sail travel links into piratical opportunities (the Hooks? Eh? Anyone? See what we did there?) has become clear, and has redefined how we have ended up building our game world as regions of sea and isolated islands, each with its own challenges and opportunities for a twisted, treacherous sea dog crew.
We have ideas to shake up both what it means to be having excursions on land, and engaging in downtime. With the ship as a sort of mobile base for your crew it makes sense for us to go to town on those procedures, and massively change the equivalent phases as you find them in the original TEETH.
And yes, the bestiary is also filling up with the weird and the salty. This includes the merhog, as depicted here.
Sure, they might be cute as pups, but many is the damned fool tar who's taken in a juvenile merhog to be the ship's mascot, only for it to develop into nine foot of snapping, snorting sea-monster with a glistening musculature known to cause a total breakdown of discipline in the lower decks.
Rumours of a merhog king bearing Neptune's own trident are widely dismissed as the ravings of erotically-demented sailors who've spent too long in their own company.
We should have more fixed news on the beta PDF and other things in the coming weeks! Obligatory golden push: you can still pre-order Gold Teeth! If you like.
Love you!
-Marsh & Jim
LINKS!
THING OF THE WEEK: Look, watching the entire of season 2 of Andor, and then Rogue One, and then crying, that’s an experience a lot of people have had this month. We might have shared in it. And it might have made us even more of a prime audience for Star Wars things. But it did not make us do a hack of the Free League version of Twilight 2000 to allow you to play as a group of rebels trapped on a planet. Someone (one of our favourite someones) did, though, and holy crap REBEL TWILIGHT hits the vein. Look at it! This is going to get some playtime.
Not Star Wars, officially speaking. OTHER THING OF THE WEEK: I thought we’d mentioned this already, but it seems not. System-neutral folk-horror setting White Horse Of Lowvale is so much our sort of thing it’s scarcely conceivable that we wouldn’t mention it. I believe physical copies are happening.
Old Men are still running the world, but don’t let that get you down, because Old Men Running The World has been getting on with the TTRPG coverage, skimming the princely Mythic Bastionland (cor!) and interviewing Graham “Cthulhu Dark” Walmsley (wow!) in a couple of Old Man actions you won’t want to miss.
That there are miniatures being made of classic Ian Miller drawings has only just been brought to our attention and holy crap.
We’re really into Offa’s Dyke. Not only that, but this is a generational interest for Marsh, whose grandfather was also really into it. It’s a good dyke! (Jim’s note: there’s also a good one near me, Wansdyke.)
This list of Russian monarch’s nicknames could be a Thing Of The Week, but it isn’t.
THIRD THING OF THE WEEK: What’s that? DEEP CUTS, the official Blades In The Dark expansion is getting a physical edition? That seems like an okay reason to have three things of the week. But that’s enough for one week.
What, what?! There could be FOUR things of the week? Well no, don’t worry: CBR+PNK: OVERLOAD hasn’t actually launched yet, so it doesn’t count. But perhaps you’d want to get in the queue.
There won’t be such a long gap to the next newsletter, all being well, so do tune in next time for an unhealthy dose of nostalgia as we visit Jim’s first ever RPG. (Owned, not created.)
That’s it!
More soon! x
Rebel Twilight is a thing of beauty, so thankful for Tim's massive effort. Now I can get back to crying while playing.