Other Things: Dolmenwood, The Beasts and Blessings of the Hallow'd Hall and a banana-grasping hat monkey
Welcome to the TEETH newsletter!
This is an almost, occasionally, somewhat weekly missive from the world of tabletop roleplaying games, written and compiled by creeping dread, Jim Rossignol, and throbbing terror, Marsh Davies.
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Links!
Another video! Oh my.
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We’ve nothing much from GOLD TEETH this time, aside from this incredible reading, screaming, banana-grasping hat monkey.
And shouldn’t that be enough for anyone?
Nautical hat monkeys aside, we’ve been musing over an interesting bit of naval history via research about a real-life vessel that would have been in the area at the time GOLD TEETH is set. I won’t say any more now, because I think Marsh is planning to write about it in the near future, but it is quite the coincidence.
What can say right now is that we’re making decent progress with the book and have already learned a thing or two from getting the game into the hands of others via the beta. Send us feedback to improve our work! If you haven’t seen it yet and are backer, then have a gander at your Kickstarter messages. If you recently pre-ordered and don’t have the message, please give Jim a nudge.
The rest of this newsletter is a summary of what’s caught our (single shared) eye in TTRPG land this time around. As usual, there’s a tremendous amount of stuff out there, much of it good or even great. Let’s take a look.
-Marsh & Jim
LINKS!
THING OF THE WEEK:
Jim: So you say The Beasts and Blessings of the Hallow'd Hall is Thing of The Week, Marsh, but what is it?
Marsh: It's a compendium of sixty-five folkloric oddities, illustrated in the style of 17th-century woodcuts, and described in period-appropriate language, all in a beautifully typeset pdf that conjures up the feel of an authentically ancient bestiary, complete with a worn, clothbound cover. I think it originally started life on Kickstarter as a physical deck of cards, but is now transformed into a digital zine in its itch.io incarnation. It's horrible and strange, and has eight pages dedicated to a perturbing radish. I love it.
Jim: It looks incredible, and the pages I’ve seen make it seem like something you could use as a sort of in-world plot device for the right sort of game. Players can read it “in character” and I think that makes it super interesting in terms of how you might encounter it. It’s not a monster manual in the traditional technical sense, but more like a tome that your characters might discover and then diagnose monster-clues from. I feel, in fact, like you could even make it work as a book of old monster lore to provide an alternative bestiary for a game like… oh, I don’t know, TEETH?
Marsh: I can absolutely see players digging out a copy of this from a dusty shelf at Pearle's Arcana & Books in Gatlock, though no doubt its proprietors would drive a harder bargain than the $15 I got it for on itch.
Jim: I really do love this, and there’s some designs in there which genuinely make me jealous we didn’t come up with them ourselves. These people are wizards! Just ludicrously ambitious work from its creators, Conner Fawcett and Jack de Quidt, and an impressive THING OF THE WEEK. If you use this in a TTRPG context, or simply as reading before bed, then let us know.
Matt ‘The Bad Spot’ Risby did an in-depth and very encouraging video review of our own TEETH: Blood Cotillion, of which we are very proud. He has some really insightful stuff to say about the TEETH series as a whole, so it’s worth a watch even if you’re already familiar with our games.
It goes without saying that we have a deep love of dark supernatural Westerns, and so even though I can’t do a convincing American accent I would be very into the idea of running Death Valley, which is funding over on Backerkit. Get a load of this: “not only do you experience the horror, you also bring it. As an undead resident of Bardo's Bluff, neither alive nor fully dead, there are plenty of warmbloods and even those of your own kind who are hellbent on destroying your peaceful life-in-death. Your days are spent negotiating the trials and tribulations of a ruthless environment alongside seeking out answers to what it means to be undead.” I very much want to be a skeleton cowboy. And in the game. (Relatedly, this month seems to have a “skeletons enjoying their afterlife” theme to it, as I’ve been reading the Dolmenwood books -- see below for more on that -- and was really take by the idea that skeletons in it can be happy-go-lucky party folks just singing and playing the lute and enjoying the second life that undeath has given them. A similar notion seems prevalent here! Just hang out as the skeleton honky-tonk pianist in an undead saloon, until dreadful living monster hunters come to town… etc.)
Comrade Gillen talks about why he wants to run a TTRPG. And it’s not just for the fame or the drugs or the money. He says it’s for the single rule or mechanic that he can relate when he talks about the game. It’s a thoughtful piece, have a read.
There are just a couple of days left on the latest Doomsong campaign book. I haven’t yet written about the other one, Lord Have Mercy Upon Us, but I have been reading it thanks to the team sending me a copy. And I might just do another video, because it’s another bleak and engaging work of RPG beauty. Either way, the Doomsong books come with a strong recommendation from me (Jim) because they’re rich seams of the good stuff.
One of the Dolmenwood Books Is Pretty Great
I mean, clickbaity headline aside, they’re all pretty great, but that doesn’t give me the same hook.
My last video to show off Doomsong has encouraged me, against advice and better judgement, to look at more RPGs via the medium of top-down book-lookin’ camera, and the next thing that arrived on my doorstep was the ludicrously lavish package that I backed during the Dolmenwood Kickstarter. But I home in on a single book. Regular readers will already know which one.
Here’s a direct link in case that embed doesn’t work.
More soon! x