Welcome, favoured adventure-folk, to the TEETH newsletter! This is a (sort of) weekly transmission about our explorations in the very secret land of Tabletop Roleplaying-Games. 

What appears within this letter is written and compiled by veteran game critic and designer, Jim Rossignol, and former Mojang alumni and famed illustrator, Marsh Davies. Why not come and join us over on the TEETH Discord! Free tooth emojis for everyone!

1. Hello, you.

2. Bests.

3. Links.

4. 2026 is coming!

Hello, you. It’s a Best Things of 2026 type list newsletter! The year is running out of time to impress us with its Bests, and so we’re pulling the trigger on this one. Have a lovely holiday, everyone.

Best Events Of The Year (Jim)

It has been a year filled with awfulness at both personal and international geopolitical levels, but there has been some loveliness, too. False Kingdom, our game of medieval lunacy won us a (silver) Ennie, which was pleasing indeed. Especially when we only lost out to Grimwild’s astounding Free Edition offering. Thanks for the recognition, if you are reading this, Ennies-people! We also shipped the Gold Teeth beta to our beloved backers, and so despite illness-derived delays managed to produce something that we’re proud of and made folks excited for next year’s final book. And speaking of shipping things, I also shipped MILESHIPS with Mr-Ships-in-the-sky himself, Ian McQue. People really rather seem to have enjoyed it, and it is fantastic to close out a project that took us eight years from that first pint in a pub to the immense and colourful tome that exists today. (If you missed the crowdfund and want a copy, please do keep an eye out for the remaining books going on sale next year!)

Best TTRPG (Marsh)

Triangle Agency blew me away back in February and continues to deliver surprises. I won't bang on about it much more here (there's an earlier newsletter dedicated to my raving), but our evolving group of agents has included a time-bending 1920s fop, an avatar of pizza delivery, a worst-timeline Paris Hilton whose dog is also a gun, and a squid. This has leant itself to some degree of farce, as you might imagine, but also unexpected drama and quite a lot of moral perturbation. Moreover, the game's artful rethinking of how players act upon the world has been really inspirational, and may well influence our own future output.

Best TTRPG (Jim)

The Between by Jason Cordova (run for our Tuesday night group by the skillful and notorious Kieron Gillen) has dominated my year. Wot I Think about it got detailed in an overlong and hugely enthusiastic article on Old Men Running The World, but I will also say this: The Between is absolutely a challenging game for GM and players alike, and it’s that challenge which I found so engrossing and so satisfying. I rarely think much about a game that I am playing in, rather than running, but here my thoughts kept returning to what had happened, and who our characters were. The writing, setting, system, they were all excellent, but that’s true of all manner of well-made games in 2025. What really stood out about The Between was that we felt like we had done something notable in our time playing TTRPGs, because the role-playing itself was meaningful. We tried hard. The results were clear. As funny and ludicrous as ever our games are, but with a note of horror and personal chaos that I have rarely detected in other titles. It’s not often I get that feeling. It will be remembered, and treasured.

Best Videogame (Marsh)

I enjoyed many videogames this year, but few could be recommended without caveats: Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 was a brilliant visual novel of political machination, supernatural intrigue, tremendously rich characters and a century-spanning murder mystery, but its pleasures were sadly incarcerated in a dismal first-person brawler. Arc Raiders is a thrilling multiplayer shooter in which you ramble through the spectacular husk of a destroyed world, with a fluid social space that makes for delightful impromptu cooperation and beastly betrayals—but it has been regrettably nailed to a nakedly exploitative and tedious loot grind, to say nothing of the dev studio's use of genAI. The only 2025 game I can recommend without any equivocation is Type Help: a free, purely text-based game in which you uncover transcriptions of a sinister and deadly event many years before. It's an information game, in the vein of Her Story or Return of the Obra Dinn, and it probably my favourite example of the genre, partly because of its spooky and troubling mystery, but mostly because I think the way you unlock information or prove the information you have is extremely clever. It all builds to a chilling climax with surprising emotional heft and a frankly upsetting metaphysical dimension. Brilliant stuff. 

Best Videogame (Jim)

Arc Raiders is, I suppose, the best videogame I played. It is not too far, indeed, from the sort of dream game I might have made had the money from the Big Robot games stretched to some major work: goofing about with friends in a ruined world, all the while stalked by evil machines? Yes, it’s very much my cup of computer time. (Although I do still hate crafting.) But in truth the game that I continued to play, as I have done for many years, is Hunt Showdown which, despite TWO Post Malone-themed events this year, remains the best-designed first-person shooter I have ever encountered. I remain utterly baffled by its relative unpopularity. All of which is prologue to saying that the game I actually enjoyed most this year, even if it was not Best in some faux-objective sense, was the minimal, pixelated horror game Last Report, which I played through in just over an evening, whisky in hand and heart in my mouth, so to speak. It’s far from perfect, but it did that thing of capturing my attention fully for the time it lasted, and so leaving a deep and indelible impression. Having seen a factoid that no one plays new games now (down to just 14% of games played on Steam), and realising that I am rapidly becoming one of those people, I have to say that I would gladly treat more games like movies, dedicating a single evening to their digestion. Last Report, as such, is a perfect present.

Funnest GM trick (Marsh)

A particular delight this year was pausing our Triangle Agency campaign while one of our players was away, and breaking out Fear and Panic, a rules-lite horror game, only to discover that our GM, Noel, had used this ruleset switch to cast us as terrified bystanders to the paranormal mayhem caused by our agents. Juggling systems isn't an invention fresh for 2025 by any means—Jim very memorably did a similar thing in an old Blades campaign, when exposure to a psychic fish induced a trippy sojourn into Troika's ruleset—but Noel's particular use of it brought to focus how different rules can be used to express different perspectives on the same events. What is a high-stakes paranormal puzzle to our agents is deadly, unintelligible horror to those who get caught up in the carnage. Right now, I'm travelling to see family, but the rest of my table continues to play—now switching to FIST to illuminate precursor events to our Triangle Agency campaign by way of Metal Gear-inflected Cold War action. I love this idea and will be on the lookout for ways to drop it on groups I GM for in the future. (Needless to say, it's worth following Noel's blog.)

Best Book About The North Sea (Jim)

This actually came out years ago, but The Edge Of The World: How The North Sea Made Us has ended up on my list of History Books I Recommend To Other People. Partly this love is because I love the North Sea and lost Doggerland beneath it, has long captured my imagination, but mostly this is about the sort of lost socio-economic history of that sea since the fall of the Roman Empire, and it highlights a bunch of things that I simply didn’t know about. (A favourite fact: that coin-based money fell out of everyday use towards the start of the Dark Ages, and it was North Sea trade which brought it back again.)

Best Nautical Historical Coincidence (Marsh)

While doing research into the average height of a frigate's main mast, as one does, I ended up on the wiki page for the Hermione, a French naval vessel from the era in which Gold Teeth is set. There it notes that one of its commanders, Louis-René Levassor de Latouche Tréville, had transferred much of the crew from his previous vessel—named, to my surprise, the Rossignol! While the internet trail for the Rossignol is more sparse, it was a corvette deployed with some success in the American Revolutionary war, and sometime after Latouche's departure as commander, it ends up in the Caribbean—more or less at the time of Gold Teeth. It's ultimate fate I have not been able to discover, but clearly it is asea again in spirit.

LINKS!

• The most recent version of “downloadable tragedy” of Last Train To Bremen is available on itch.io, and this GMless tale of animals who traded their souls to the devil is on our list for playing early next year. Perhaps it could be on your list, too.

• Speaking of being inspired by the North Sea, Whale Roads is an account of a huge campaign based on Luke Gearing’s dark ages hexcrawl, Wolves Upon The Coast. It sure sounds like they had a good time: “Thirty players. Three Referees. A year-long voyage across the whale roads, seeking glory, power, and a place to call home. WHALE ROADS chronicles the journey of the wandering flotilla, following their victories, challenges, and defeats across the Northern Isles.”

• Vincent Baker talked dice pools over on his Kickstarter updates for the latest edition of Apocalypse World. And as regular readers will know, we love dice probability graphs like other people like fine art.

• I wrote a guide to getting better at improvising over on Old Men. People have said some nice things about it, so perhaps it will be helpful to you, too, Steven.

Have a lovely Christmas, one and all.

And if you read this far, and if this this newsletter has ever been useful to you or entertaining for you, please consider buying some of our games. They’re even half price right now! The pennies, they do help.

More soon! x