Perhaps I Was Lying To Us Both
You are reading the TEETH newsletter, by Jim Rossignol and Marsh Davies. It’s a newsletter about table-top role-playing games: our own - that we’re publishing over here - and some by other lovely people. It’s a fun time.
Hello, you.
Thank yous and high-fives for everyone who has written and messaged to ask about the third instalment of the TEETH games, please be assured we are working on STRANGER & STRANGER and the delay in publishing has nothing to do with global catastrophe, and everything to do with exciting, happy changes in our personal lives! Hooray!
One significant, albeit unrelated, change is that my own son, who has so far shown no interest in TTRPGs (and far too much interest in the flickering siren of digital videogames), announced this week that he was joining the D&D club at school, and that he was going to be a warlock. We then spent some time discussing the differences between druids, clerics, and warlocks, subtleties his youthful mind has yet to quite grasp.
Undaunted, I purchased him a copy of D&D 5th Edition, and we began to read the hundreds of pages of rules. What a handsome book it is, and what a lot of pages there are. I assured him that the whole thing was less complicated than it looks, and really boiled down to the attribute modifier table, but I fear perhaps I was lying to us both.
We’ve discussed before on this newsletter how D&D being the most popular TTRPG warps people’s perceptions of the cognitive burden of learning new RPG rules, but reminding myself of the weight of that was quite refreshing. D&D types do get a little irritable when you point out that their game is mostly geared around an overly complex system for killing kobolds, but actually that’s fine: combat is great, and there’s no reason not to design a game around it. If that’s what you’re into, then that’s great. We recommend it, even.
That said, you guys know precisely where our predilections now lie. Perhaps I’ll persuade the school D&D club to switch to Blades In The Dark... but I somehow doubt it.
Anyway! We’ll soon have much to talk about when it comes to TEETH, Forged In The Dark, and all the other things that light up our own after school club. We’ll have details on the next game shortly. In the meantime, let me whet your appetite with STRANGER & STRANGER’s handsome map, by Marsh and containing a marsh.
Delicious.
LINKS!
Well, well, tears in the rain. Free League have only gone and announced a Bladerunner RPG for some time next year. It’s not presently clear to me whether I will be able to resist buying this, particularly if it’s up to the lavish standard of their other books, but we’ll discuss that closer to the time of consumerist dilemma. I managed to resist the broadly lauded Alien RPG, but this is another category of temptation. That said, it could be an Old Harrison Ford, rather than the Young Harrison Ford, and wouldn’t that be terrible for everyone?
RPG Talk friend Turtle Hat has announced Mountain Home, a Forged In The Dark dwarf settlement-building game, which sounds right up our mineshaft. “Mountain Home games take place over the tenuous decades of a settlement's early existence in a new and remarkable land. The game cycles through both fast-paced expeditions where the characters set out to take control of fate and the steady dig downward as the settlement expands.” That’s dwarfing!
This Gauntlet RPG Podcast is about running one shots. Are you not running one-shots? WELL. CAN I RECOMMEND YOU SOME? But seriously, much of the most interesting design in the TTRPG space is being done in this format, and we don’t simply say that because we are so interesting and handsome, although that is also true. The episode of the excellent podcast series goes into some of the considerations about running One Shots, and is overall a good pitch for doing so.
Dialect is, as Marsh points out to me, a couple of years old now, but it is nevertheless worth a mere link in a TTRPG newsletter. It’s a game about collaboratively creating a language and then losing it. We understand it to be extremely well-regarded, but also couldn't immediately make sense of the video demonstration of it. Nevertheless it sounds thematically exciting!
We share The Red Giant because we are big fans of the key-art.
We’re also fascinated by Eagles & Rifles, but haven't yet dug into it. We’re intrigued to see how this sort of linear warfare makes for Actual Gameplay. Can that really work in a way that gives players both exciting choices and meaningful advancement? Perpleing. While we work that out here’s a compilation of Sean Bean as Sharpe, saying “you bastard”.
Jay Dragon’s Sleepaway has rightly earned some attention. Based on Avery Alder's influential GMless game Belonging Outside Belonging (another version of which, Thistle & Hearth, we played last year - and I realise now, writing this, and that I promised to talk about that and never did, so perhaps I should), Sleepaway is a game of telling stories around the campfire, with creatures waiting just beyond the light of the fire. “In Belonging Outside Belonging games, everyone shares the role of facilitator, and each person can pick up Setting Elements to bounce off of and provide narrative impetus for the other players. In Sleepaway, Setting Elements also contain Rituals, in which gameplay becomes more abstracted, to highlight unique moments of play by combining them with real-world actions and activities. Rituals might invite you to draw, to gesticulate, to play music, or even to destroy elements of the game itself in very unique ways.” It’s a 130 pages and illustrated, too. We think this is worth us all investigating.
Look at these horrible-yet-amazing dice.
Research this week uncovered the 1730s patriotic ballad Roast Beef Of Old England, here played on fife and drum. It really is all about beef, and will doubtless soon be the new national anthem of the UK as the food shortages cause some sort of beef-withdrawl-based revolution.
I’m also a big fan of this saint’s name: Gregory The Illuminator.
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And apologies. There is no essay this week, so please forgive this lapse, but look out for a series of exciting interviews starting next week!
Love you! x