Perilous Tribulations!
Hello there. You are reading the TEETH newsletter, written and compiled by Jim Rossignol and Marsh Davies. This is a newsletter about table-top role-playing games: our own - that we’re publishing over here - and some by other lovely people whom we link below. Want us to see your work? Get in touch!
Our latest and greatest release is STRANGER & STRANGER, a 63-page, beautifully designed and illustrated campaign-length adventure based around the perilous tribulations of a gang of mutated villagers, an abomination, and a rather convincing stranger. Low prep and highly entertaining. Please do check it out, and, if you are interested in supporting our exploits, please do buy a copy!
Back at Teeth Towers we’ve turned our attention to finishing off a draft of TEETH itself, the book that we intend to release in 2022. The adventures we’ve released so far are simply just prelude (both in terms of us warming up to the main event, creatively, and in terms of us wanting to have some smaller games delivered before we went for the bullseye).
The big TEETH game remains in the 18th century setting, but delivers the full package of monster-hunting under the shadow of imperialism, with a detailed “somewhere the UK” setting of bleak moorlands, dark forests, and sinister fens, as well as a full range of of playbooks and outfits for monster hunters and their organisations. All this will, once again, be a version of the Forged In The Dark ruleset, but while the adventures we’ve so far released streamline that mode of play down to the sleekest skeleton, our full campaign setting builds it back up again, with a progression system, a wilderness and travel phase, rules for hunting and fighting folkloric monsters, and an overall campaign metric based upon your own secret agenda and the passage of the seasons. We also revamp and return the full FiTD actions range, which we feel gives TEETH the same bite as the amazing source materials on which it is based. We’re commencing some playtesting now, and hope to have lots more news on this as the weeks progress.
In the meantime, let’s have a look at what the rest of the world is up to.
LINKS
Ye olde Kickstarter has been extremely busy this week, not least with the meteoric appearance of the Mothership First Edition. Yeah, it’s gone fucking nuclear, raising £695k at the time of writing. Holy shit, this game of space horror has really hit a nerve with the gaming public, with over 10,000 backers! Amazing stuff. What’s most interesting to me, however, is not the popularity of the Kickstarter - we already knew it was popular, and played it ourselves - it’s that the new edition does so much to address the obvious flaws in the existing game, which so many people had played and critiqued. For example: “Combat and violence have been greatly clarified and simplified, replacing the old opposed roll system with a more intuitive "roll to hit then roll damage" system. Many edge cases have been smoothed out, and the whole thing overall is much better.” And even more rewarding for the kind of game we like to play: “We've removed levels all together, and characters start off a little stronger and can increase their Saves through Shore Leave, spending time training, resting, and gaining new skills.” I’m genuinely excited about this and our regular group is already talking about running the game again once the digital books are available.
Also live on the fundraising platform is the magnificent project of Down In Yongardy, a Fighting Fantasy-style gamebook based in the Troika universe, written by Chris Bissette. Regular readers will know we are fans of Mr B, and previously interviewed him about his work. Bisette is wildly prolific and inventive, and has recent moved to working full time on creator-owned TTRPG work. Backing this Kickstarter will support him in making that move a permanent one.
Oh and they keep coming! A second edition of marvellous Lovecraftian investigation RPG Cthulhu Hack is doing very well.
And that’s exactly the sort of thing that the TTRPG world is great at and reknowned for, but what about Shanty Hunters, a game about collecting magical Sea Shanties in 1880? No, honestly that’s a real game, based on the excellent Gumshoe system, no less. “In Shanty Hunters, your character is a sailor or scholar drawn to the sea lanes to document shanties – even though doing so angers the campaign’s villain and imperils your life and the lives of your shipmates. You are defined by your Profession and your Drive. The book presents twelve example Professions compatible with disappearing to sea for months at a time.” I mean, take a look.
Oh, this last one isn’t out yet, but Salvage Union looks extremely enticing indeed, telling stories of “ragtag” team of mech-pilots salvaging to survive. There’s a bunch of superb mech art on this project, including the excellent Hamish Frater. You can click the Kickstarter notification stuff here.
Oh, and there’s a new version of our favourite tabletop combat game, Turnip28. I’m starting to collect bits for my own Turnip army, and will update when I have something to show!
Research this week (via Gillen) gave us the 1st Russian Women's Battalion of Death, an all-women combat battalion which was actually deployed the Eastern Front in World War 1 as the Russian provisional government attempting to keep the failing war effort going.
Not an RPG thing, although it might well provide good materials for one: we’re fans of occult British mag Hellebore, and they’re producing a lavish new book about the occult in Britain. Take a look!
Finally look at this place on Planet Earth. That really is the stuff.
That’s all for now!
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Love you! x