"Secrets” that you had to spot.
It’s the TEETH RPG newsletter! Squirming and toothy in your inbox. Written by Marsh Davies and Jim Rossignol. You can buy our tabletop games. And perhaps you will.
Hello, you.
No big essay this time, but still quite a lot for you to consider. A kind mega-LINKS! catchup, if you will, which will bring you up to scratch with where we are in the world of TEETH and the universe of TTRPGs more generally. We have a couple of exciting bits to share soon, but not quite there yet!
Anyway, firstly: GOLD TEETH, our second book, is still available for pre-order, so if you somehow missed it and want a copy, then you still have a (closing) window to do so. The original TEETH hardback is sold out, so do not miss out on this next resplendent (and doubtless highly desireable) tome. Secondly, if you were a top tier backer for this book THANK YOU, and holy wow, thanks again. But also: you should have received an email from Marsh about your pirate portrait. If you are at the top tier for the Kickstarter and this doesn’t sound familiar to you then please check your Kickstarter messages inbox, and your own email spam!
In game-playing we’ve been both continuing our tests of GOLD TEETH, but also playing some one-shot games in other systems, as I’ll mention below. All that has inspired the next few updates that we’re going run after this one, and might lead to a little GM-tips guide at some point. This actually sounds a bit more ambitious than it is, perhaps we’d be better calling it “this is how Jim manages to run stuff all the time, guide” or something like that. Either way, it might come in handy.
Remain steadfast, friends.
-Marsh & Jim
HALT! There are SO MANY of you now reading that we’re into Costly Newsletter Territory. If you are a kindly soul who would like to chip in for maintenance costs then do so by getting yourself one of our PWYW RPGs! False Kingdom or Night of the Hogmen. They’re both Quite Good. If you own both of those and would still like to help out then… uhh. Hmm. We’ll have to think of another way. Yeah. TBC.
LINKS!
THING OF THE WEEK: There’s very little time left on this deal, but hopefully some of you will still be able to pick it up. As you might imagine, we are self-conscious Englishmen with a slight weakness for PG Wodehouse and so Flabbergasted is absolutely our cup of tea. A Jeeves & Wooster ‘em up for the tabletop, they explain: “Flabbergasted is a rules-lite and narrative-driven tabletop RPG set in the roaring 20s! … you'll take on the role of either an affable Aristocrat, an entrepreneurial Well-To-Do, an idealistic Bohemian, or one of the ever ready and steadfast Staff.” I’ve picked it up, and I like what I see. In fact, I am sort of amazed I hadn’t encountered it before (but not really, for the world is wide and we are but tiny men). Anyway, there’s a free quickstart here for you to make your own judgement.
“You know…”
This week has also been one of thinking how best to approach TTRPGs for kids. My own ten-year old daughter has been asking to play D&D, although not due to any influence from nerdy old Dad. I think this has come about more via friends and broader cultural osmosis: she has come to see it as a thing she should know about and enjoy, without really associating it with the weird books that Dad makes. So anyway we have been playing the Rossignol-edition of D&D from my brain-pickled-in-RPGs, but also using Slowquest’s fantastic supplements (starting with the endlessly charming Goblinquest). It’s been fun! She tried her hand at GMing for her best friend just a few evenings later. However, it did not end there. I mentioned this in conversation and various friends began to ask me how they could run D&D for their own kids (yes, many of my peers are of that sort of age) and, well, I didn’t have a great answer. There are few lo-fi solutions I might point to, the one-pages and so on, but generally kids do want something that steers more closely to what they imagine a “real” RPG to look like, with an inventory and hydra battles and so on. I’m going to pick up Mausritter on that basis, since it seems to tick a lot of the boxes I am interested in filling, but I am sure there are other, just as adequate solutions for playing with kids who are just starting out, that I don’t have awareness of. Perhaps you have better suggestions? Head to the comments here, or the Discord, and tell me what you did.
It didn’t (quite) end there, either. The Goblinquest Kickstarter box came with a tiny gobliny Choose Your Own Adventure book, which we played through after we wrapped up our game, and I thought I was introducing my daughter to this sort of thing for the first time, but actually she already had a CYOA, but in graphic novel form, which she’d bought on her own volition on a bookshop trip some months back. It was Hocus & Pocus, a CYOA “graphic novel” as part of the Comic Quests series. It had a few rough edges, but I was amazed how well the panels as “pages” actually worked, with the options for the numbers often drawn into the scenes, to the point where some were “secrets” that you had to spot. There was some clever design and lovely art. Great stuff and certainly recommended for kids of that sort of age.
In more adult gaming news, our regular Monday night group ran two sessions of Brindlewood Bay before we restarted our GOLD TEETH playtesting sessions, and it was extremely interesting to play as a GM. (I’d played the first scenario with Gillen as the GM, which I ran again in this instance). I was struck by the extent to which I do almost always introduce the “play to find out” aspects of this game whether or not the former rules of a game support it. While I often have my own ideas and plans for any given scenario, I am well aware of how poisonous railroading becomes, and will happily follow the player’s lead if I possibly can. Now, the Theorize move in BB (there is no answer to the mystery, it’s generated by the players as the conversation surrounding this this dice roll, so no one knows what the answer to the mystery is until it’s answered, because there isn’t one) is undoubtedly ingenious, but I’ve also long allowed players own theories to be the reality of what we’re up to because, well, sometimes they’re just better than mine, and other times they just save me a lot of effort. I am industriously lazy, but also well aware that stuff that comes from the players ends up being more rewarding for them by the end of the session. Anyway, it works brilliantly in BB, and the setting was one that my crew of (mostly) middle aged men absolutely warmed to in an instant. My other observation was that the second scenario we ran (the Lighthouse) was much harder for the players to create a theory for than the first (Dad Overboard). I think this was nothing to do with the scenario itself, but rather because I did less to establish relationship dynamics between the different characters and allowed the players to do much more “snooping about for physical clues” detective work. So while a plausible story emerged from the clues, a strong motive did not appear before our session time ran. It worked, sure, but because people hadn’t reached a strong picture of how the individual characters felt about each other, it didn’t feel as satisfying as it did the first time, and that was absolutely on me as a GM. I needed to spend a bunch more time spinning out the relationships between the characters so that possible strong suspects emerged. It was a learning experience. Anyway, all of this led to Marsh running a GOLD TEETH murder mystery the following week! And perhaps we’ll talk about that next time, if we remember. I don’t really know why I buried this bit of gameplay reporting in the links section, because there isn’t a link at all. A mystery!
ICYMI: Much of what I’m writing here is going to get reposted over on OLD MEN RUNNING THE WORLD, which is a blog about TTRPG stuff I’ve been pulling together with Comrade Gillen. We’re old men. We play, make and write about RPGs. This week’s article was one of my favourites from the archive, the one about Atlases.
We learned, via comrade Chris Gardiner, of the Stone Frigate. Which “is an informal term which has its origin in Britain's Royal Navy, after its use of Diamond Rock, an island off Martinique, as a 'sloop of war' to harass the French in 1803–1804.” So basically rocks that get legally classfied as boats for the purposes of create a loophole in the legalities of running the navy. Which feels relevant to our interests, don’t you think?
More soon! x
I started playing TTRPGs with my little one when he was just 5, using "Amazing Tales". It is an extremely simple system (you choose 4 skills; each is represented by a specific die; skill checks are made by rolling the corresponding die, with 3 and above meaning success, below meaning success with a complication). I can't recommend it enough -- we both loved it, starting with the story suggestions in the book (doing both sci-fi and pirate scenarios) and then moving on to a simplified version of "The Wild Beyond The Witchlight" because of the fairy-tale setting.
It's not complex, of course, but he's never asked for more (yet). I wonder if what you describe as your kid wanting "an inventory and hydra battles and so on" is an age thing, a personality thing (crunch vs story preferences), or just the fact that my son has never played a video game, does not know what DnD is and thus has no pre-conceived notion of what a TTRGP is supposed to be like. I guess I'll know in a few years, if he continues to bother playing strange games with his nerdy dad. (I always wanted to find out if it's actually possible to play one of the many, many RPGs centred around teen protagonists with actual teens, or if it's just a thing old people do to feel young again...)
Perhaps you might start a Ko-Fi or Patreon to allow people to give you a bit of cash?