SILVER MEDALLISTS (And some some stuff about maps.)
Hello, you.
Links!
Hauling Up More Treasure From The Depths of GOLD TEETH development
Hello, you.
FALSE KINGDOM WON SILVER FOR BEST FREE GAME AT THE ENNIES! Whoop! Whoop! And we only lost out to the amazing Grimwild, which is one of the strongest free-to-play offerings we have ever seen in the deep gnarls of the internet.
Readers! Thank you SO MUCH for voting for us, we really, really appreciate it. It’s been a huge lift. Thank you thank you.
Meanwhile! Friend and long-time TEETH playtester, Alex Wiltshire, has been busy making some games. They’re up on his itch.io! The latest is BOARD OF MAMMON, a GM-less game about having the worst boss in the world: the devil of capitalist avarice himself. It’s a fascinating reworking of the Paragon system (AGON) in just two pages, and it’s our firm belief that you should check it out.
Other news? Well, we’ve had a difficult old summer, more on which in future newsletters, but it’s been hard to complain too much when we’re making a beautiful RPG. We’ve detailed a bit about our playtesting campaign, which finished up this week, below. No real spoilers, as I don’t want to, well, spoil anything, so it’s not a full-blown after-action report, but more of a meditation on how great playtesting is, and how much it changes the game as you go through it. Obviously our main focus was making sure the rules don’t shake themselves apart over extended play, but it had other ramifications for the project, too.
The other final delight this time, which is not entirely related to RPGs, is that Jim (that’s me, actually, writing this) got to finish a great work of art (at least the words bits of it) which was Ian McQue’s landmark art book, MILESHIPS. There is a limited time to pre-order a copy of that if you want to get on board. I am obviously biased, because I wrote the text for it, but I think it’s an actual masterpiece.
So there’s all that.
Love,
Marsh & Jim
LINKINIKINS!
Ken Lowery is again providing grants for RPG developers. If this sounds like something that might benefit your adventures in TTRPG-land, then go take a look.
We are so blessed to have Wyrd Science, and a new volume of magazines is coming soon! In the meantime though we can wallow in the website features that are being posted up regularly, like this beauty on the Rogue Trader-era action figures.
Weird, Whimsy & Wonder looks fun.
The DIE RPG Quickstart is out, and provides more than enough to play a game of Gillen’s finest meta-as-fuck game of games. He also posted this tale of woe to go along with it.
Fiction recommendation: the horrible and extraordinary Wolfhound Century by Peter Higgins. I forgot who recommended this originally, but thank you for doing so! It’s very much My Sort Of Thing.
Hauling Up More Treasure From The Depths of GOLD TEETH development
I’ve just realised that we made the world of GOLD TEETH in much the same way as we did TEETH. In the original we wrote a chunk about the Vale and then Marsh drew the map. We then filled it all in. This time, because pirates are nothing (NOTHING!) without maps, Marsh drew a map of the proposed archipelago and we have instead been etching in layers of detail. And, stop me if i have mentioned this before, quite a bit of that world-building has come from play-testing this time around.
Maps, as mentioned, are one of the most piratey things imaginable. And so the book includes not just the maps of the archipelago, but an archipelago of maps: a lot of other detail to give you a huge canvas on which to be ludicrous, mutated pirates. It even has diagrams! Which are one notch up the illustration magnitude chart from maps. Perhaps more than that. I didn’t have to draw them.
We’ve talked about how certain games really do need maps, but it’s fair to say that the TEETH games have ended up being partly generated by them. How can you not want to carved a funny name into those hills? Ah, it’s heady stuff.
Did I permanently change my brain by blue-tacking Forgotten Realms maps to my walls as a teen? I fear I must have.
Anyway, the internal playtest wrapped on Monday, prior to the release of the beta (which is coming, it’s just going to have a load of illustrations and other lovely polish that we need to finish before releasing, and will be more like a full-on Quickstart than anything else: it will will contain everything you need to play, but not have the full bestiary or worldbook) and it’s interesting to look back on.
This is by far the longest playtest we have done, by some margin, although that’s been partly due to a troubled and overfull schedule. It has, however, been filled with the sort of events, hooks, leads, and crazed moments that makes this sort of RPG so entertaining: sharks branded with the seal of King George, ancient diving suits made of unidentifiable skin, Blackbeard’s ghost, psychic octopuses, ludicrous pirate antagonists, stuffy British officers, dimension-bending macguffins, supernatural mangrove sap, and a French man-bat monster that finds itself exiled from its native Paris and so is doing Predator in the jungle. If it bleeds, does that really mean you can kill it? Only one way to find out.
What’s been interesting at a design level, for us, is that we’ve changed a bunch of how the Worldbook stuff reads and is set up. The original TEETH was filled with breadcrumbs and leads as to the mysteries of the Vale, and we’ve done much the same here. But I have also re-written a big chunk of it to reflect how I actually ended up running it. The sheer nature of having a ship, there being islands, and enemies being able to traverse both land and sea, makes this even more of a sandbox (sandbox! Eh?) than TEETH was.
Anyway, the campaign wrapped up with our heroic trio actually surviving their curses and completing their horrid agenda: a Bully who was turning into a giant mouth, a French intelligencer who was turning into a thing of seaweed and crabs, and an Old Salt who was becoming the eye of a storm. All these transformations and their attending powers came into play in the final session, in which the gang saved a Golden Ape from a watery fate, and battled The Thrice-Cut Gem, another pirate frigate, in a chaotic sea battle which involved conducting lightning via chain shot fired from the cannon. (It sort of made sense at the time!)
The real mission, though, was for our pirates, who were sea-god cultists, to birth a kraken. To do this they had to feed a final damned soul to it, and that was done in the form of a cult-leader who was trying to birth his own rival deity from the sky. No thanks, said our gang, and duly fed him to the creature at the bottom of a murky lagoon. That woke up just in time to attack a ship of the line which would have made short work of our crew, their ship, their pirate settlement, and their agenda to turn the punchbowl into a hellscape of sea-magic and blood sacrifice.
All in all it has been a magnificent run through some murky seas, and when the beta lands on the beach of our personal desert island, we’re pretty sure you’re going to enjoy it.
Can GOLD TEETH grasp a Gold Ennie next year? Maybe. Here’s to digging a hole and putting our misbegotten treasure in it.
More soon! x