Sit Back In Your Chair And Be Entertained For 80% Of The Session
This is the TEETH newsletter, a regularly irregular transmission about our adventures in the very secret land of Tabletop Roleplaying-Games. We have published a whole series of our own TTRPGs now! More games are coming! And we shall play many others, and then report on those experiences right here.
This newsletter is written and compiled by secret competitor Jim Rossignol and mysterious celebrity Marsh Davies.
Hello, you.
Links!
No Man Is A (Deathmatch) Island: An Interview With Tim Denee
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Hello, you.
Marsh and Jim are busy at work on RPG things! As mentioned last time, the key focus is REAVER (a FITD-derived setting-agnostic sailship combat system) which will provide the basis for GOLD TEETH, a supernatural piracy setting set in the grotesque 18th century of our original RPG. Avast!
He’s too good not to post again, sorry.
Marsh and I are already discussing whether the book needs a “talk like a pirate” section. (Probably.) While there’s also the question of cursed ship’s biscuits: are they already cursed? Some would say they might be. The rum definitely is.
ALSO: there are also a couple of smaller things we’ve been messin’ with that will turn up on a PWYW basis over the next few months. The first one of these we’ve hugely pleased with already and we’re just about to hit some playtesting to make sure all the buckles and straps are secure. It’s a continuation of the TEETH setting, but with a whole different beat, focus, and even historical period. We think you’ll like it.
But there’s more! The TEETH Discord is quietly pootling away, and we have some folks over in the Looking For Group channel arranging games. Please say hi and then check it out! We’ve love to see more of you screaming THE HOGMEN ARE COMING.
Finally: Marsh fed some eels in real life! Actual eels. They were huge! Giant, even. This, readers, is what we in the profession call an omen.
-Marsh & Jim
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LINKS!
BEHOLD! Long time followers of Rossignol’s activities might recall that he’s been planning to work with Ian McQue again, and that’s finally occuring: MILESHIPS is a narrative art book featuring the flying ships and floating stones which McQue has spent the past decade developing. Please do sign up if you want to be notified of the launch of the book’s crowdfunding, over on Kickstarter. There’s no news on a MILESHIPS RPG yet, but we’re certainly given to pondering!
We don’t often post miniatures stuff, but the Golden Demon winner this year is so totally Next Level that we can’t help the link. Hot and holy bejesus.
The box set Second Edition for Cairn is setting off our crowdfunding alarms. Look at that beauty!
I totally missed this episode of Chris B and Quinns having a chat about adventures that Quinns enjoys. He quite enjoys this one! It’s Mothership!
We mentioned The Lost Bay before (it’s Kickstarting), but we’re going to do so again. “The Lost Bay is like any other place. There’s a skate park, wild horses, arcade games and ghosts. You and your gang dwell here. You are young and wild. You’ve been touched by the Weird: now it’s in your blood and grants you extraordinary Powers.”
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No Man Is A (Deathmatch) Island: An Interview With Tim 'Old Dog Games' Denee
With Deathmatch Island apparently in the post (according to my email from Evil Hat, anyway) we figured it might be rather pleasing to speak with its creator, Tim Denee. Tim has created a few things now, including those maps of Doskvol you all enjoyed so much. Let’s find out what he has to say for himself.
JR: Could you tell us a little about who you are and how you came to be working with RPGs?
TD: I’m a graphic designer by day, working on things like book covers, a data visualisation atlas of Aotearoa, and so on. I’ve been making RPG stuff as Old Dog Games for the last few years, starting with maps and illustrated actual plays and more recently making full-fledged games.
I actually first started making RPGs around the age of eighteen, falling in with the Forge (which was brand new then, in 2002). My games were mostly terrible, but I learnt a lot before stepping away for a long time (ten or fifteen years). When I got back into RPGs (around the same time seemingly everybody else did), it was a swift road from D&D back to indie RPGs.
JR: Can you describe what a really good TTRPG campaign would consist of for you? Can you recall any systems that have helped you achieve that?
TD: Great question. For me, a really good TTRPG campaign is when a satisfying story comes together, and it comes together organically - the main thing is, I want to be surprised by what happens (that’s getting down to brass tacks; of course I also enjoy fun fights and stupid jokes and everything else).
To get more specific, it’s all about those moments where someone is rolling the dice and I cannot WAIT to find out what the result is – whatever it is. Those times when my enjoyment isn’t predicated on a particular outcome, but on finding out what happens next. That is the shit.*
I’m still trying to figure out how to get there consistently (it’s amazing how, as the GM, you end up subconsciously controlling how events unfold even when you’re trying REALLY hard not to).
Some examples that stick out for me…
Ironsworn. Mostly known as a solo game, but we’ve been playing this as a GM-less backup game when some of our usual group can’t make it. Fantastic stuff; prepping (in the GM sense) is impossible, so of course everything that happens is a surprise - and just as importantly, the finely-tuned mechanics and reams of random tables give it coherence and specificity. No mean feat!
Thousand Year Old Vampire. Cheating a little bit since this is a solo game, but the feelings of discovery and surprise and delight were top-tier (so much so that I was inspired to draw the whole thing). To be able to hit those same highs in a group setting is a big design goal for me.
AGON. This one’s interesting because it’s in a very structured, episodic framework - there is no player agency about where you go, which island you travel to next, or what your goals for the campaign are (it’s always: you’re lost on an endless voyage, and have to please the gods to get home). Nevertheless, it is full of dynamic surprises. It does really interesting things with authority and permissions, giving the players very broad authority to say what happens next. As the GM, you can sit back in your chair and be entertained for 80% of the session.
JR: I am incredibly taken with your Blades hacks, Dogs In The Bark was a particular highlight for me, but can you talk about your own relationship with the Blades system?
TD: It’s been a slowly evolving relationship, that’s for sure. I started by making little play aides like character art and lair maps, then some small hacks (starting with light reskins), then detailed street maps of the entire city of Doskvol, and now I’m working on Blades in ‘68, which is a full standalone thing that rockets the game forward 100 years to the swinging 60s.
It’s funny looking back at my earlier hacks, because I was so nervous about changing things in what felt like an intricate clockwork machine. Although I’m still an “if it ain’t broke down fix it” sort of designer, I’m way more confident about chopping and changing where I think it fits the themes of the game.
Your recent newsletter where you spoke about trying to get to grips with the faction/downtime industrial complex, and playing without prep, that really resonated with me. I’ve played plenty of Forged in the Dark games, yet I’m still learning to get out of my own way. That elasticity (where it can be heavily prepped or not prepped at all) is a strength of the system and surely one of the reasons for its immense popularity, but it can become a crutch. A comfortable rut. I want to go deeper!
JR: When recommending Blades-derived materials to people, what do you tend to be most excited or energetic about? Are the things you find yourself explaining or recommending to people over and over again? (I, for example, cannot get enough of explaining to people the resist rules in Blades and having them say "like a saving throw?" and saying: NO! Anyway.)
TD: Resistance is a good one! The things that blew my mind when I first read Blades were the flashback mechanism and the “pick items as you go” quantum load. They’re so simple mechanically (both are basically just permissions - “you can do flashbacks”, or “you don’t have to pick items until you need them.”) but they’re super fun, they’re thematically appropriate, and they’re critical to the design goal of fast scores with minimal planning. Genius.
The other thing I love is the crew sheet and the claim map. This goes back to the whole faction/downtime/entanglement aspect of the system. Although I don’t feel I’ve ever fully, 100% got that engine roaring for myself, I love what it promises and it’s definitely a huge part of what excites me about sitting down to play Blades.
JR: And then along came Agon? What did you make of Harper's follow-up? Blades seems like a tough act to follow for anyone. Why does that system work for you?
TD: Yeah, I mean, the AGON kickstarter was an instant-back for me as a big fan of Blades.
It actually took me a while to get AGON to the table, and it wasn’t until I did that the game clicked for me. What might seem kind of simple on paper really sings at the table. It’s a unique experience, elegantly designed, and clearly rigorously playtested.
The way it shifts authority to the players is super interesting. It’s a very intentional piece of design; who has authority over which aspects of the game is clearly delineated, even more so than in Blades. It makes for a very collaborative atmosphere at the table without necessarily feeling like a woolly creative-writing exercise.
Layered on top of that is the fact that you’re all competing for Glory; you want to succeed as a group, sure, but you also want your hero to be the best and gain the most glory. So even as it’s very creative and collaborative, there’s also the friction of friendly competition and rivalry. It’s fun!
JR: This brings me to Deathmatch Island. I backed this instantly, or at most in a single second, when I realised you were intending to adapt the Paragon system to this sort of setting -- was the idea behind doing the book a similar sort of lightning bolt? Or is there a more convoluted story?
TD: Yeah, pretty much - we played a campaign of AGON, I couldn’t stop thinking about the “friendly competitiveness” of it all, and wanting to explore that and push it further led to Deathmatch Island. What I really wanted was to have the friendly competition, like in AGON, but provide an opportunity for these rivals to go head-to-head in the finish (if they want to!). Give them an outlet for all that pent-up competitiveness.
So in Deathmatch Island you cooperate as a team to survive. You’re also competing with each other to be the best; competing not for Glory but for Followers. Like in any reality TV show, Production will tip the scales to help the most popular characters, those with the most followers, survive to the end.
It all leads to a Prisoner’s Dilemma where you have to choose whether to turn on your teammates to win the game, or work together to tear the whole thing down.
The thing about good deathmatch media is that, like good zombie fiction, the interesting part isn’t really the shooting and killing. It’s about the people, the main characters, and what they will or won’t do when put under pressure. The advantage of the Paragon system is that it does provide the fast, punchy action (being designed for the exploits of ancient greek heroes) but it doesn’t get bogged down in minutiae and specificity. It gives room for players to explore and express who their character is, and it provides a lot of narrative structure so that everything pays off in a satisfying way.
JR: Why did you choose the "mysterious" setting rather than some specific dystopian explanation of the situation the players find themselves in?
TD: I’ve watched enough mystery box shows and deathmatch movies to know that any one solitary explanation will be disappointing. In the spirit of wanting to be surprised by what happens, and the narrative freedom that the Paragon system gives to the players, a locked-in canon explanation just felt wrong.
What I did instead was to provide four different categories of explanation (e.g. it’s a big scientific experiment, or it’s actually a reality TV show for the mega wealthy, etc), and there are concrete clues sprinkled around the islands that point to each of these explanations. The players choose where they go on each map, and so they’ll run into some random combination of these weird clues and insights. Then they do “theory crafting” to propose what the clues they found might be pointing to.
In this way, it’s not asking the players to make up the explanation for themselves from whole-cloth. It’s providing a few possible explanations, having the players bump into different clues based on where they go, and then asking the players to theorize about what those clues mean. It’s up to the Production Player to riff on those theories and provide input back into the game fiction that might confirm those ideas, or might challenge them.
It’s a fun interplay between myself as the game designer, the actions and ideas of the Competitor Players, and the input and control of the Production Player. The results feel earned, and “real”, but also match the tastes and sensibilities of any given table.
At least, that’s the idea!
JR: I love ideas! How are you feeling about the project at this moment in time? (Congratulations, it's looking fine!)
TD: Oh man, a lot of things. Mostly proud and stoked, to be honest. Everything’s shipping any day now, both the printed materials as well as all the digital rewards and stretch goals, all well ahead of schedule. Amazing.
As you know, it’s a funny process, this TTRPG crowdfunding thing. It’s a long road getting the game ready, and then there’s the big extravaganza of the crowdfunding, but that’s only really the start; you still have to fulfil the damn thing, and only once that’s done is it actually in people’s hands. Then you wait for people to read a whole book, then schedule a game, and then maybe play your game. It’s a lot of dominos that need to fall before someone can tell you what they really think of it.
But yes, I’m proud, I can’t wait for people to get it, and I hope they like it. This might be a hot take but I’m of the opinion that it’s totally fine to buy RPGs that you’ll never play, and that they should be pleasurable to read and to look at as a book object, not just as a game. That was a big goal of mine for Deathmatch Island; that it would be satisfying to own even if you never play it.
(But please do play it.)
JR: Okay fine. But at this point wee like to invite all Teeth interviewees a chance to point to stuff they're excited about, or in awe of, or generally just want the rest of the readership to be aware of. Would you like to do that?
TD: Yes!
Ironsworn: Starforged: Sundered Isles. As mentioned, I think Ironsworn is a truly great piece of game design, and Starforged builds on that and polishes it to a really impressive degree. Great layout, information design, game design; the complete package.
True Grit (the book). You mentioned my white whale project (Blood Red Clouds in the Western Sky, or Blades Meridian, if you must) a while back, and I do love a western story. I only read True Grit for the first time recently, and it blew me away. Just a really funny, concise, well-written book that I think everybody should read.
Australian Survivor: Titans V Rebels. Look, wait, keep reading. I know Survivor isn’t for everybody, but I think the Australian franchise is in a class of its own at the moment, better than the US version, and the season that just finished is SO good. Funny, moving, entertaining, I can’t recommend it enough. Especially for anyone thinking of running Deathmatch Island; my DMI life hack is that Survivor characters are a great mental short-hand to reach for when characterising an NPC.
JR: Tim, you old dog, thanks for your time.
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*Reader, it really is
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Next time: Maybe we will get around to that Mothership thing.