Some Finished Pages From TEETH & Our Games On Sale!
Egad! You are reading the TEETH newsletter, written and compiled by lofty rationalist Jim Rossignol and gritty empiricist Marsh Davies. This is a newsletter about table-top role-playing games: our own—that we’re publishing over here and also here —as well as interviews, links, and general noodling. Want us to see your work? Get in touch!
Hello, You
Links!
SALE! SALE! SALE!
What's In A Name?
Hello, You
This week we have mostly been clinking our fliptop beer steins together in celebration of Marsh having laid a staggering number of pages of the full TEETH book. We’re so pleased with this that we’re going to show you some, in just a moment.
Marsh also wrote an essay about the many, many extraordinary and wonderful character names that we came up with for The Vale Of Deluth setting.
Anyway, below are some examples of the (subjected-to-tweaking) spreads from the book. We are most excited about people seeing these, because they’re awesome. Note that these aren’t a sequence, they’re just the bits that we think give the best flavour of the piece. Maps! Atmospheric illustrations! Little boxes to tick off progress towards advancement or oblivion! (Note if you’re looking at this on mobile you can open up to view the whole thing, but that’s probably best done in a larger screen.)
Get a load of this, we say.
First: this is the playbook for one of our character types, The Keeper.
Below is The Outfit Sheet, which tracks the achievements of the group as a whole, as well as the passage of the seasons, and the factional influence of the different groups which the outfit is likely to encounter in their adventures in the vale.
And here are some spreads from The Worldbook, which explains both the distinct settings and locations, as well as providing prompts for adventures and monsters to hunt.
And there’s much more than this, something like 300 pages at last count, and this includes a hugely colourful (black & white) cast of characters, such as Adriana Quail…
And some hideous supernatural opponents, such as the Myraclid…
You can see, perhaps, why I am so amazed and pleased to be working with Marsh.
Oh and here’s a mockup of what we expect the cover to look like. More on that in another newsletter.
Next we’ll be working on the details of how this makes its way into the world now. It’s been a long process, but it’s now reaching a denouement!
Links!
Ah, it’s been a busy old month in the mild circus of TTRPG things, but we’re going to be fairly quick on the links because we’re literally running out of newsletter space. THING OF THE WEEK is Ex Novo by our friends at Sharkbomb Studios. Following on from their excellent “playable dungeon-building” game, Ex Umbra, this is an experiment in the same direction but dwelling on Dimopolous’ personal obsession with cities. Ex Novo is a big old bundle of ideas, with an entire game built around doodling up your city, developing things like its resources and events that the place experiences. (Weirdly, as I read through the PDFs, I myself experienced a very heavy rememberance of things past as I recalled trying to do something just like this with my cousins one summer, as we sat in a spare room with a load of paper and pencils on a rainy summer holiday. How the decades slide away.)
Not actually an RPG book, but look at how beautiful An Illustrated History Of UFOs is. It could be a sourcebook for something, right?
Since many of your come here for Forged In The Dark things I also have been reminded to quickly recommend Hack The Planet. I can’t remember if we mentioned this before, and it’s perhaps been a little eclipsed for us by the lite-ruled CBR+PNK, but this is a huge slab of cyberbook, running to a startlingly un-punky 346 pages, and really is a beautiful basis for campaign-length cyberpunk setting games.
Everyone in the world linked this Procreate gaming table lighting setup, but still, holy shit.
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SALE! SALE! SALE!
The TEETH adventures are available at half-price on itch.io for the coming week. Of course NIGHT OF THE HOGMEN is already a pigswarm of Pay What You Wantness, but this puts the incredible soiree infiltration of BLOOD COTILLION and the haunted wanderings of STRANGER & STRANGER much closer within your monetary grasp, being $3.50 and $5 respectively!
If you’ve enjoyed the newsletter but haven’t picked these up yet, then we would encourage you to do so now.
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Now, here’s Marsh to talk about some other stuff in TEETH, namely the names…
What's In A Name?
If there's any part of the creation of TEETH that has been too much fun, it's the names. Names are important in TTRPGs, in a way which is maybe undermined by the very randomness of the random name generators regularly used as a crutch for time-pressured GMs. Names need to be memorable, for one thing. Jangle too many random syllables together and the difference between names becomes harder to hold onto.
But you can also use names as a creative shorthand to sketch a character, their purpose, their threat level and so on without a word of extra description. And so it is that a major operator in TEETH is the formidable pork magnate Sir Gorbrus Batchley, a collection of syllables that is somehow suggestive of a red-faced English gentleman with certain body-mass index while also meaning precisely nothing. Igmead Spence, Dory Fussmouth, Mayor Balburry Prope, Beneficia de Lorte and Lorkal Tone also play roles, large and small, across the Vale.
Being so quick-witted (and dashingly attractive) as you are, you'll have no doubt noticed that these aren't actually English names, despite our game being set in 18th century England. Our shared instinct, which I don't think Jim and I discussed until the project was well underway, was to have a lot of names that sound like English names, but also definitely aren't. This helps to signal that this world is like ours, but not ours. Also, if we stuck by 18th century naming conventions most of the characters would be called John or Mary. But mostly it's because there's just a tremendous joy in coming up with gibberish, in much the same spirit as 70's Italian pop sensation Adriano Celentano's song, Prisencolinensinainciusol, in which the singer delivers plausible sounding English-esque lyrics that are superbly crafted nonsense. I love it. I'm not entirely sure I can explain why.
We've been a bit more careful with names from further afield. English is our own speech to mangle, but our long imperial tradition of dismissing foreign cultures and their tongues as barbaric gibbering casts a playful approach to other languages in a gloomier context. We hope that our empire-building European neighbours are reasonably fair game: we share so much history and language with the French, Germans and Dutch that juggling their phonemes in the same spirit of silliness shouldn't feel like punching down.
Then there are the nicknames: Milk Fever Sue, Glad Peter, Ulf the Depleted, Mad Milly Cluck, Galloping Dick Ferguson (this last being the epithet of a real highwayman!) - always useful to create a character who is set apart from others by the rhythm of their syllables alone. Giving everyone a phonetic identity is important: if you meet too many people called Gorbrus Batchley or Smitherin Clum or Pidgery Styke in quick succession, the names sink into a porridgey morass of meaningless sounds. The way we've structured TEETH presents players with a subset of the total cast at any one time, and hopefully we've kept the names sufficiently varied and asymmetric within that bubble, helping the players to remember who is who.
And yet, for all this theorising about the power of names, somehow Jenny Eggs is still the name that makes me chuckle most. Please let us know your favourite character names from your own adventures (or indeed, from the ones we have already released!) in the comments! We’d love to hear them.
-Marsh
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More soon! x