STRANGER & STRANGER is coming! (A Little Preview)
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!
This week we’ve been working on our next release, STRANGER & STRANGER. I am going to talk about that now:
STRANGER & STRANGER, our next standalone adventure, is nearly done! Marsh is putting the final touches to its pages, and we are making the last-minute adjustments to the rules and playbooks. Once again we will release the PDFs in two parts, one for all players, and another for the GM, as well as PDF playbooks, online playbooks, a map, a GM guide and low-ink versions of everything. I am massively proud of the way we’ve created suites of richly-produced documents with our publications, and it is down to the skill and dedication of Marsh that we are able to do this at all! Amazing, handsome man.
STRANGER & STRANGER is once again a standalone Forged In The Dark game of our own devising, but this time wider in scope. This time things should run to a small campaign for anyone playing it, and we completed it in 3-4 sessions. This story tells of a desperate band of isolated 18th-century villagers who are trying to save their village from Abomination, battling merciless farmyard animals, terrible English weather, and the scourge of mutation as they do so.
STRANGER & STRANGER is set within our 18th-century TEETH setting - a fully-fledged version of which is also in the works. This grim scenario of doomed historical England in which monster hunters roam a quarantined tract in the north is set against a backdrop of arcane disasters which have contaminated the realm with “occult debris”. The perspective in STRANGER & STRANGER is not that of the hunters, however, but the local yokels, who see a stranger arrive amidst profound calamity and hope that this impressive, powerful outsider might save their village from its burgeoning doom.
He seems nice! What actually happens next, however, is actually down to our villagers.
STRANGER & STRANGER is a 64-page booklet of rules and world lore, completed with illustrations, a map, and playbooks which flesh out the characters. If you have played our previous games then you will be familiar with our stripped-down approach to Forged In The Dark games, but in this version we expand it again, with some “downtime” type features called the Aftermath Phase. This phase allows players to recover, to recoup stress, and to mutate. Our playtests saw this adventure covering several sessions, and we’ve tried to make things much looser so that players and GM can find their own path to saving the village, or not. The lore book is filled with ideas, from cursed, semi-magical foods, to haunted farm animals, to the final monstrous encounter with the creature which threatens to destroy the village. Can The Stranger be trusted? Can the other villagers be trusted? Probably not, but that’s surely the fun of it all.
STRANGER & STRANGER is Coming Soon!
LINKS!
A tabletop RPG based on the excellent Hyper Light Drifter is just one of those games which an impossible level of sense as soon as you encounter it. That’s precisely what Metal Weave Games are doing: “you play as a drifter, one who ventures into the ancient ruins collecting forgotten knowledge, lost technologies and broken histories”, which is very much my area of interest.
This essay, ambitiously titled “The Computational Sublime In Monster Design” is actually a really fun academic essay on how the mechanics of monsters can be scary for players. This bit about the original Fiend Folio’s Crypt Thing tickled me, and also reminded me that the monster terrorises both the players and the GM, by splitting the party: “the monster’s transgressive special ability is not connected to level draining, and instead is has the “unfailing ability to cast an improved form of a teleportation spell on a party”, which will result in those characters “who fail to make their saving throws [being] instantly teleported” to a random location according to an intricate table. On top of this, the Fiend Folio also establishes the Crypt Thing as a liar, as “if it is questioned on the disappearance of some members of a party, it will not reveal its power but will instead maintain they have been disintegrated.”
Jez Gordon’s whimsical idea about creating an RPG based on Bakshi’s Lord Of The Rings has taken on a creative life of its own.
This idea - MOSAIC Strict - is interesting, although I am not sure I can say much more about it, or do anything with it. Our Failbetter friend Chris Gardiner points to someone doing something with it, however.
We don’t usually link to music or even RPG soundtracks, although they are numerous these days, but I have been writing RPG stuff while listening to this album by my friend Geoff. It’s quite good!
I can’t remember whether we linked this before, but doing again won’t hurt: Chris Bissette is doing a solo gamebook based on Troika. It’ll be on Kickstarter soon. There’s even going to be a digital version. Follow for notification!
Finally, research this week delivered unto us two medieval pirate priests. First 12th-century Wimund, a bishop turned “seafaring warlord adventurer” who frankly deserves his own book series and movie, and 13th-century Eustace The Monk, who was actually a pirate operating out of Sark. Possibly less of a sorcerer/Robin Hood type than Wimund, but still absolutely knocking it out of the park. Well done to both of them.
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More soon ! x