Take Us By The Hand: BLOOD COTILLION released!
Hello, you.
It’s a fine day for being invited to an 18th century ball under the pretense of finding a husband, when you are actually a savage anti-occult crusader. Yes, our next vision from TEETH’s grotesquely magical 18th century England - BLOOD COTILLION - is here. More on that in a moment.
This past week has been a busy one at TEETH Towers. As well as publishing escapades we finished our Mothership campaign, which both Marsh and I will write about next week, and I’ve also been reading The Dee Sanction, a 16th century RPG of “Enochian Intelligence”, which clearly lands rather close to our own hearts. More on that, probably, when we get a chance to actually play it. But in the meantime do check it out for yourself if you find yourself intrigued: the core rule book is a mere tenner of British coin.
Let’s do some links!
LINKS
The talented and handsome Greg Howitt has released a solo journaling RPG called Fetch. Worth a look, as is all of his stuff.
Wow, look at ARC. It’s a game of defeating apocalypses in a specific timeframe, based, as far as I understand it, on how much time you actually have to play. To wit: “a real-time Doom Clock that counts down to apocalypse”. Now that sounds like a thing.
Jason Morningstar’s THE SKELETONS has been around for a bit, but it popped up again on itch this week and I was reminded of how excellent it is.
Nothing to do with RPGs, other than the woodcut style making an appearance in a few books, but I’m a big fan of Stanley Donwood’s BAD ISLAND. He lives down the street from us!
Research this week led us to the legend of the 16th-century Scottish cannibal gang, because of course it did.
BLOOD COTILLION
It’s here. 45 pages of illustrated rulebook, eight playbooks, two maps, one of which is full colour, and two illustrated cheat sheets! Yes, we’re particularly proud of this one, because it’s not only a rollicking adventure, but we have gone and produced a fine object of pen & paper publishing.
BLOOD COTILLION is considerably more ambitious than our first outing, NIGHT OF THE HOGMEN. While that was a nightmarish chase through a dark and stormy hurricane of pig monsters, this is something far more dangerous: a delve into the perfidious realm of English landed gentry, with all their entitlement and fascination with occult power. Blood rites likely, dancing with a terrifying souse inevitable.
I personally feel like this conjures our 18th century setting with all appropriate vigor: if you’ve seen Pride and Prejudice and Zombies then you probably get a glimmer of the idea. Young women dressed to the nines, hooped skirts flouncing as they heft a machete or wind up a crossbow for a second headshot.
Playtesting was a literal and figurative ball, and seeing everyone get into character as murderous zealots playing demure socialites was a scene. In actual play we saw villainous aristocratic thugs stabbed with quill pens, bodies dragged into secret passages in the walls, cottages set on fire, bachelors drugged— and they didn’t even make it to the haunted hedge maze, or visit the hermit in his cave!
The book contains ideas about flattering your players’ ballgowns, prompts for how to introduce ghosts, as well as rules for what happens when you blow your cover. (Chaos!) More significantly, we’ve made an effort to really provide everyone with the tools they need to make this work, with cheat sheets and prompts galore. The setting, heavy with characters, both major names and an army of possible minor NPCs, can get chaotic pretty quickly, and so we’ve made an effort to streamline and support all that.
We have included both detailed cheat sheets that allow people to keep track of the cast and players, as well as the normal rules bits, but also a set of suggestions for how GMs should handle the complexities of this stuff based on our own experiences from playtesting. It’s tricky to keep the party together, for example, when the different assassins are trying to get the brothers alone and extract the information they need, and so allowing people to split up and rotating the action to keep the cliffhangers coming is a powerful technique. Keeping track of the moving parts means keeping everyone in the flow, which has led to some challenging play.
Obviously we’re extremely keen to learn how people get on with it, so as with Hogmen please do keep us informed of your adventures!
In the meantime, we’ll be getting on with the next thing…
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Love you! x