Welcome, favoured adventure-folk, to the TEETH newsletter! This is a (not all that) weekly transmission about our creations in and explorations of the very secret land of Tabletop Roleplaying-Games. 

What appears within this letter is written and compiled by veteran game critic and designer, Jim Rossignol, and former Mojang alumni and famed illustrator, Marsh Davies. Why not come and join us over on the TEETH Discord! Free tooth emojis for everyone!

1. Books!

2. Links!

3. Marsh runs Blood Cotillion!

Books!

(Hello, you.)

Okay, so (drumroll) BOOKS! (And zines!)

If you are a resident of the United Kingdom, you have not already done so, please consider supporting us by purchasing our fine zines and books.

International distribution is being sorted and we'll update you with details when this happens!

GOLD TEETH, our game of Forged in the Dark 18th-century piratical cursedness, and FALSE KINGDOM, our game of berserk 12th-century backstabbingness, are both available direct from us. Please consider supporting us by purchasing one or both of these fine publications. PLEASE NOTE: I will be posting these in small batches, as my ability to get them dispatched is constrained by logistics. (Also I didn’t pick up enough maps to sell these from here, a bit of an oversight! But they will soon be available elsewhere, and are provided digitally for your usage.)

If you would rather support us via digital purchases, then the full range is available on itch.io!

As you might expect, this means that fulfilment is mostly complete, and it is! A few belated-survey stragglers are still going through the system, but the books are otherwise in the hands of you, our beloved backers. Thank you all, so much!

As for an essay in this newsletter, it's Marsh with some thoughts on our much-loved and possibly most-played zine, Blood Cotillion. We're probably going to be talking about our own books a fair bit in the coming months which, well, that's what this newsletter was set up for. We cast our net broadly, of course, but we will be dragging the TEETH books from the depths in coming newsletters. We also have a big after-action report on our year-long The One Ring campaign, which will appear here between now and Christmas. Busy times!

As always,

-Marsh & Jim

LINKS!

• Did you come out of the cinema this year wishing you could get into trouble with the Gods after a fraught expeditionary war? Well, then you might consider Atrapos, currently in the trials of crowdfunding. A compelling pitch, and look at that cover treatment!

• The exquisitely-pretty Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland has yet to be brought to the table in our neck of the RPGs, but really, it's only a matter of time. Just the right sort of prehistoric esoterism, as explained in Indie Gaming Reading Club's recent post. "The interesting twist is that to fight a spirit, you have to strike at them with your amulets, therefore doing the things you’re bad at. Maskwitches get beat up! And the longer they wander the land, the more masks and amulets they pick up and the stranger they become." And in the game!

• This has probably done the rounds before, but Triple-A Minesweeper made me chuckle.

• Our kid Gillen has chosen his Top Ten TTRPGs, and that top spot certainly is a leftfield choice that shows this is a man who is always struggling to bring a light to the more obscure corners of TTRPG development.

• Ten Ambience Channels for writers was an instant bookmark.

• When Dice Were Made Of Flint is a sprawling retrospective of the pre and early history of the hobby. "Having done a couple of school plays, I had joined a small am-dram group as a hobby. Some of the younger members were recent graduates, and had picked up a new-fangled American game while in university. It was a blend of miniatures wargame and improvised theatre, they said. Nobody won, and it never actually ended."

• A profound sort of delve into solo journaling LARP territory from Mr Risby.

• And speaking of solo stuff, The Walden Paradox looks absolutely great. "You are Henry David Thoreau. You came to the woods to live deliberately, in solitude — a mile from any neighbor. And yet there are more visitors each day. Each peculiar. Each obsessed with the details of your life. Something is very wrong. The Walden Paradox is a transcendental solo journaling game. Roll dice and draw cards for each new visitor. Watch for strange anomalies and time paradoxes. Record it all in your journal."

• Inkle's Kaleidoscope podcast is great, but I point to it specifically for the episode with Graham Walmsley (scroll down a bit… keep going, there it is!) a master of TTRPG erudition. Have a listen.

For whom the belle balls

A few weeks back, I (Marsh) had the pleasure of running Blood Cotillion for some friends. It is the second of our released games, a one-or-two-shot set across a single evening at a fancy summer ball in 1775, which the players are attending in the guise of husband-hunting ingenues. They are, however, elite assassins, sent to extract information about cultish practices from the manor's horrible men and, ultimately, destroy what they find. It plays out as a sort of Austen-inspired Hitman level. Players flirt with the eligible sons of nobility, lure them from the hubbub of the ball to more secluded places, and do distressing things to them until the manor's secrets are revealed.

We—or at least I—had a jolly time with it. Lascivious bachelors were partially decapitated and stuffed in cupboards. Secret passageways were revealed, and then quickly covered in both blood and jam. A chandelier was sent crashing into a crowded dance floor, setting the entire place ablaze. What a splendid evening!

It remains, however, a challenging scenario to run and I think, looking back on it now, we might approach the structure of the zine a little differently. A particularly tricky aspect of it—trickier still if you aren't the people who wrote it—is that there isn't a clear distinction between the things that are defined as canonical parts of the mystery, optional details that can be freely changed, and the things that we expect the GM to fully improvise. This is probably true of all our books—and it works for me and Jim despite being a compromise of our divergent approaches. My attitude to GMing is to try to download as much of a scenario as my limited brain will permit, flushing out phone numbers, names of loved ones and so on, until I'm confident that I can handle the likely permutations without the terror of inventing things off-the-cuff. Jim, meanwhile, is simply an improvisational beast with the well-earned confidence that he can fix anything he breaks on the fly. 

But it makes other GMs panic: they do not instinctively know which bits of our scenario can be futzed with, and which bits could break some later causal chain; where they can lean heavily on the text to carry them on and where they should colour in between the lines. 

How would we solve this, were we to do it all again? Rather than include some metatextual "How to Read and Play Our Games" philosophical primer, maybe we should reorganise things such that the fixed details were up front—made clear, short and sweet. Then perhaps we might detach everything else from specificity, so it can be rolled from tables as the situation requires. We already move part way in this direction by suggesting the GM feed players clues in a given order, regardless of who they interrogate first; there is a fixed mystery to the manor, but there is no canon truth as to which person knows what, so the pacing of unlocking the puzzle is maintained and its easier to track what the players understand. 

But then again, I like my little webs of detail! That one of the horrid noble sons in particular is mired in a disastrous canal building scheme is the kind of gossip that would lose some juice if trimmed of its specificity and turned into an NPC-agnostic fact that could spill out of any successful conversational gambit. Also, for max malleability, it would be better to dispense with the maps altogether, and have the manor sprawl in the table's collective imagination from spark tables and the GM's whims—but that would be a loss, too; maps provide a sense of place and atmosphere that I personally find to be a core inspiration when planning a game. 

I'd love to hear the thoughts of others on how the material could be reorganised to keep as much characterful detail, while giving the GM the tools to move among it quickly, and improvise without anxiety! Perhaps join our Discord to tell us.

The other hazard of Blood Cotillion is that I talked myself hoarse. It's pretty much Split the Party: The Game, which is manageable in terms of player engagement, as long as you keep moving focus, but hard on the vocal chords. So much of the game is a social challenge that the GM ends up in a one-on-one conversational relay throughout. This has made us think about games which give each player a secondary character who acts as a sidekick for a different player (such as Triangle Agency's mentees). I'm not sure how we would contrive that in Blood Cotillion, specifically—perhaps each ingenue has a personal valet?—but it might help spread the load.

This is not to say that we will do a makeover of Blood Cotillion (though I do intend to embed Playbooks within the main document for future print versions)—there's much within it that still makes me proud and, as an artefact of our developing tastes and talents, I'm not sure I'd want to meddle with it too much. Maybe it's better to embrace the mess—much like our ingenues' own chaotic efforts—and accept that the hastily concealed scars, the cliff-edge teetering over mental collapse, the sheer idiot panic of it can sometimes be what makes a soiree sing. 

More sooooon!