Welcome, favoured adventure-folk, to the TEETH newsletter! This is a (mostly) weekly transmission about our explorations in 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. Hello, you.

2. LINKS!

3. Monday Night's Black Adaptations

Hello, you.

If you've backed us on the GOLD TEETH Kickstarter you'll likely already have seen me posting this page from the book. Just a little sample of the predictably astounding work that Mr Davies is putting into this second tome.

If you haven't backed us yet then you still can: there is a while yet before we will ring the ship's bell and close for printing and uh shipping, so don't miss the boat! (Sorry.) 

I do believe that you will want a physical copy of this book. I'm hugely pleased with what we're creating. It's funny, weird, colourful, and does some design stuff that is genuinely ambitious. Marsh has excelled himself in all departments. It's going to be magnificent!

Pre-order for future pleasures, but also to get hold of the beta right now*!

*if you backed and didn't get the beta link, let me know and I will fix right away.

As a moral bonus, by backing you'll also be helping keep this newsletter running, because it is now popular enough to cost us non-trivial sums to keep mailing it out. If you'd like to help us out with that then you could also consider picking up some of our other games. They're truly good and fun to read!

Oh and on the now-common topic of a TEETH reprint: a significant number of folks have asked us when we're going to have physical books in stock again, and the truth is we're not in a position to afford a print run at the moment, but it's something we're going to look at seriously once GT has shipped and is backers' hands. We'll have some kind of answer for you later in the year, but we do want to do it and will try to make it happen! Of course we do, because the book is fantastic and you should own a copy of that, too.

In the meantime, we brace the crossjib, crank the clartpump, and set sail the seven-times-cursed seas!

Avast ye lubbers,

-Jim (writing this) & Marsh (from the poop deck).

LINKS

• The internet has been awash with encouraging games stuff this year so far (without evening mentioning Kickstarters that we're very excited about beginning to gear up) from the grand opening of this games store in Milwaukee to this article - 60 systems and 600 sessions. 3 years in the life of a TTRPG meetup -- about organising games happening just down the road from me, in Bristol. Two Facebook groups with 1000+ members! I mean, wow. Perhaps they'd like a game of TEETH? Or at least some Hogmen. Hmm!

• Another thing that delighted me was listening to a recent episode of Dice Exploder which contains massive spoilers for Triangle Agency. Now, I have already spoiled it for myself somewhat by reading more of the book than a player should, because I could not resist doing so, and am considering running it myself, but do not go here if you want to experience it as a player, or even maybe as a GM. But if you have played it, check this out. What was fascinating to me was that the podcast host, Sam Dunnewold, spoke several times about how the Triangle Agency did not actually deliver what he wanted or needed from it, in a way that made me more intrigued to run it rather than less? Despite admiring how it went further and got weirder than his expectations or desires, he (I hope i get this right here) was left frustrated because it did not meet with the almost ineffable personal response to the particular pitch and starting situation the game made to him. Now, Triangle Agency does seem to be a game that inspires these sorts of feelings, not least because it is a game which steps outside of itself in a way that is frame-breaking, but it's hardly unusual in being a game that didn't do what a player wanted or expected or, ultimately, needed from the time they spent with it. That feeling itself, "this game doesn't provide what I need from it", is practically a universal response to games as a whole, but I think it often goes unanalysed or unacknowledged in favour of describing a game in a way that explains how it did things wrong. Anyway, I wrote another four thousand words on this topic (no, really) which I will not post here, but might finish up and post elsewhere in case anyone is insane enough to be interested.

• And something that also connected to the thoughts in the previous bullet point was this post about Meeting A Game Where It's At, which is replying to Kieron's superb post about how to run Mythic Bastionland. It's interesting how often someone carefully describing what is in front of you makes that thing easier to understand.

Monday Night's Black Adaptations

So we've covered what the Tuesday night sessions have been up to in Quite Excruciating Detail of late, but I have neglected to mention one of the games that the Tuesday night crew got to play. That was Night's Black Agents, The Dracula Dossier. We ran this campaign last year, during my convalescence, with Alex Wiltshire as the GM (or The Director, in Night's Black Agents terminology.).

The last time I read Dracula it was because I had to. This time I read it because the Dracula Dossier is Bram Stoker's Dracula annotated by agents who have previously dealt with the monster, and that's a core part of the material that makes up the experience of the game. You are reading annotated Dracula, your character is reading annotated Dracula. Meta! (Thankfully it comes with a PDF where ctrl-F works on the 'handwritten' notes that make up a lot of the clues, so searching for names that come up as you play becomes a little easier.) It's all gloriously high-concept, as you might imagine, and we did end up completing and defeating the whole Dracula, despite hijinks and, frankly, some lowjinks. 

The most interesting part of it all, however, was Gumshoe, the detective/investigation system none of us had ever touched on before. In Gumshoe player character actions come in two parts: the actions that are related to your social, technical, or academic expertise, and the actions that are related to, well, action: fighting, driving, that sort of stuff. The first of these groups, which really make up the investigative part of the game, are interesting in that they are points-based. You don't roll for them, and if there's a clue where you are looking, you find it. The design here is about forward-momentum. It's removing the step that can snarl up in TTRPGS, where you roll to see if you find the clue, and then don't find it and uhhh. The exciting part of investigations is, of course, figuring out what to do with all the clues, and piecing them together to produce a solution to a mystery. And this is a game where there is a definite mystery, and which you solve. I say mystery, it's a conspiracy, which goes far, and which you unpick by pieces to find the Great Fanged One, at this point several exploded vampires in, sat up the top, smoking a blood-crusted cigarillo. It's gnarly stuff, with lots of different factions and sub-conspiracies worming their way in. I am not sure we quite made the most of Night's Black Agent's node-based "conspyramid" conspiracy engine, in part because I think it needed a bit more time, which I regret not giving it, but the entire system is a fascinating beast with a tonne of supplemental material.

Oh, also, going back to Gumshoe, when you investigate you can spend some points from a regenerating pool which allows you to get even more detail, so you can decide how and when to spend them for additional effect. This means that you will always get forward momentum in the form of more clues, but can also uncover deeper threads of story and reveal more about the world as you go. This made for a sort of gameplay I don’t think we’ve encountered before, which is more about spending your resources, deciding where specific valuable points may go, than in try to load the capriciousness of dice one way or another so as to earn fate’s favour. It’s a mix of both of these things, of course, but the investigation part was, being the least familiar, the most thought-provoking.

This meant there was a considerable lore aspect to NBA and for me the delight in this was how it had been meticulously researched so that it dovetailed with actual geography and history: I learned a load about ancient Romanian pagan religions, the Communist history of Romania, as well as some ancient stuff about London and Germany, including historic places like Coldfall Wood. What I am saying is that it left me reading Wikipedia for an hour after each session.

Action stuff, though, is more traditional, more laborious, and we ended up doing some sighs about it. After a couple of fights, we decided this was not really for us, but far from wanting to abandon anything, Alex valiantly did the work to change the action system. He did this using the QuickShock rules (also by the NBA authors), as he explained in great detail on his blog: "QuickShock completely upends fighting, health and other systems, replacing them with a single round of player-facing Gumshoe-style rolls and a huge set of cards that give players physical and mental injuries that affect play. The cards are very flavourful and rich, in their names (“Existence is a Meat-Grinder”, “It’s a Miracle You’re Alive”); in their effects on the character; and in how the character recovers from them — so much more so than losing health points and asking for a Medic check to restore them."

This worked really well for our rather less crunchy-combat inclined group, which is not to say the default stuff was bad, just that it didn’t do what we needed. Alex goes on to share the full breakdown of how he rejigged the action system within NBA to work with those rules and I'd certainly looking at this if your group, like ours, doesn't want to get hung up on a traditional and turn-based combat system for a game that is otherwise all streamlined and about forward momentum. It's neat that a solution existed within the (expansive!) ecosystem of those games already, but the work required was non-trivial, so thanks to Alex for catering to our fussy tastes.

Also this work of Alex's, combined with some of the tweaks that I've looked at making to The One Ring as we prepped that for a campaign (the first session went really well without implementing any of that, we'll see how we fare) fed back into that 4000 words I mentioned upthread, which in turn folded neatly into a request by Tomtom over on Discord to talk about playing adventures written for a specific game with other systems and… I realised what I wanted to talk about was adapting an adventure that my players, some of whom may read this newsletter, will play in the near future. And so that will have to wait in case I spoil anything.

What I can say is that I mentioned previously that the Sam & Will Tempest published a beautiful Mörk Borg adventure called Strang Beorn. I picked this up partly because Will Tempest is an artist I've admired for a while and partly because it looks like this.

What sold me, of course, was that they put the title on the cover in Ogham, the ancient script from our very real world. Clever, precocious design stuff which makes me say Yes Please.

Anyway, Strange Beorn is a dark beauty. It's an eerie, bloody, and disturbing book about the monstrous aftermath of an event involving two hillfolk tribes. It's filled with (sometimes literally) berserk design and striking imagery, I am a huge fan. But it's not something I would dig out Mörk Borg to run, no matter how low-effort that might be. We played some Mörk Borg. It's fun! But I know from experience that it doesn't meet the needs of my players (that again). And on that basis Strang Beorn was a beautiful object for my shelf, for the time being.

Later, I started putting together our campaign for The One Ring, and something came into view. I did some figurative measuring up and sketching, standing back to take a look at it all with my hand on my chin, and yes - Beorn has a very specific meaning in LotR, so that will have to change - but this could work. 

Monkey's Paw stuff, perhaps. But I like it.

And as the for rest of it: More soon!