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. Jim and Marsh talk about GOLD TEETH, at this important juncture.

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Hello, you.

GOLD TEETH, the PDF version, is now on sale for $35. If you want 350 pages of our magnificent work, well, it’s right there. If you want to support this newsletter and also get 350 pages of our magnificent work, that’s also the case, right there.

Prefer physical books? They’re coming in a few months time! The news will be here first.

If you already backed us and haven’t checked your Kickstarter DMs for the details, then do so now!

Look at that!

And, as ever, thanks for coming along on this fancy piratical voyage with us. It was dark, it was dangerous, but we’re so glad we did it.

-Marsh & Jim

LINKS!

• We lost John Blanche last week. It goes without saying that he was an immense influence on us personally, and also defined the hobby that we are so in love with over the past fifty years. An incredible, world-changing legacy. Wyrd Science posted a farewell.

• Ironsworn 2e is happening, and it seems like a few of you might want to keep an eye on this.

• This video about improving safety tools at conventions did surprise me: I have to admit to never having played a convention game, but I would have thought this would be a place where they would be best implemented. Hopefully, with some consideration like this, they will be.

• Loved this thread about GAMESMAN a tabletop games magazine from 1992. I was buying games mags in 1992 and I am not sure how I missed this, perhaps because it only ran for 10 issues.

• Michael Spicer would have had his own TV show just a decade ago, but now at least he has a Youtube channel on which gems like this one might be found.

Gold. GOLD! (TEETH)

Jim: Marsh, you have done a great work! The PDF is now in the hands of our generous and beautiful backers and on sale on itch.io for just $35! One American dollar for every ten pages of our fancy writing and your superb illustration! The road/navigable sea route has been long, and it is complete. But tell me, what are some of your favourite pages?

Marsh: You know it's funny. Now the game is out, I've been giving the elevator pitch a lot: "It's about piracy and occult horror in a cursed corner of the Caribbean!" And it is! But as I flick through the book, I realise that the elevator itself is built out of Jim & Marsh-branded dipshittery that almost has nothing to do with the big ticket features of the game. It's just packed full of self-contained silliness. There's a murder mystery; a scenario in which the occupants of the governor's mansion are being driven ape by a set of cursed monkey figurines; there are multiple treasure hunts featuring cartographic puzzles. Tucked in a table at the back of the book is the material for an entire wedding planning campaign in the service of Blackbeard's ghost. And of course there are the spark tables featuring horrendous creatures and how to cook them. Don't get me wrong: I love the seafaring rules; I think they really work to conjure the thrill of nautical adventure—but the pages that make me giggle are the things you could pull from the book entirely and slot into a totally different game.

Jim: Yes! That's very much the thing going on here. While we have made a book that might be the best pirate game ever made, it's actually another excursion into the ludicrous realm that makes the TEETH games stand out for me (even though we wrote them), which is that we collect oddities, transform them, and then spit them out in new forms in a way that is surprising and funny. I think we surprise each other, which is probably a part of the point of doing this. Our DM log is a catalogue of weird fuckers from history, and stupid shit that doesn't sound like it's real, but actually is, and then it feels like a very explicit challenge for us is to outdo that. There's a (nautical) tonne of material in this new book, like the new sea magic rules, or the bonus playbooks: things that make me hoot with ill-laughter each time I encounter them. 

While I do think we made an ambitious book -- the ship sailing rules aren't quite like anything else I can think of -- the TEETH books as a whole are all about abject nonsense, and that's not necessarily as a topline, as you say, not as the elevator pitch. It's all this absurd flotsam and jetsam (literally, in the case of the flotsam and jetsam tables) which make what we've written such a pleasure to read and play. As with the other books, people are already calling out the nuggets they have found, and I love that. I recall Quintin Smith saying of the original book something like "I read it cover to cover, like a novel", and I know people will be doing that here and discovering pockets of creativity. GOLD TEETH isn't really intended as a general sourcebook or resource, but I think it is one.

Marsh: Right, being able to read it cover-to-cover, in an almost novelistic way, is important to me. Maybe 90% of tabletop roleplaying games never actually make it to the tabletop—so I want it to be an enjoyable thing to consume regardless of its aspirations to be a game. As with TEETH, it aims to engage the GM as much as serve them: the world is heavy with internal connections, such that it almost works like a Choose Your Own Adventure, allowing the GM to follow narratives threaded among the various locations. Of course, that's useful in play, too: the GM can feed these breadcrumbs to players, knowing that they will lead somewhere interesting, but I want it to excite their own curiosity, too. I mentioned the treasure maps—there's a whole bunch of them at the back of the book which correspond to locations depicted on the fully rendered maps elsewhere in the book. Maybe no one will thank me for this, but I intentionally did not state to which places they refer: the GM gets to enjoy that puzzle themselves, although, of course, they could simply let their players figure it out. But I really hope the book delights GMs as readers—GMing can sometimes be a lonely burden, so having the book engage you, or share an inside joke with you, feels like camaraderie. Do you have a favourite joke in there?

Jim: The inventory objects all sit high up on the humour ladder for me, and you really went all out on a few of those. I think it's the elder god Stewart Lee joke, though, right? I think that might be a first in TTRPGs. 

Regardless, we absolutely entertained ourselves, as we have done in writing all of these, and I think that's part of the joy of writing: seeing what we spontaneously come up with. Going into what you have written and having a chuckle, or, even better, finding something I'd forgotten I'd written and laughing at the joke is a special pleasure. I suspect, though, that the long and lonely task you've had in illustrating and laying out the book was Not Funny At All. Can you talk about that process at all? What did you learn? How do you now feel?

Marsh: Well, as with every book we've made, what I've learnt only at the very, very end is how I should have done it from the start. Developing a colour art style took a long time and the results are inconsistent: I don't feel this is as aesthetically coherent a book as TEETH, but at a certain point you just have to make your peace and get it done. I'm quite pleased with the maps, though—I worked hard to find a look which evoked the period while exuding character. Cartography of 1781 had largely made the leap from vibrant inexactitude to dry precision—especially when it comes to nautical charts—but there were still a handful of holdouts making these charming 3D projections of cities with fudged perspective lines, and wobbily interpretative topographical paintings of islands. Those are my people. And it happens that this mishmash style communicates both the sufficient detail and feeling of a place that are necessary for roleplaying.

I also learnt that I hate drawing ships and don't ever want to perceive another again. Do you know how many ropes they have, Jim? Too fucking many.

Jim: I would like to declare, publicly, that this project has altered my level of interest in sailing ships in particular. I was always more of an era of steam onwards guy. I have gone from "ah, look at that," to something more like "wow, that the fuck" of boats with sails and many ropes. Prior to this the Age of Sail had not really called to me, as it has to you, and my main interest in pirates was instilled by watching Black Sails, which was absolutely rip-snorting TV with one of the greatest conclusions ever committed to the screen. Hot, hot pirates, and all of them, in a blender. So it was in that mythic-mash that I approached the ship, and all boat-related topics related to GOLD TEETH. Did I care about sailing ships? I barely thought about them. 

In truth I think it was mostly down to your absolute momentum with regards to sailing ships that we ended up doing this project: you turned up with a folder full of rules for making sailing ships and the crews within them work with a framework derived for Forged In The Dark style play, and we talked pirates, and that was really that. We didn't have to stay in the 18th century, of course, but we were anchored immediately by your own delight in the big floaty vessels and the maniacs who crewed them. And telescopes. Important! That said, doing another 18th century book was also a reward on its own, and in no small part because we cast our view much wider than the valleys of made up England, to look upon things in that horrible century which chimed with our own cynical silliness and horror at the world. (Listening to podcasts about the American, French and other revolutions during my fairly long illness in the middle of this project helped bring to life for me what a savage birthing of the project of modernity that project ends up being, for all we had already discussed such things as we wrote TEETH itself.)

Marsh: Right, I think a confluence of things—the continuing grim political shift of the 2020s, our reading external to the project, and the decision to move beyond England in this book—inevitably led us to confront some uncomfortable parts of history, and Britain's role in it. TEETH has pretty clear political undercurrents, but in GOLD TEETH they are the entire ocean on which you sail. I don't think you can set something in the 18th-century Caribbean without engaging with this stuff—without acknowledging how so much of that imperial moment, or even how much maritime business in general, is underpinned by the crime of slavery. It's an atrocity which shapes every other thing about that time. It felt like abdication to remove it, though it might have been creatively safer to do so, especially in a book which at points aspires to considerable silliness. Have we made something lowbrow, even? Maybe! But I just don't think your brows, wherever they sit, are absolved of history. In fact, I think if we leave the acknowledgement of atrocity to only the sober voices, or to academia, then we are abetting in censorship—and, of course, the backdrop to all this is the concerted effort by right wing agitators to infiltrate the voting bodies of the UK's heritage organisations, like the National Trust, aiming to strip any mention of slavery from our discourse. I don't want to help them do that.

Jim: Nor should anyone. I think it's fair to say that all history is a story told, but the idea that this stuff can or should be made, via a sort of perverted relativism, into a matter of opinion, or softened so as not to trouble the thoughts of those already insulated from it, reveals only people's desperation to whitewash history. That said, the equation is an interestingly rich one. The book is silly fiction rather than sober history, comedy taking on big topics: we invent magic and introduce Elder Gods into the 18th century. GOLD TEETH is very much filled with our delight in the absurd, taking place in an invented island chain, with (mostly) fictionalised historical figures, and a crew of ludicrous pirate mutants, one of whom can be a shark. It's a very funny game, and I can't stop laughing at how ludicrous some of the jokes are, even as the backdrop darkens.

Marsh: But none of this gives us carte blanche with the topic either, right? With the Caribbean especially, we are writing about a place—even under the cloak of fictionalisation—from which we do not come and cannot speak for. This might be an anticolonial book, but it's unavoidably from a colonisers' perspective. I'm really grateful for the sensitivity readers we had (Adanna Nedd, Helen Gould and Yussef Cole), who understood the project's intent and helped it to become a better version of itself. That process, of having perspectives other than our own brought to bear on what we had written, was genuinely enriching. I admit I was very nervous of it, but that turned out to be unfounded: it was really supportive and pleasurable, even. In the end, the book is a heady mix of flavours—of comedy, grotesquery, occult horror and historic trauma. Does it all sit well together? I won't say that we have succeeded, but we did try! And I can't regret that. 

Also, I simply can't regret the silliness, as discordant as some might find it. I'm prone to gloom and the research for this project involved staring directly at some of the worst episodes in human history. What keeps me going is the sense that it is all part of some terrible farce. The absurdity is self-care.

Talking of which, perhaps one of my favourite things in the book is also one of the stupidest: the name Emma-Jane Chokinghazard. It's so dumb, but it makes me snort every time I see it. And, you know, sometimes you need that.

Jim: I do agree. What I want to say, overall, I think, is that I am amazed by what an ambitious piece of work this is. And it's in no small part your ambitious work, Marsh. Well done, my friend, you made a thing, and it's quite, quite beautiful. (And just delightfully horrible!)

GOLD TEETH is available in PDF form now, with physical books coming later in 2026. Stay tuned - yes, tuned, using your internet dial - to this channel for further announcements!