TEETH: Let Me Tell You More About our TEETH.
Hello, you.
Welcome to TEETH, our weekly newsletter about pen and paper gaming, and our own creations in the theatre of the mind (and/or tabletop).
Firstly: BLOOD COTILLION, our second TEETH standalone, one-shot adventure will arrive next week! Marsh has been doing extraordinary things in laying out the adventure, which runs to a mighty 45 pages and has two maps. And one of them is in colour. AND there are 27-ish illustrations, eight original playbooks, Google Sheets version of said playbooks, two cheat sheets and low-ink versions of the main documents.
BLOOD COTILLION lets you get a bit more familiar with ballgowns and murder than NIGHT OF THE HOGMEN, and that’s no bad thing. More on that next week.
But also in this week’s newsletter: Links, and more about the full TEETH setting.
LINKS
Perhaps you would like to try a solo pen and paper RPG? Try this one.
Or this one. “In this solo table-top RPG you will explore the Winsome Heartwood estate using a single D6 and a standard 52 card deck - searching through its buildings, mapping its roads and recording the experiences you have.”
If you are two people then you might want to keep an eye on Love & Barbed Wire, a letter writing RPG for two. The pitch: “A soldier and their loved one write letters to each other during the First World War. Will their relationship survive the war?”
If you are even more people then surely you will want to be getting into The Zone, a GM-less, zer-prep exploration of The Zone of Alienation. You can play it online right now! (Excited about this one, obviously.)
Research this week delivered us Jack Parsons, American rocket scientist, chemist, and “Thelemite occultist”. As ever, research is going Quite Well.
A WORLD OF TEETH
We nearly called the TEETH project WORLD OF TEETH, but it didn’t sound hip or horrifying enough, and might have been mistaken for something to do with dentistry. No indeed, TEETH - our forthcoming campaign-length book - is a game of horrible monster hunting in the 18th century. The teeth involved are attached to abominations from beyond the page, and also, probably, in need of the invention of dentistry.
Let me provide some context: as well as playing a great number and amount of TTRPGs, Marsh and myself have been looking for an excuse to work on something together. As many of you know, our shared backgrounds are both in editorial publishing and also in videogames, so it seemed likely that whatever we worked on would be a digital game of some kind. But, as the past couple of years unfolded, we realised that we had a shared interest in doing a book. A pen and paper RPG soon became inevitable, particularly since the imagery that Marsh has lately been producing so neatly fits with our interest in TTRPGs.
Clearly the action-packed computer game Hunt: Showdown also had something to do with it. Marsh and I have spent a good part of the last couple of the years knee deep in the murky swamps, and have greatly enjoyed discussing why cowboys secretly hate horses, why they’re so bad at jogging, or why they can’t climb over fences a foot higher than they are.
Not that we’d want to set anything in the Wild West, however: our interest is very much in hedgerows and moorland, pheasant poaching and future National Trust properties in remote locations. The eerieness of the British countryside has, of course, been an important aspect of my own work over the years, and so it seemed logical for us to head in that particular direction.
Initially, though, we didn’t. Or at least not exactly. The world of TEETH was instead a fantasy kingdom, analogous, in that Game Of Thrones way, to the north of England. We ended up writing the entire first draft in this way: with a roughly 19th century level of technology, and an entire fantasy world to back it up. There are still numerous excellent ideas in that take, which will doubtless be recycled for future use, but we came to realise that a) we were going to get more mileage out of fictionalising an actual historical British setting, and b) we wanted people in powdered wigs, and that meant the 18th century.
There’s a distance and weirdness to the 18th century, too, as opposed to the 19th, which I think works particularly well for TEETH. Things moved differently before the steam engine, if you’ll forgive the pun: the modern age was being born, medievalism was gone but not yet replaced, industry was metastasizing but pastoralism remained ascendent, imperialism was young and monstrous, and King George was a good candidate for a villain. With all that in our pocket we reimagine TEETH with an English setting. The final take brought us to Deluth Vale, a fictionalised northern region which has been quarantined by the King, following a dreadful occult accident. That accident and its side-effects, an occult Chernobyl, echo through the region, and out into the Empire, attracting monster hunters and other dangers to a remote and backward region.
Maps, of course, are profoundly important to us. There’s an entire article in this, but I don’t think I would have the attachment I have to TTRPGs if it wasn’t for maps. Fortunately for me, for TEETH, and for you, Marsh has got quite into producing maps that have, topically, a lot of marshes in them.
These materials made fertile ground for the kind of adventures we intend for people to have in the full game (as opposed to just the one-shots we have teased to evoke the setting) and for the kinds of peril we intend them to face. TEETH provides a Blades In The Dark type “job” that you can jump straight into, which is the hunting of monsters, but all the other stuff, the world and the mechanisms that make that world lean on your, give your characters a weather-beaten environment, disturbing and disturbed local characters, cursed food, hideous monsters, even worse human adversaries, and a corrupting malignancy behind it all.
The Vale itself is, like much of England, dotted with weirdly-named villages, haunted by the mistakes of the past, and alive with a sense of history that I am enormously pleased with. Many RPGs invent their past to make way for the present context, but here we have invented the present to make a charming grotesque of a very real past.
More on big TEETH, next time.
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Love you! x