Welcome, favoured adventure-folk, to the TEETH newsletter! This is a (occasionally) 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! Glorified links!

3. No 3 this time.

Hello, you.

It's newsletter time! We've been busy over on the Kickstarter updates, as those of you who backed GOLD TEETH may have noticed. In brief the news is that

PHYSICAL BOOKS ARE COMING

But in long, there's been a great deal to sort out with paper, book files, shipping stuff, and fiddling around in the back end, and that's not (entirely) a euphemism.

What is also non-euphemistic are the additional materials that Marsh has been producing, which included the condensed-rules cheat sheets, a spreads version of the PDF, bookmarking and page links for the PDF, and a supporting historical document for the setting called A Guide For Aspirant Pirates. It fills folks in on what the 18th century might have looked like for sea-faring types, as well as the state of the world in general. Obviously TEETH is a fantasy, with magic and monsters, but it's very much grounded in history. As our resident scholar, Marsh Davies, man of many disciplines, has done astounding work in providing this extra bit of supporting material for our backers. I (Jim, writing this) applaud, because it really makes it feel like GOLD TEETH is every bit as fat and comprehensive as we had hoped it would be.

For those following on with health news: I am doing okay, and hope to continue to do okay for many years into the future. Last year was terrifying and exhausting, but it's in the rearview periscope and rapidly receding into the seas of memory. And that's a fine thing. Thanks again, everyone, for your patience while we got past those horrors. There is so much more cool stuff to come!

Most pressingly, for GOLD TEEETH backers: watch your inboxes, you'll get a very important email soon. (Although I should note that if you are using one of those email forwarding things, I think mostly AppleID based ones, you will probably have trouble getting emails from Backerkit. It’s a real problem, and made the delivery of Mileships an outstanding pain.) I will make a lot of noise when you need to get in touch if that doesn't reach you!

The rest of this newsletter is a glorified links section, but I think you will find some interesting things waiting there for you, like gold bars half-buried on the beach. Our next newsletter will probably be about The One Ring, which is our current main game with the main Teeth-playtesting gang. It's been huge and thrilling, and we're remotely not finished yet, but there's lots to talk about.

So until then!

Love,

-Marsh (away doing brave and clever things) & Jim (writing this)

A Glorified Links Section

• THING OF THE WEEK: Kieron loaned me his (physical) copy of Play Unsafe by Graham Walmsley and I suspect it was with the intent of getting me to write something for Old Men Running the World, which I will in time, but I wanted to mention it here because I've talked previously about how any why to improve your GMing and your playering, and this is a seriously thoughtful book, filled with Walmsley's rich and considerate personal experience, on precisely that subject. If you play TTRPGs regularly then I really cannot see any reason why you would not read this. It has recently ended up on my aspirant-GM son's bedside table, too. I don't think he would have tackled a longer volume, so this is just the right sort of measure. Seriously, get hold of it and inhale.

• Our shipping partner Peregrine Coast Press talks about how challenging international shipping has become. And, you know, for a world economy “focused on growth” above all else, the constant costs and increasing complexities of running a small business that just wants to send its silly books around the world is preposterous and frustrating. We are thankful for having a resolute band of hobbyists to support us through this, and I know that the rest of the publishers and creators out there feel the same. Long live the hobbyists!

• We must note that Rascal's article on Cthulhu Larping is quite the thing. Look: “The reason that we rented the helicopter was because the only way that you could see the 300-yard-long occult symbol that we had carved into the dry lake bed.” 

• While we are on the topic of Rascal business, you can vote on the direction of the next season of the excellent Reading Club podcast, which if you have not heard, listen to with haste.

• We were (horribly) interested to read about the next Mothership book being Wages of Sin, “a catalog of 100 bounties, a prison colony, and over 50 planets”, but what are stats really for when our games are about fucked NPCs and twisted moral implications? Yes we were even more interested to read this article on the book. "This is Mothership’s riff on Dolmenwood. It is the cassette futurist connective tissue waiting to act as the backbone to your campaign." Now there’s a sentence. But more incisively: "Wages doesn’t force your crew to think about the broader context of what they’re doing - it’s too classy for that. The horror of your complicity in the prison-industrial complex just sits there, waiting for everyone to acknowledge it." This is an great article on a book which I am now reading and holy crap this fucker is going to spawn a thousand campaigns, including one of our own, I suspect.

• Ona related but drier topic, I am thinking that this link might appeal to the small section of you who are also narrative designers (hello!), for it's a quick look at a set of practices for playtesting a (videogame) story. There’s some interesting stuff in there about tracking player-comprehension through iterations, anyway, just go have a nose if that’s your bag, you are probably already doing some of this if that’s the case!

• Okay so I am little bit in love with this Bluesky thread about the history of polygonal dice in D&D. Iyt tells that TSR actually exhausted the world's supply of polyhedral dice at one point during D&D's original surge in popularity, resorting to cardboard chits to fill the breach. "By 1980 TSR had "Dragon Dice" molds made in Beloit, Wisconsin. Indeed they would save a lot of money in contrast to purchasing and overseas shipping but were woefully behind on dice craftsmanship compared to competitors. TSR did make an innovative first: a true d20 numbered 0-20 instead of 0-9(x2)"

• Using modern and well-made (digital web-browser) polyhedrals we played Every Second Counts. It's so good! Notorious comics-writer Kieron Gillen explained: "Tim “Blades ’68/Deathmatch Island” Denee has clearly been watching too much of pressure cooker show about the pressure of cooking, The Bear. He takes the Paragon system (Agon/Deathmatch Island) and makes Every Second Counts, which is basically The Bear, the TTRPG. We have a skip week in our regular game, so I hustle to run a one-off, a level of panic which actually is thematically appropriate, at least. Every second does count." Now, we've played a lot of Paragon games this year, and I can't help thinking back to playing Agon and, at the time, wondering if it was too specific and possibly too unlike other RPGs to really gain a foothold as an alternative "engine". It certainly has been slower to do so that its cousin, Forged In The Dark, but I now think all it needed was for some designers to master and internalise the possibilities. This is a particularly good use of it, in a real world setting, and the contrast with Gillen's new Paragon game, an ode to space-imperialist maximalisms in which I deleted the concept of orkishness from the universe to defeat a roving warboss, is like some sort of cosmic tasting menu.

• I've been reading a load of old D&D materials for secret reasons. A couple of things to note: firstly, I really seriously am in love with this Brom cover for Dark Sun expansion Arcane Shadows. Look at this fucker! Shadowrun in desert planet backstreets! Gonna hack into the wizard matrix and steal his orb/drinking water.

• But also I have been reading the voluminous 1986 Basic Box module Night's Dark Terror. This classic, transitional adventure sandbox contains this guy. 

Was this intentional? Were you not taking your D&D supplement seriously enough?

I am sure his mum loves him.

More soon! x