TEETH: STRANGER & STRANGER is Out Now!
Hello there. You are reading the TEETH newsletter, written and compiled by Jim Rossignol and Marsh Davies. This is a newsletter about table-top role-playing games: our own - that we’re publishing over here - and some by other lovely people whom we link below. Want us to see your work? Get in touch!
Stranger & Stranger is Out Now!
“I know this scene,” says the Stranger, stopping amid the ruination and swirling smoke, the eyes of the village upon them.
“This is the work of an Abomination. And, I regret to say, it will likely return—and soon!”
Who will save the people (and pigs) of Dilbrook Waddle from this Abomination? You, perhaps, should you choose to play... TEETH: STRANGER & STRANGER, a grotesque, standalone, table-top, roleplaying mini-campaign for 3-6 people!
The players portray mutated bumpkins, battling to remain human while wandering a cursed corner of 18th-century England. Will they find what they need to save their village? Or will they return too changed to care?
It costs $10, the equivalent of roughly two pounds of ham in 1790s Massachusetts, adjusting for inflation. Get it here!
This is the third module we've released in the run-up to launching our full RPG setting, TEETH, and it's bigger in both content and purpose than those preceding it. If you've played the others, you may have noticed: these zines are designed to ease players and GMs into the ruleset we'll be using for the main campaign, step-by-step.
NIGHT OF THE HOGMEN was a fast-paced, straightforward oneshot, bouncing players through a pachinko board (porkchinko board?) of terrible choices. BLOOD COTILLION was more open-ended, but still contained to a single space and time—conceived as a roleplayable Dishonored or Hitman mission, with a series of objectives you could tackle in any order and in multiple ways. STRANGER & STRANGER is more recognisable as a full RPG questline, with all the non-linearity and length that suggests, but with an opening scenario that delivers a primer in all the rules and key concepts the players will need to go it alone.
At each stage we've introduced more of the rules you will encounter in the full TEETH setting. NIGHT OF THE HOGMEN and BLOOD COTILLION take place across a single night and can be completed in a single play-session, and so the rules don't really need to contend with such fripperies as, say, long-term survival. STRANGER & STRANGER represents a longer period of time both for characters and those who control them, and so there are more things to track (and ideally recover from) across multiple sessions. They will need to be able to heal injuries. They will have to be able to reduce stress (a currency with which they can boost actions or perform special feats). They will also have to deal with corruption from the occult detritus strewn across the region—and the horrifying that mutations that result.
In fact, those mutations are a central gimmick of this particular module. There are twenty possible conditions the players can aquire, each with their own rules, four stages of advancement, powerful boons and terrible repercussions. They are lurid, chaotic and deadly, both to the players and to others—and tremendous fun to roleplay. Players might become temporally dislocated, messily divide into multiple degenerate versions of themselves or receive troubling boons from an entity known as Seven Tongues. But, as fun as that might sound, other people might not be as welcoming if they see you boiling a cup of tea with a knotty proboscis or ejecting corrosive fluid from bubbling sphincters. Furthermore, advanced corruption is as much a threat to you as anyone else: when you hit Rank 4, you are living on borrowed time.
Can the players find what they need to save their village before corruption takes them? Why not find out for yourself?
The full package includes:
63 pages of hideous rustic calamity and 18th-century occultism
Many illustrations therein, a structured opening scenario, oodles of material to combine as you see fit thereafter, tables for weather and minor encounters, lists of horrid foods and more!
Seven pre-made Playbooks designed for this scenario
Playbooks for Google Sheets - just copy them off and edit them yourself!
Mutation Table for Google Sheets
GM Quick Reference Sheet
Player Quick Reference Sheet
A luxurious colour map
Low-ink versions of the key documents
It's a fair amount of stuff!
LINKS
You’re probably already aware of this, but paper-book based Kickstarters are probably in for a bit of an indefinite delay, because Europe has run out of paper, and the rest of the world will not be far behind. Kickstarters, including that of our DIE chums, have therefore been postponed to avoid disappointment.
BUT that should not stop you simply being patient and backing at this tremendous looking pitch. “Exquisite Crime is reminiscent of games like A Quiet Year and A Fake Artist Goes to New York where by the end of gameplay, there is a tangible artifact that the players have created during the game. Exquisite Crime does this by having you draw several “Exquisite Corpse”, which is a classical fine art exercise that involves using collaborative drawing.” I would have called it an exquisite pitch, but that seemed like it would be a bit much.
And who needs paper books? (I do.) There’s lashings of PDFs of all the old classics like this fuck off bundle of the old Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay stuff. I mean, you’d buy it just for the tips on how to roleplay skaven, wouldn’t you? We did.
In what is fairly significant news for Blades In The Dark fans like us, an official expansion has been announced and discussed by its creators. Blades in the Dark: The Dagger Isles, set in the dark jungles of the game’s Dagger Isles setting, has an introductory paragraph over here.
I’m pretty into the ideas behind DEAD BELT. “Dead Belt is a solo strategy RPG. It’s about skillful and desperate scavengers picking over the remains of junked starships in hopes of a juicy payday.”
Teeth-friend Jake has a new dark tale available at The Black Library.
We were delighted that everyone enjoyed our important interview with Grant Howitt, and a fortnight later, by his own admission, his RPG output seems to have peaked.
Research this week dug up “the strangest battle of World War 2”, which was indeed fairly odd. One of the final battles of the war, The Battle Of Castle Itter featured the German army fighting alongside Americans and a bunch of VIP prisoners, including an internationally famous tennis player and several former presidents, to defeat SS soldiers sent to recapture them. Remarkably, only one defender died before the US infantry arrived in force to relieve them. Even more remarkably, no movie has been made about it, despite a popular book recounting the unlikely take.
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More soon! x