TEETH: Things Of The Year! Broadcasting From A New Location
Thank you for reading the TEETH newsletter in 2023!
In 2024 we’ll be talking to people about their work, and announcing more of our own in the coming weeks, and continuing to write cheerful commentary on the TTRPG world as we find it.
The TEETH Kickstarter has been completed and delivered (check your Kickstarter DMs if you still need to claim stuff!) and the newsletter continues. As ever, written and compiled by Christmas tradition Jim Rossignol and New Year’s resolution Marsh Davies.
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1. BIG IMPORTANT ADMIN NOTE
2. Hello, you
3. THINGS OF THE YEAR
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BIG IMPORTANT ADMIN NOTE
You are now reading this via Buttondown.email. Despicable utterances by our previous hosts at Substack have meant we needed to abandon that platform. We’d been thinking about it for a while, but they recently sealed the garbagey deal. You don’t need to do anything, though, just note that the newsletter now comes to you from a different server. You can unsubscribe as normal, should you wish to do so!
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Hello, you
The traditional Making-Lists-Of-Things time of the year has almost passed! Sadly we have been blighted by covid and international travel and therefore slow to meet the demands of the season. But we here at TEETH Towers are suckers for tradition. Hell, we’ve been making lists since we worked on honest-to-goodness paper magazines back in the early '00s. It feels like a lifetime ago! And that’s because for people born since 2001, it was.
Anyway, there’s some stuff below.
Beyond such traditions, this year is a year of thanks. We want to thank everyone who supported us, either on Kickstarter, or on here, or both! We did it! We made an actual hardback RPG and people now own it in their homes and everything. Absolutely amazing. We would like to thank the people who came on here and chatter with us, as well as the creators who made the games we have read, talked about, and played. The TTRPG scene is just an incendiary place right now, and it doesn’t much look like it will cool off any time soon. 2024 is packed with things we can’t wait to get our hands on. We’re looking forward to that, as well as starting new projects of our own. We will announce plans and things on here, of course. Jim has a rather significant one coming up in just a few weeks, so please do stay tuned/subscribed for that! Marsh & Jim
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THINGS OF THE YEAR
TEETH TTRPG OF THE YEAR
Last year our TTRPG of the year was the magnificent Trophy Gold. You can read about it here.
This year the TEETH RPG of the year is TEETH RPG, obviously. I mean, we’re a newsletter literally called TEETH RPG, it would be weird if we didn’t celebrate this being the year that our big book became a reality! Right?
Actually no, while I am beyond delighted to have reached this point with our own work, I am also going to take this opportunity to mention that an even more essential book arrived this year, from fairly close to home. It’s a masterpiece.
Now, as many of you know, I (Jim) have been a long-term collaborator and friend of Kieron Gillen, so there’s a very clear conflict of interest going on here. However, since this is a promotional newsletter and in no way an attempt at non-subjective criticism, I feel justified in declaring that Kieron’s DIE RPG is our TTRPG Of The Year.
As you probably know, DIE is based on the comic of the same name by Gillen and Stephanie Hans, and it’s my feeling that the comic can be seen as a sort of abstract or target reference for the game Gillen ended up making. The comic is a story which explores the idea of fantasy worlds being expressions of people’s psyches. In that story players meet for a tabletop game and are pulled into that world, becoming the characters that they had created and experiencing directly the world that their game manifests. In DIE the RPG we create these players, which the game calls “Personas” who become their characters, called “Paragons”, once they are pulled into their game world. Because we begin with a layer of fiction about who the people are playing these characters, and continually explore the dramatic relationship which exists between them all as a group, DIE becomes a device for producing the kind of situations the original comic explored, with an antagonist, with interpersonal drama, and with a decision about whether or not go back to the real world, if the players get that opportunity at all.
All of which sounds like some sort of Inception-y dream-within-a-dream, but thanks to Gillen’s precocious erudition (as well as huge amounts of playtesting, comparisons to Jumanji, and doubtless some quite severe editing) ends up being almost instinctive in play, particularly to those of us steeped in RPG experiences in the first place. Or perhaps it works because we are all just playing roles, all of the time, and have just the same sort of attitude to fictional personalities as we do real ones. It’s entirely human to do so! Hell, an eager philosopher has probably already written a volume called “A Phenomenology Of Fictional Intentionality” or something which explores this aspect of experience in painful depth. But getting people to read that will likely be less popular than running this game at the table and then having a few philosophical thoughts on the side.
That said, there remains a challenge (acknowledged by Gillen in the book) for groups to work out how the game actually plays between the levels of the personas and their paragons. (“Which one is the real pretend me right now?!”) Articulating this, and formalising it, is something each group seems to deal with in their own way.
Although this also begs to the question of how folks who have never played an RPG before will parse the experience of playing DIE, of which I am sure there will be plenty. Will they feel like they’re trapped in a brain-swap comedy? What if they’ve never seen the original D&D cartoon? It is a disturbing truism of being a game designer of any popularity that any game you make will, almost inevitably, be the first game that someone has ever played and, possibly, indelibly mark their existence thereafter. I shall have to recount the case of the septuagenarian Sir, You Are Being Hunted player at some point, but not here.
So DIE is a pen and paper RPG which is about the act of playing pen and paper RPGs. It explores the notion of fantasy RPGs by being a fantasy RPG. And in a way, this makes it essential reading just by virtue of its pitch, which is no mean feat. But… there’s something more fundamental here, which is, in that Gillen-y way, that it’s just very entertaining. Despite my pontificating, the truth is that DIE is no exercise in theory. The core rules (a comfortably modern D6 dice pool system), the clever character class conceits, the incredible bestiary which somehow includes interesting takes on all those iconic fantasy monsters that have been reinvented a hundred times: it’s a big book and it does a lot, and you will want to read it and then, likely as not, to play it.
The heart of the game is elegiac of the earliest instances of D&D while still being a fresh and sometimes quite eccentric take on the iconic forms of rogue, cleric, knight etc. Each Paragon type gets their own platonic dice (D8, D10 etc) which is the only one of these in the game and defines mechanisms specific to that character. Even the GM has a class and abilities within the game, because their role is built-in and self-referential. And the world of DIE is (or at least can be) a globe shaped like a D20, because the entire motif of the game is the motif of these kinds of games: it is a sort of logical skit which pushes through absurdity to return back to a tangible, enormously likeable game.
From the perspective of someone who has known Gillen for quite some time, DIE RPG is the project that represents the deepest tranche of his great big Staffordshire brain, bringing together the world-building meta-analysis you see in all his other creative work (where it’s possible to detect the critic’s eye and the creative’s hand all merging into one sort of horrible recursive mega-organ) with his wholly earnest commitment to games as an intellectual and emotional activity. Gillen’s capacity for deep research and his veteran’s ability to inspire artists to their best material is very much on display in DIE. And while Gillen’s projects are habitually carefully composed ironic examinations, DIE is the one where his analysis of a phenomenon seems to be most nakedly in love with its subject matter. Less committed authors might have stepped back from the brink, and they would have failed.
TEETH VIDEO GAME OF THE YEAR
There’s something weird going on here! DIE is a TTRPG about imaginary worlds within worlds and the relationships between them. And Cocoon is a video game about imaginary worlds within worlds and the relationships between them! What!? The two could hardly be more different, and yet the fact of their meta-structure can’t be denied. Is there something spooky going on? Is this newsletter actually inside another larger newsletter? Is 2023 actually inside a higher-order meta-year?
Regardless of the reality panic, I simply love Cocoon, and generally-speaking I am not well-disposed towards puzzle games. This, however, reminded me that the sub-genre of “puzzle games as action games” has been a thin thread over the past years (and I include the Portal games in this) where an aesthetic has done much to interweave and support the experience of unpicking an quasi-abstract logic problem. Most such games are only really conceivable thanks to the spatial-impossibilities that videogame worlds are capable of and Cocoon does much to explore that.
The strangeness of the problems which Cocoon poses, which involve the interactions of layered worlds or dimensions that can be moved between each other in a hierarchy, is underscored by simplicity of the individual puzzles, as well as the the low-poly alienness and insectile animation. All of this together makes it a coherent whole, where each part of the thing supports the intended overall experience. Aesthetics conspire with intellect! Have a play and you will see precisely what I mean. It’s a rewardingly brief game, and thoroughly enjoyable.
TEETH ACTUALLY UNRELATED-TO-RPGS BOOK OF THE YEAR
Aha, this is where the meta-tide is turned. Or at least sucked down some unexpected sinkhole into hyperspace. Given that TTRPGs are so often acts of intense and overwrought world-building, and MJ Harrison is a writer whose position has long been one opposing the very idea of world-building as an activity, it was certainly interesting to read his Not-A-Memoir-But-Something-Like-An-Esoteric-Writing-Guide, Wish I Was Here.
MJH’s recent novel The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again is probably my favourite book of all time, but it is practically the antithesis of game worlds and fantasy as we indulge with it. Wish I Was Here is arguably a companion-piece to that work of “late style” (as MJH puts it) in which the author provides a sort of context which admits that really none of us understands the context.
I dunno! It’s hard to really articulate what it’s about without reading it. And I am not sure that I’d want to try. I am not sure I entirely understood it, or even that it’s there to be understood. I should read it again. And, either way, highly recommended.
TEETH SOCIAL MEDIA COLLAPSE AND REBIRTH OF THE YEAR
It’s been a year where the internet has begun a shift of some kind. It has affected us! We’re moving over to Buttondown for the newsletter, as you can see right now, and if you're interested in staying in touch via social networks then we’re attempting to rebuild over on Bluesky, having abandoned the awful wraith which Twitter has become. If you need an invite, then we still have some. Email us - teethrpgitch@gmail.com - and we will share what we can while stocks last.
Have a tremendous 2024!
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More soon x