The Atlas Of Unexpected Planets
You are reading the TEETH newsletter from Jim Rossignol and Marsh Davies. We are making a series of tabletop RPG games set in an occult 18th century. We also talk about our own bold adventures in tabletop gaming, link to interesting stuff, and make things up on a whim. It’s a fine thing.
Hello, you.
Our Important Content This Week is an essay (below) by Marsh on the making of maps for our Teeth games. He’s good at maps, and so it made sense that he explain himself and his process, and reference his influences at least a little bit.
Our next release, the mutant-bumpkin adventure Stranger & Stranger - which has a map! - enters a second phase of playtesting this week, and so it was of particular interest this week to listen to the first episode of a Forged In The Dark podcast series featuring the man himself, Jon Harper. There’s a lot there, including a bit of Harper running the game for the hosts. Hear how he does it!
One of the things which struck me particularly was the different ways people seem to have interpreted the phases of the game, which is of course the nature of these things: a game is different at each table. Harper notes that the “downtime” phase of Blades is handled by some as a purely box-ticking sequence between the real action of the jobs, but that it was never intended as such, and indeed he suggests a “downtime session” as a sort of antidote to this interpretation, in which players can role-play in detail all that happens to their characters when they’re not caught up in the action.
My main group - the Monday Night Dice Club - have gone back and forth over the years, and have ended up doing something of a hybrid approach, where we go into detail when we feel like it matters. The management aspects of the downtime phase can be skipped over to get the next juicy chunk of action gameplay, but if it’s the culmination of that long-term project, or of someone over-indulges in vice, then it’s time to play that out.
All this is particularly relevant to where we are with Stranger & Stranger, because we have reintroduced certain gameplay phases to the base Blades/Forged game - cut out for the single-circumstance games of Night Of The Hogmen and Blood Cotillion - meaning that we need to have both the pre-job setup of information gathering and the post-job downtime harm and stress management. The feel of this new standalone, then, is that of a short campaign, and you should not expect to get through it in a single, or even a couple, of evenings. And we’re not even on to our full campaign rules yet! Gosh!
I hear links a-comin’.
Links!
Hack/Cash is a highly condensed heist game that looks like it should be fun.
Intrigued by the announcement of Fiasco-like Weird Stories. “Weird Stories is a one-shot, zero-prep, dice-less, and GM-less story-editing roleplaying game where players will tell stories similar to the films of David Lynch, novels by Haruki Murakami or Jeff VanderMeer, and the TV series Lost and The Twilight Zone.” Seems like a tricky one to pull off and I shall be fascinated to see how Gil Hova systematises mystery-based story-telling.
Forged In The Dark-powered dystopian sci-fi a|state sounds intriguing, and has an imminent Kickstarter awaiting (as well as lovely art!) I also discover that “a|state” is an unGoogleable term! Very dystopian.
Just a few hours to go on the English version of Not The End, which uses an intrigue system of its own devising: “Not the End uses HexSys, a system created specifically for this game, which, instead of using dice to resolve conflicts and dangerous situations, uses tokens of different colors, to represent successes and complications. Each trial the characters face will add something to the story and the game world, making the outcome of each trial unique and different from previous ones.”
Research this week… well, look, we’re spending a lot of time digging up bits and pieces from the 18th century because that’s the era that TEETH is set in. Whether we can really take inspiration from the tale of Mary Toft is another matter. Just maybe: “Mary Toft was an English woman from Godalming, Surrey, who in 1726 became the subject of considerable controversy when she tricked doctors into believing that she had given birth to rabbits.” Be warned the full story is a weird and grisly one.
And now, Marsh on maps:
Mapping the Vale
There's been a recent trend of slightly sniffy articles which critique fantasy maps and their tropes. They're not altogether wrong. You'll certainly recognise the "fantasy map style" on sight, even if you've never really thought about what constitutes it: the faux-aged paper stock; fonts that suggest the penmanship of a vanished past without sacrificing legibility; the mountains drawn in profile or obliquely, as though soaring towards them; the questionable arrangement of geological features. There's often a certain convenience to them, a pointed lack of clutter or confusion, that marks them as fiction.
As these articles point out, the fantasy map is an ahistorical mash of medievalism and post-enlightenment styles that never truly existed before Christopher Tolkien drew Middle Earth. The implication is that these maps are worse for it, in some way, unstudied and ignorant. But what these critiques often miss is how functional these maps are for the kinds of travel a reader does in an imagined land, for the kind of storytelling that GMs and players do together.
Yes, they provide some amount of orientation, some sense of relative distance, but the exact miles and measurements often have less value in roleplaying than the evocation of place, the suggestion of what stories might be told there. You want a map that invites a GM to concoct a diversion, a misadventure in a bog, ruined tower, or blighted wood. You want a map that describes not just the topographic features, but the mood of the landscape.
Actual medieval maps won't cut it, unless your purpose is to provide players with something inaccurate, or described with cartographic language so archaic as to be meaningless to most humans alive today. (Though what map would not be enhanced by the ram-like "bonnacon", ejecting scalding diarrhea?) And yet, get closer to the mapping conventions of the present—many of which are born in the 18th century but recognisably coalesce only in the 19th—and you lose much of the feeling of a place. Maps become denser with information, but harder to parse for the drama. The fantasy map solves for this. It is not a compromise or a failure, but an innovation which bridges space, time and imagination.
There is precedent for real-world maps that tell stories, too. Anna Beek (sometimes "Beeck") was a Dutch cartographer working at the turn of the 18th century. Frustratingly little is known about her life—she was abandoned by her husband, divorced him and took full ownership of the business of map making—but she was prolific during the War of Spanish Succession, creating more than 60 maps that describe and evoke the tumult that engulfed the European mainland. Her beautiful work often combines precise diagrams of forts with a larger sense of the landscape in which they lay, often detailing the military movements across it, using a flexible viewpoint that sometimes seems to be perched on a hilltop, and sometimes above, looking down at the landscape from an oblique angle. Her perspective style changes to serve her purpose at any moment: sometimes features of the landscape need to be separated out in order to clearly convey their relative position, sometimes they are collapsed together into the horizon. Clearly she was capable of fastidious cartographic accuracy: but that was not always the purpose of these maps. Her audience did not need to be able to find the butcher's shop by the duck pond in a town they could never visit, but they did want to experience, vicariously, its annihilation by Spanish canonfire.
With Teeth, which is set explicitly in the late 18th century, we have a similar dilemma: do we create maps apt to the time, or apt to the audience's need for evocative material? We've done a little of both. In fact, our map of Gatlock (the principle town in our cursed corner of England) is quite inspired by Anna Beek's map of Limburgh, taking from it the artificial oblique perspective that spaces some features apart for clarity and concatenates others. (See also this fantastic atlas of 16th century city maps by the German duo Georg Braun and Franz Hogenburg.)
But, ultimately, where a sense of imagination was called for, we've just wholly abandoned the reality of 18th century cartography for a lusher map style that might even border on fantasy. Does that offend my inner pedant? Yes. But then, he also has to contend with the fact that magic is real in our version of the 18th century, and that intrepid cartographers might well have huffed a vial of Crowmind Powder, a preparation that "contains the fragmented thoughts, and sometimes dreams, of between three and ten crows". Handy for those looking to get a bird's-eye view. Anna Beek, surely, would not have been able to resist.
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More soon! x