The Bundle Of Holding Is Full of TEETH / That's Some Nice Handiwork
Welcome, News-Riders of The Great Wastes, to the TEETH newsletter! This is a (mostly) weekly transmission about our explorations in the very secret land of Tabletop Roleplaying-Games.
THIS TIME ON TEETH “NEWSLETTER”
Hello, you.
Links!
An interview with Jon Hodgson from Handiwork Games.
Hello, you.
The GOLD TEETH Kickstarter was a lovely time, thank you for all your support. We’ve left late pledges open for now, so if you’ve missed the boat then you can still back us over on the main page. We’re already well underway with writing, playtesting and illustrating the book. It’s going to be spectacular.
We’re also about half way through our featured time on The Bundle Of Holding.
Not only is the main TEETH RPG PDF discounted tremendously for this bundle, if you pay the threshold price you get PDFs for all the adventures as well as the MORE TEETH expansion for the main game. It’s so much TEETH! Tell everyone! If you are for some reason reading this newsletter and don’t own all our published work to date, now’s the time!
As ever, there’s much more to come.
Love,
Marsh & Jim
LINKS!
THING OF THE WEEK: What follows in Links! this week includes a couple of Bluesky posts and, well, it feels like the communities that were shattered by the death of Twitter are beginning to rebuild and reform on that site. If you are still on the old site, or still interested in social media generally, then I can say with certainty that it’s time to make the leap. The migration is happening, and Bluesky is becoming the sort of place that we all need it to be. Come and find me and Marsh, and say hi.
Jason Cordova did an excellent thread breaking down what’s special about The Between.
A Blades In The Dark expansion? From Jon Harper?!
Back at the old blog people are still writing about video games. This piece about the problem of being a Space Marine rather stood out. “‘High’ and ‘low’ culture undergo cybernetic recombination: the founding tale of a Space Marine rebellion against the Emperor, led by the Chaos-polluted Horus, is a reworking of Satan's treachery in Paradise Lost, but there is also a character called Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau, and a planet named in mockery of Birmingham. The whole thing is reminiscent of Shakespeare, not in the gilding of the poesy or the sentiments, but in the way it plays to the pit as much as to the gallery.”
TEETH-friend Riley Daniels has written about the genesis of As The Sun Forever Sets which we, and quite a few other people, are looking forward to a great deal. It’s a long piece, and there’s a lot going on it, including the psychological pressures of delivering a formidable work of art like this, so be prepared.
I had no idea about this origin of the name of California. It’s quite the tale, and seems equivalent of discovering new lands and naming them “Gondor” or something.
I enjoyed this short piece on the unlikely legend of Sir Cloudesley Shovell. (As if anyone needs to ask where we get our ideas from…)
That’s Some Nice Handiwork: Jon Hodgson On Not Picking A Side
Handiwork Games’ portfolio is complicated and filled with weird and excellent ways of approaching the hobby, as we shall see in this interview. I asked Jon Hodgson what on Earth he is playing at.
Jim Rossignol: So let’s begin, John Hodgson! Could you introduce yourself?
Jon Hodgson: So my name is Jon Hodgson. I own a little games company called Handiwork Games. We're based in Scotland where I live, but we've got we've got contributors all over the world! You know, the usual set of criteria for role-playing game companies. We publish a bunch of different games such as Beowulf Age of Heroes, which is duet play for 5e. That was the first thing we ever did! What else do we do? Well, we did an a|state second edition which is Forged In The Dark rules, and we did Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland, which is our own very minimalist storytelling game that is out now in a Redux edition. We are currently in the build up to launching Five Evil on Kickstarter. This is a kind of total gutting of 5e, which is our big communication goal to explain to people how it isn’t just some stats for horror for 5e, it’s this entire reworking of the system. And finally we’ve got Cold City: Hot War which was a real classic British indie game in the early 2000s. We're relaunching that with the creator and author, Malcolm Craig, early next year. We’d hoped to squeeze into this year but we're going to be early next year now. So yeah. That's, I think, everything we might be doing, anyway! I forget more than I know.
JR: Ha, that’s everything.on my list, anyway. But what about yourself? How did you end up doing this? How did you end up as this indie RPG publisher?
JH: Yeah, I've started asking myself that quite a lot lately! So for years and years I was a freelance illustrator. I worked on things like D&D, World of Warcraft, Legend of the Five Rings, all kinds of stuff! And I worked for years and years for Warhammer Historical, which was this weird little offshoot of the Black library. It's kind of Games Workshop’s conscience: these historical games that helped historical mini manufacturers have stuff to do releases around. That was really good. We did loads of books with Warhammer Historical. So I had quite a successful career as a freelance illustrator and then I got recruited to become the art director for a company called Cubicle 7 and I worked there for about nine years in total, kind of rising up through that company, to eventually becoming deputy CEO and creative director there. I left there in 2018 to start my own thing which was Handiwork Games. I sort of learned how to put books together and had already built a set of skills at the old job and yeah yeah, now I'm doing it for myself! I should have done it a bit sooner than I did, actually.
JR: People do seem to say that about doing their own thing.
JH: Well, it's always easy to get stuck. You don’t know how things will turn out and in my case it was a secure wage. I mean, I did way too much work. There was a joke we had about making a Discord for survivors of Cubicle 7! We worked pretty hard. But that's jobs, I guess. It's the security, right? Doing it for yourself and taking all the risks you need an enormous set of skills. And it's kind of rare not to do everything in roleplaying games as well. You know, for a publisher to just be the publisher and just being a management role would be unusual. You tend to be writer, designer, layout person, marketing department, all of that all rolled into one. I happily did loads of those roles at Cubicle 7 and then was able to take it on to be my own thing!
JR: You mentioned the Games Workshop history line stuff and it feels the connection between history and games is quite strong for you as a publisher and a creative. Do you think it came from that older work or there are other influences there?
JH: Yeah. I mean I think that was a big one. I was always interested in it during my misspent youth. We did a lot of live-action role-playing, which is not not really something I do anymore. I kind of don't want to say I grew out of it, because I have a lot of friends who still do it! And I'm not saying they are not grown up, but for me, it sort of got a bit same-y and and I moved on to other things. But that stuff was always very historically informed. There's a group still running in Devon and they're like Premier League stuff for live action roleplay and what they do is all based around folklore and myth and history. And I think that was really a key interest for me and always has been. What led to the Warhammer Historical stuff was knowing people, friends of friends, and being introduced to the right folks got me into it. It's definitely in everything we do in some way. Infected by an interest in history! Your stuff is also really big on that stuff.
JR: Yeah, I mean Marsh is a more legitimate historian than I am. I like to read a history book but he's got he's got qualifications in medieval literature and all kinds of stuff. He's very much the history man and with Teeth one of the things I got him to do was to write a guide to the 18th century because it feels like it's most readers aren’t actually that familiar with the time period.
JH: Yeah, no, totally.
JR: Especially as it sort of a middle ground between the modern era and the medieval stuff, the tropes of which people are much more likely to be familiar with. But I feel like that came across really well: people really kind of got into the idea of the 18th century setting. It doesn’t actually matter if you don’t know the period, but some flavour helps things along.
JH: Yeah. I really like that about the history stuff, where you can be familiar enough with a period to do a good rendition of it, which you can’t do with a total whole cloth created fantasy setting. Weirdly I think people can be a bit leery of history thinking. “Oh, I need to know everything about it to do anything”, but actually you probably know enough to start. And there's nothing wrong with doing a bit of reading if or listening to audiobooks. I love all that stuff, you know.
JR: Do you think games actually make real history more accessible?
JH: Yeah, I do. I was about to say maybe not, but no, I really do pick up books purely because you're incentivized to do a bit of reading around. Certainly we find that with our game Maskwitches, which is set in a really quite not very well known period: it's all the Mesolithic stuff that comes between the Paleolithic, the old Stone Age, which is a bit more cave-manny, and the Neolithic, which is the new Stone Age, where get the rise of agriculture and all this stuff. The Mesolithic is the middle period. Not a lot of people know a lot about it but it's really, really interesting. People were all “oh I didn't know anything about this” and have gone and read up on it. They find that actually it’s really interesting and some really cool stuff happens to humanity in that age. I should add, actually, that the Mesolithic has different names and different parts of the world. That's the sort of European name for it! It’s difficult not to be Eurocentric.
JR: Did you find yourself diving into research once you’d decided on that time period as the setting?
JH: Yes, I'm just looking around in my office! I've got into some difficult reading, which I've really enjoyed and certainly being a bit older I feel like I can really make the journey into knowing more about a period, noticing what I don’t know, and I find that really interesting in itself. You know, stuff I've learned that I didn't know and my ability to digest more difficult books, it all comes together in this… I am looking out for my best difficult book, but it's not here! It's next to my bed. Oh my God, I'm reading it for bedtime. Reading The Oxford Guide to the Anthropology and Archeology of Hunter Gatherers, and it's 1200 pages long!
JR: I think from just from my kind of very light history reading the difference between popular history and the books with, you know, archaeological citations, is pretty heavy going. I picked up something on the Bronze Age Collapse a few years ago and it was incredibly dense, citing specific findings in specific digs in the Levant and so forth. It’s a different sort of reading task at that point.
JH: Let me grab a book: Paleolithic Societies of Europe by Clive Gamble, right? So he was massive in this sort of stuff in the late eighties and early nineties. Look at that! Cambridge University press book. That is the hardest book I have ever read. It talks about the way societies work and you know how in some reference books you can just dip into and go “Oh, here's some interesting facts. I can build some game stuff off this”? Well no. This was not like that. This was incredibly difficult. You've got like a paragraph to introduce an idea. And then another idea is introduced and then another the idea is introduced and you've got to hold all those in your head because this fourth idea is gonna sort of synthesise those three! I'm like “I can't cope with this”. This stuff really is the limit of my reading level, you know. But obviously our games don’t require anything like this, it’s just fantastic to get ideas from.
JR: Yeah, and it's just amazing raw material for a game. And with that in mind let's move on to how you ended up with working with Malcolm Craig on The Cold City stuff because the Cold War setting, I think is a blinder. Marsh and I were talking about the other day saying, there should be more Cold War games. And this is a classic of that time period! How did you come to be doing a new version of it?
JH: So, I've known Malcolm for quite a long time. I'm, you know, an immigrant to Scotland, obviously, probably tell from my accent, and I live about two hundred yards from where Malcolm grew up. I met him through the Edinburgh gaming scene and I think I knew him online before I even moved here. We found out we had a lot in common. I think we might have bonded over a shared love of Mervyn Peak, JG Ballard and that kind of stuff. Anyway in the early in the early 2000s there's a thing called The Collective Endeavour, which was a group of indie game publishers who got together to work together, you know, collectively and, and rent booths together for shows, and so on. But they, as a sort of offshoot of The Forge, were quite rigorous about theory as well. And I had again, I been on the periphery of The Forge. I think as a sort of brainy illustrator who reads books I’ve always really liked The Forge as a community. I like its rigour, which is not always popular with everyone. You can hear the rolling eyes when you talk about it, but it was really strongly moderated, which I liked. And if someone said something at The Forge, they had to back it up. You know, Ron would come in and go make you unpack ideas, which I've really loved. So anyway I've got to know Malcolm through that and the years passed and Malcolm worked with a guy called Paul who is his graphic designer artist lay out guy. I recruited Paul to work at Cubicle 7 because Paul is one of the best layout people in the business! Then later he came to work for us at Handiwork Games. We then of course realised we could bring back some of the games that him and Malcolm had been making! First a|state and then Hot War. Malcolm had gone off the meantime and become a senior lecturer at Liverpool John Moore’s and his specialism is Cold War history, so he came back to it and updated everything in Cold City: Hot War.
JR: If our readers pick up those books what should they expect to see?
JH: Very much Indie Games! They are self-contained games. So there's no external rule set needed. They're kind of classic digest size book. Cold City is a great book because it’s all about trust, that’s the conceit. It’s set in Berlin, post-war period, and you are members of various national factions vying for hard and soft control of the city. You are all in an espionage role working to unpick things that happened during the war. This is something Malcom has unpicked and updated, changing the emphasis a bit in this version. There’s super-science stuff going on and basically there are remnants of monster-technology floating around which you need to go after. But the real game is about trust between your characters. There’s a mechanic that is pretty original and produces more of this social narrative thing than the traditional monster grinder!
JR: This sounds great. We’re definitely into that sort of interpersonal currency stuff in our games, and I know a few readers are, too. However I am going to make you switch tack here and talk about something we talked about before we started recording this interview which was the AI stuff in the original version of Maskwitches. The AI topic was kind of interesting for me because early on what you would discover looking at that stuff was that the mistakes that the AI made, the “hallucinations” as they ended up calling it. Those produced uncanny effects, which for me was really interesting. That was what you plugged into to make eerie visuals for Maskwitches. They’re really striking images and I remember seeing them the first time and being fascinated. Then as I was prepping for this interview I found myself saying to the little Discord of people I regularly talk about RPGs with that it’s a tragedy that in just a few months the weird output of your computer hallucinating became stolen, useless sludge. The errors it was making were the only interesting or legal thing about it!
JH: Exactly, yes. Artists were originally looking at early AI with curiosity, like “look at this weird thing, it does weird stuff”, and it could be used to create fascinatingly broken, disturbing imagery. But it quickly became very boring, not least because stuff like Midjourney started using votes on what was a good image. That was a very fast way to filter out anything interesting about these images. I lost all interest in it very quickly. While I have some of my own views on the legitimacy of exploring AI stuff, almost overnight I found myself arguing things that I didn’t really believe to use it, and so I took the Maskwitches books off sale. We have since remade all of those books with sets, models, props, physical effects, the smoke machine, all this cool stuff. So the new edition is still as weird as the old edition but in a completely different way.
JR: Why physical props? That sounds like more work than illustrating it!
JH: Yeah. I mean the whole idea was just stupid, really. I realised there were a few things I could do with physical props. Actually, let’s back up. The rules that we use for Maskwitches is a game I wrote called The Silver Road. It's really simple, but I like to complement myself and that's quite complete. It's minimalist, but it's not minimal, if you see what I mean? I like things that are quite complete. Anyway, the rules for that were for a 24 page booklet, and I thought we could remake that. And keep that game out there because I was experimenting with making sets with paintings, cutting bits of paintings, and building them into sets. I've got a smoke machine! And I’ve collected various little figures and buildings and things, but Maskwitches is a very fixed, particular sort of setting that’s got a certain vibe about it. So of course it became this enormous project where I made hundreds of sets, hundreds of models, whole things that I learned to make it happen. I relearned photography. I did a lot of doing photography wrong which was sort of exciting in the same way I was using AI wrong and I was enjoying how it works and doesn't work and finding how things break in interesting ways. The really key part was I got some little artist mannequins and discovered I could put them in costumes and it would work and it looked good. There's all sorts in an actual Mesolithic setting of course: flint tools are in there, and I ended up doing a whole blog about the making of it. It shouldn’t have been possible, really, but if I get told I can’t do something then I do it anyway. Ultimately it was just this weird journey for me, because it’s not exactly a popular setting, the Mesolithic, you know, in Doggerland? But the people who love it, they really love it. It’s just never going to be my biggest selling game!
JR: Which is, presumably, Beowulf?
JH: Yes.
JR: Why do you think that is?
JH: Well, it’s been out the longest. I don't really want to say because it's 5E, but it is because it's 5E, and it's a massive audience, you know, it's a really big audience. Also I think it was a really good use of coming off the back of having a certain following from all my work on The One Ring. I haven’t mentioned The One Ring yet so far, which is incredible. That and Adventures in Middle Earth was what I was known for, but you know, I was doing a lot the art on there but people don't realise quite how much I wrote on that, too. Starting out I
was just filling in gaps or where we had some surprisingly poor efforts on the part freelancers. But all that work meant I had a following for that sort of, you know, early medieval period stuff. And when we started the company, we very much sat down and thought “What can we do that appeals to that fan base?” We could likely leverage something. Right? People wanted to see more of that early medieval stuff, and I think people still want to see more of that. I mean, I know my fans get a bit annoyed that I am doing all this rubbish with models and photography and things!
JR: They want to see men with axes!
JH: Right! Anyway, we had a sort of grounding from Middle Earth, but we had to move away from that somewhere, and we certainly didn’t want to step on the toes of Francesco (Nepitello) who designed The One Ring. But we had brought this early medieval historical influence to the Tolkien stuff and we wanted to find something similar, which is why Beowulf came up.
JR: You know, just to step into your flow for a moment, Beowulf has come up for me repeatedly recently. I should say I haven’t played, but that’s definitely a “I haven’t played it yet,” because I keep encountering people who reference it and the idea of a duet game around this makes so much sense to me. Anyway, it’s on the slate, because I played duet games for years as a teen, and no system I played was designed to that and yet… this is. Why did that work for Beowulf?
JH: So the story itself is one that really lends itself to that lone hero, with a band of followers who come in and out of the spotlight, right? They're not the story and it’s not about his band of folks but you know, they're always there. And so that informed a lot of the design. This was with Jacob Rogers who had worked with on The One Ring and Adventures In Middle Earth and David Rhea, who likewise has been really brilliant and a great proof-reader and has a lot of amazing thoughts about game design. Anyway, the big, the big thing that [supports duet play] is the follower mechanics. You have a group of followers, but they're not like hirelings or what have you from traditional D&D? They don't have a stat block. They are made up within the Beowulf setting with gifts and burdens. This is basically one or two things they are good at which are like one-shot powers. A bit like old school spells: you activate your followers on a turn and they do their thing. This means they usually help you out and then fade into the background again. Perhaps those abilities cause them to become spent, so they’re out of the action until you get a long rest. Sometimes the abilities are passive, and so on. It’s just an arsenal of extra stuff which gives the player more capacity to do things, and more choices. Really key to that was making the combat economy work and in Beowulf you have a couple of abilities. One of the main ones is to Engage, where the followers can tie up enemies. And if you imagine a sort of Errol Flynn movie, in the background there's always some sort of affiliated guys hitting each other's swords, it’s that: they keep opponents busy so the hero can get on with their bit. Your followers can fight other enemies while you take on who you want to fight, filling up the slots you might get for a regular 5E combat. They stay engaged for three rounds before they start making death saves. And people get quite emotional when their followers die! That can happen fairly easily. We had one player ask if they could bring back a favourite follower as an animal for his daughter’s game, and we were like “hell yeah!” because the thing is in a game like this you don’t have to worry about balance or whatever. It’s one on one. House rule it! You’re not mucking up anyone else’s game by doing that stuff. So duet play is freeing, but it’s also really intense. You’re not sharing the spotlight with anyone else, so the whole adventure is about your character and what they want to do, the way they see the world. There’s no negotiating around that. It’s just the one player. And if you are not sharing the spotlight you have to come up with everything, you can’t sit back and let someone else do the talking. We will actually recommend taking regular breaks when you’re playing duet because it’s so intense! laughs You’re doing everything that normally a whole table of players would be doing. You can’t step back and let other people carry it.
JR: I can see that, just from being a GM, yeah.
JH: The other thing is that people play games in different ways: in 5E some people are more interested in it being a skirmish wargame, and we’ve encountered people who only play the wargame angle, for them it’s just combats. They don’t do the rest of it!
JR: I have played with a group like that, it’s quite a contrast.
JH: Yeah, it’s not for me, I am too am-dram about it all! That’s me. But yeah exploring that stuff through developing a game like this was interesting because when we hit playtesting people would be like “we’ll get the group together!” And the penny drops because they realise, no, you only need to phone one person. It’s just a very different kind of game.
JR: Let’s move on to Five Evil, then. This is coming up soon and it’s another take on 5E, but this time for horror games, by Morgan Davie. How does the “doing interesting things to 5E” work in this case?
JH: Yes! So it's horror for Fifth Edition, which in itself causes great horror for some people! We've had quite a lot of resistance in the community in general, like “5E, that’s the worst possible system horror!” And I agree. If you just used 5e. However, Morgan Davie is the guy who did the rules for a|state and a bunch of other stuff. Morgan impressed me years and years ago with a game whose name I can never remember properly and I'm not even gonna try to recall for this: but he wrote a one-page RPG that was sublime. Not just good, like many of them are, but really something special. Anyway, he’s a really smart communicator and he’s great at deconstructing stuff. Five Evil deconstructs and then reconstructs 5E, takes what you know about, using it against you: things that you expect to be true are no longer true. So you get a big OH SHIT moment. It’s the horror movie logic taking over. It’s quite frightening. You are very vulnerable in a way that subverts expectations for this ruleset. Morgan is twisting up 5E beautifully. There’s a load of free stuff for everyone to check this out, what we’re calling Splinters. These are little adventures that people can play to see how it works. They demonstrate how Intensity works, for example. This is crucial for Five Evil. You know how the GM sets the DC of checks in D&D? In Five Evil that’s set by the intensity of the scene. It’s a DC based on how stressed out you are. Everything you try and do is as difficult as the scene makes it: that’s a totally different way of thinking. It’s a lovely addition that turns it on its head and makes the horror work. Also Inspiration becomes Desperation, flipping it on its head again. You get that re-roll, but you have to pay it back later. You gain Desperation, and you have to enact something about your character to get rid of it again. Paying off debts is a great mechanic in these sorts of games, like Vice for Stress in Forged In The Dark. It’s brilliant! And I can say that earnestly because I haven’t written any of it.
JR: Does 5E really get people through the door? Like if they’re familiar with it they will take the risk on something new?
JH: To a point, yeah. I think we’re in a position of flux at the moment, because of decisions that Hasbro have made. To be absolutely honest and overshare for a moment I would say that I suspect Five Evil would have done even better last year, just because of that. But in general yeah, 5E just has a really big playerbase. And I think we don’t always understand how big. I remember the first time I went to Gencon, which is obviously years ago now, and it will have changed a bit, but it was like 85% D&D and 10% Pathfinder, and then everyone else. We realised we had an uphill battle. I came from a place where we played everything and didn’t have any particular loyalty to games or anything, but there are a massive load of people who won’t play anything else. We’d have people come to the table to look at The One Ring and they’d ask what system it was for and we’d pitch how beautifully it was built from the ground up to be its own thing and run Tolkien stuff, and they’d just walk off. That’s why we did Adventures In Middle Earth in the end. But as I say, it’s in flux, things are changing, and I don’t know where that’s going. There’s enough of a loud contingent in online communities who are exasperated with 5E and want things to change, and I get why. On the other hand, I genuinely like it. The fun of it is there if you want it, but that shouldn’t be the end of it. It’s not the best and only system in the world.
JR: Right. I will probably always go back to my favourite beach in Wales for my holidays, but it’s nice to go to Disneyland once in a while.
JH: I think if we had been all about the money we would have been wise to stick with 5E and become known for it. But I am too interested in other things. When someone comes along with a fantastic Forged In The Dark adaptation and we did that, you know? And that’s a lot of time sunk into something that definitely isn’t 5E. And I was talking earlier about Silver Road and Maskwitches, and that’s really loose. My regular group really does often come down to doing stories but with a bit of a framework, no dice rolled. And sometimes, well, you want the whole deal of proper D&D with all the trimmings! As for me? Well, I like everything! It gets me in trouble because I won’t ever pick a team!
JR: Rightly so. And thanks for your time.
More soon! x