The Chattering Of January's Teeth (And Some Writing Advice)
Hello! We are Jim Rossignol, and Marsh Davies, we make the TEETH RPG series. Welcome to our TTRPG Newsletter! If you fancy hanging out and further talking about TTRPGs, why not come and join us over on the TEETH Discord?
This week:
Hello, you.
LINKS!
Every Place Tells Three Stories: A Dubious Formula from the World of Videogame Narrative.
Hello, you.
The holiday season was a pleasant one indeed for Team TEETH. Marsh was able to come over from his usual distant location for several weeks, and we were able to meet and drink tea in real life! Twice! First at Dragonmeet and then in the halls of our own past at a riverside pub in Bath Spa. Pleasant times were had.
In the intervening short days and long evenings, we’ve been busy creating words, art, and pages for GOLD TEETH, our book of occult piracy and other terrors in the 18th century (late pledges still open if you want to secure a copy!), and we are delighted with the progress. Playtesting continues! We also began to sketch out two (count ‘em!) further books, both quite different from what you’ve seen before, but nonetheless connected to our overall project. Oh yes, thrilling and inspiring future plans. More news on that as we generate it.
Marsh has also had time to expand a little on something he talked about in a recent podcast appearance. It’s an superb essay on how his game design thinking from the world of digital games has more to say in TTRPG world than you might imagine. You can read that below, at your leisure.
Remain steadfast, friends, and look after each other. We’ll be in touch again soon.
Marsh & Jim
LINKS!
THING OF THE WEEK: It’s not every week that Jim launches a blog, but it’s also not the first time that he has done so. Long time readers will be familiar with the other name on the list, too: Kieron Gillen. You might remember him from PC Gamer, or from Rock, Paper, Shotgun, or from Marvel comics, or from DIE RPG, or the myriad of other things he has created and worked on over the years. He’s an old bugger, you see. Hence the name. Old Men will largely be powered by us reposting archival material, so if you are a regularly reader of this newsletter you will a) see it first here, and b) will probably have seen it already, if it’s something Jim wrote. However, you might have missed Kieron’s stuff, and there will also be new, fresh, exciting TTRPG material: first one of those articles is coming soon!
This article about the Brazilian community around the 30-year old Streetfighter TTRPG is pretty incredible. I love these stories of communities persisting, despite everything. Heart-moving stuff.
Knocking around on Bluesky this week was story of this Roman-era whale, whose name I believe has an origin in him being purple, the most important or all the colours, is a fantastic one that I had somehow how encountered before. And profoundly relevant to our interests.
And speaking of things on Bluesky, this model of Böcklin’s famous (and brilliant) Isle of the Dead painting, is one of my favourite things recently, and not just because it reminded me that I have a permanently unfulfilled To Do list item which is to turn that painting into a Trophy Dark/Gold incursion.
Comrade McQue points out that the British Library has a weird fiction collection out. Lovely volumes, some of which really is weird, and that includes The Night Land. Now, I am not recommending this near-unreadable work of science fiction published in 1912, and reportedly written much earlier, but it’s worth at least reading the wikipedia entry and dipping into it on Gutenberg or something to get a flavour of the thing. It’s quite unlike anything else in fiction, and pre-empts both horror and sci-fi fictions of the 20th and 21st century by an almost prophetic degree. Genuinely weird, archaic as fuck, and a huge influence on me (Jim) personally.
Every Place Tells Three Stories: A Dubious Formula from the World of Videogame Narrative
In the now distant past of 2024, we were honoured to be interviewed by Thomas Manuel on the Yes Indie'd podcast. Naturally, I opened with an anecdote about being urinated on by a dog, but Thomas is such a peerless pro that he was able to shake some sense out of us, and we ended up getting into a meaty discussion on the intersection of horror and comedy as it pertains to the 18th century and TEETH in particular.
Another thing that came up is how Jim and I brought over some of the tenets of videogame narrative design to TEETH—something that Thomas later suggested I could expand on in a newsletter. Good idea! So:
Every place tells three stories. I can't remember where I heard this first, or even if I have accurately reproduced it, and I don't suggest that it is a groundbreaking insight or a hard rule. Nonetheless, I've found it useful in both videogames and TTRPGs. Even though one has a GM and the other typically does not, both videogames and TTRPGs need their environments to tell stories. Their environments need to project atmosphere. They need to have a sense of history or purpose. They need to highlight to players those things that their characters might notice or be intrigued by, or introduce obstacles to their plans.
Depending on how heavily you wish to direct players, these environments might steer, tutorialise, or warn. In Half-Life 2, Valve famously used the flight of a startled bird to draw the player's eye to an objective—or illustrate potential danger when the bird gets slurped into the gob of some lurking horror—while helpful graffiti (written in blood, ideally) remains the ultimate cliché of environmental storytelling, from the artlessly instructional "Cut off their limbs" in Dead Space, to the cryptic "Remember Citadel" from System Shock, posing questions for which the player is then primed to seek answers.
GMs do the same for players when they sketch out a location—not always because they want to railroad the players into pre-prepared material, but because they've developed a sense for what these characters will be alert to, or drawn in by. TTRPG players can resist this, of course, and step off the breadcrumb trail, but they are better able to make that decision if the GM's description has given them a framework to understand the environment around them.
In short, there is a lot of commonality between how videogames use environmental storytelling and how the GM shapes their description of a place, and so that little aphorism—every place tells three stories—handily applies to both.
This often works as three layers of time: there's the story of what the place was, the story of what it has become since, and the story of what it is now—waiting to be shaped further by the players.
So, for example, the players might find themselves in the old Trebilcock iron works, a complex of furnaces and mills sinking into mossy dereliction on the banks on the Upper Dight. The carcass of its main smithy looms in soot-stained brick from a sea of gorse, split open by the collapse of its enormous smoke stack. But someone has been here more recently: the briar around the mill pond is thinner, as though it was cleared and then allowed to regrow. The great waterwheel still creaks and rumbles, its blades patched with new wood. Nearby, a garden has been planted but not pruned; a chicken coop lies broken open and still; the vegetable patch has gone to rot. Someone started a life here—and it may have ended here, too. Beyond its banks of well-churned mud, the black water of the mill pond stirs.
Story One: this place was once a site of great industry. Why was it abandoned and is the danger still present? Story Two: it has been tentatively reinhabited. By whom and what happened to them? Story Three: something terrible lurks in the mill pond. What drew it here and how will it greet our players?
Depending on what the players have arrived here to do, one of these stories might be their focus and another an obstacle or diversion. Perhaps they are here to retrieve something made in the smithy, many years ago. They might be diverted from this to rescue a lone survivor from Story Two. Or perhaps they are on the trail of Story Two: a thief who has fled here to evade justice and come to a sticky end courtesy of Story 3. Maybe they are just here to kill the creature from Story 3 and perform an unspeakable ritual with its innards, but it flees into the contaminated ruins of Story 1. If you are writing a module, rather than GMing, you can use these stories to anticipate and satisfy different kinds of players—cultists will find a different purpose here to lawmen—but it could be that each story satisfies a different objective for the same group of players, and, as the situation unfolds, these become mutually exclusive. Drama!
Why three stories, in particular? Environments can have a different story hidden beneath every creaking floorboard, if you like, though it will be harder to keep them all in your head and communicate them. Three is usually sufficient to create complexity where the stories meet, without too much cognitive load on the GM, while making their delineation relatively readable to players.
Baked into this is the notion of time and change—it reinforces the idea that players exist in a world with a history and causality independent of their whims. But equally these stories need not be historic: they might be concurrent or conflicting temptations for players, creating a possibility space that feels dynamic and exciting but keeping its scope manageable.
For example, the players might be on the tail of a thief, thought to be hiding in the ruins, but arrive to find the forge in the midst of a Grand Reopening, officiated by Mayor Dripwood Slott, a man whom the players have good reason to kill. However, before any decision can be made, the enormous shadow of Redbeak sweeps across the tumbling ruins—an evil bird, known to have recently swallowed a player's wife. Maybe all the players' wives! Why not? They could still be within, as yet undigested, if only the players might catch it.
Many of you will be reading this and thinking this is agonisingly obvious. Having a big bird full of wives appear as a distraction is probably something a lot of GMs do instinctively and on the fly! But it's rarely a bad thing to be mindful in the process of writing, to be aware of the density, balance or interrelation of your narrative hooks, and, maybe most importantly, how clearly they are expressed through what the characters can see. You don't need to have your story scrawled on a wall in blood, but having some part of each narrative iceberg immediately visible above the surface is a good way to engage and orient players. And with that horrendous mixing of metaphors, I shall cease sharing writing advice.
-Marsh
Argh, 'Every Place Tells Three Stories' is really good! I've kind of poked around the edges of stuff like that in my own designs, but that's really good!