The Guiltiest Bounty Hunter
Hands up! You are reading the TEETH newsletter, written and compiled by the revolutionary agent Jim Rossignol and secret contact Marsh Davies. This is a newsletter about table-top role-playing games: our own—that we’re publishing over here and also here —as well as interviews, links, and general noodling. Want us to see your work? Get in touch!
Hello, You
Links!
Notoriously Alone With My Guilt
Hello, you.
Teeth news is that Marsh has neeeeaaaarly finished designing, illustrating, and laying out the book! He’s like a wizard!
We’re going to talk about some of the challenges involved in that within the next newsletter, but I have to say that most of the challenges were Marsh’s, because he had to do all the drawing and fiddle formatting stuff, work which is beyond my rough spade-like hands and gentle poet’s mind.
Most importantly this means that the book itself should land in this near half of this year, and we’ll be excited to share it with you! Thanks to everyone who contributed to the beta testing, you are a credit yourselves and your people.
LINKS!
I am fascinated by the prolific Lucas Rolim’s work, and Mini Kingdom is no exception. It is a “non-violent” or “conversation starting” RPG session, in which combat is definitely not the answer. The mini part is quite literal, by the way.
This is actually several years old now, but having been Googling some stuff around Mörk Borg, I have to say that “Mörk Borg’s Putrescence Regnant is a grim ‘bog crawl’ adventure releasing as a vinyl music album” is the best Mörk Borg headline I have ever seen.
Why was I Googling around Mörk Borg stuff? We were looking at the Bare Bones Edition, which is certainly bare bones in the sense that the punk rock layout and black metal art stylings are missing, but it still manages to fill countless pages with grimdark psalms as flavour text. They can’t help themselves!
Imposter Kings is very pretty. (Thanks to Glowfriend Adam Pearce for this link!)
Is Jeeyon Shim’s Patreon where all the best material is to be found? It seems that way. “Catfish is a solo game about a human who uses their charm to bait unsuspecting victims for their monster friend. Use your own real life dating app messages to lure in your friend’s next meal.”
Research this week led us to 15th century depictions of duels between men and women, where men are buried up to their waist in a pit.
Notoriously Alone With My Guilt
So, reader, an admission: this is the first time I have tried out a solo journaling game. You’d think, as a writer who likes to believe that I write just for my own amusement, I might have gone down this route before, and yet it’s a blank. And I now have some thoughts on that.
Notorious (Jason Price) is a fine piece of work. The inspirations are obvious and stated clearly (Star Wars, Mandalorian, and the cultural influences of those works) and the intention is very clear. Torben Bökemeyer’s superb art manages to make a caricature of the source material, and yet provide the thing with its own identity, but without losing that vital genetic material which made the inspirations so special, and so compelling. Combined, the package is deeply convincing. (I picked up the ring-bound book from the Kickstarter, and I recommended picking up that physical copy if you can.)
Yet the reason I ended up backing the project wasn’t simply down to presentation or references, but because the very specific nerd-fantasy is one that I will always be interested in, Star Wars or otherwise. Bounty Hunter is so clearly one of the compelling fantasies of the popular science fiction franchises, and yet it is rarely (if ever!) satisfactorily addressed in any format, and particularly in games: and I believe that extends across game types, from TTRPGs to digital games. Of course there are plenty of games which have bounty hunters in, and even some which star these kinds of characters, but they almost never manage to articulate what I want from the experience in a systemic sense, game-design sense. Game systems address specific desires for tackling a kind of experience, which I think is broadly missing when it comes to the Bounty Hunter. There is so much there in terms of how systems could work to address that role: how your character selects a contract, how they hunt the target, how the target evades or fights back, how your decisions might deal with the client and secure payment. So many rich and interesting spaces for design and game systems to live and do things! (If Disney wants to hear my pitch, then I am ready to go.)
Notorious, by the way, does manage to systematise all this, and does so in a way that, with a little effort and some dice rolls, generates a satisfying story. It is one of the closest pieces of work to addressing the itch I am trying to scratch here, and after so many years doing that, it’s really saying something. The characters are exactly the cross-section of tropes that I want to pick from, and the prompts and tables for everything from character personalities to the showdown moments with your mark (“You find them in the ruins of a gigantic crashed starship, searching for something”) are tonally bang on. The Hunt was good, and took about an hour and a half — that perfect for a movie or time spent playing a game.
Anyway, as I sat in my fur-collared dressing gown and read/played through this satisfying work, reacting to the prompts and making my decisions, I found myself simultaneously engrossed and… guilty. What is that? A pervasive sense of discomfiture in my leisure time? Can I not just relax and be happy?
So here’s the thing: solo-journaling in a game like this feels like GM prep. And yet it wasn’t. Perhaps that’s just me, and perhaps I’ll get over it, but one of my regular and favourite pastimes is already about reading sourcebooks, making notes, working out how I will use the prompts, ideas, and fictions that other people have made in a tabletop scenario. And here I am doing basically that without any reference to anyone other than myself! This is time I could, indeed, should spend preparing for a group of real, other people. How selfish of me. How mortifyingly self-centred!
And — forgive me — there’s nothing here that reflects poorly on Notorious in any way. When I identified and put those feelings aside, I had what should have been a great time. But I also think it was a little psychoanalytical: we’re getting to the root of why I haven’t played a journaling game before. Hell, it’s why I never really spend enough time with all the Fighting Fantasy books I collected as a kid. I’d rather plan a new Rifts campaign than doing something for myself.
The Notorious story I created was an entertaining one indeed: I set out as an “Uncanny” bounty-hunter, (or Nomad, as the book has it) born into an oppressive Mystic Order cult, but abandoning that way of life to explore the galaxy. A solemn, insectoid character, J’Oh (ha!) took a contract to hunt Chedo Robas, a Ghul who had fled to the ice planet of Utov to escape the wrath of the Red Moon, whose shipments he had sold to the Tharg Cartel. But he couldn’t escape me, could he? No he—
Argh! Can I psychologically file this as research? Perhaps I reuse my experiences here to introduce a bounty-hunting theme to our forthcoming Mothership campaign, and this can be an excuse for that? Honestly, I have to think of it this way. There has to be an ulterior motive. Oh no. Too many years being a GM has broken me. And I only have myself to apologise to!
Sorry, me.
[You can pick up Notorious here, and you should!]
[[Also while writing this, this tweet came up in my timeline. Hmmm. Thinky emoji indeed, my friends.]]
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More soon! x