The Most Cavalier Dog
You are reading the TEETH newsletter. Your author this week is Jim Rossignol.
TEETH is a series of games by Jim Rossignol and Marsh Davies. This newsletter reports on that and visits places all over the papery world of TTRPGs. Thanks for tuning in!
Hello, you.
This week’s newsletter contains a large interview with a prolific and inspiring TTRPG writer, Paul Baldowski, whose name you will likely have seen associated with Cthulhu Hack, The Dee Sanction, and Symbaroum. The interview covers a bunch of ground, with some valuable thoughts and advice on anyone working in the TTRPG writer space.
In TEETH news we can report that, hurrah, the TEETH: Stranger & Stranger playtest is complete and successful! Our third standalone adventure set in the supernatural horror of 18th century England is nearly finished on the page, too, but the publishing will, tragically, be delayed a while as Marsh deals with some exciting and broad real life things. We’ll update on progress as soon as we have some.
(My Idle Chat with Marsh, by the way, will continue next week!)
In the meantime, let’s do some links!
LINKS!
I picked up a physical copy of The Vast In The Dark (“A zine about exploring dark and alien megastructures in an infinite realm”) from the excellent Rook’s Press this week, and it’s simply the loveliest thing, with rules for creating an infinite hex map, the interiors of alien megastructures, and the lore and rules for the weirdos who live in this hellish dimension. (Digital version here.) So impressed am I, in fact, that this (couple with a simply OSR type ruleset) will be the next campaign run over at Monday Night Dice club. I shall report back on how that goes with a campaign write up in a forthcoming newsletter.
If you do point yourself at Rook’s Press then also consider The Goblin Manor of Anstruther-Mogg. We haven’t read it ourselves, but consider this blurb: “A drooping manor house in the wilting countryside of Frumbley housing the hateful and decrepit Anstruther-Mogg sisters. Once a site of many a lavish ball and breakfast, host to Lairds and Ladies and Knights and Knaves, its winding, fretful corridors now sit empty except for the spiteful hurryings and evil thoughts of the uncountable goblin sorority.” Hard to ignore.
Over on Kickstarter the “horror spellbook” The Book Of Gaub is already well beyond funded, but it’s worth a moment of your consideration. “The Book of Gaub is a RPG supplement and anthology of creepy magic and micro-fiction, fit for all game systems and tailored to retro/old school D&D in the style of Wonder & Wickedness. Written by seven authors, their concerted effort fleshes out the Seven Fingers of the Hand of Gaub, manifest through the filigrees of cobwebs and nails, false memories, and nightmares you want to forget.”
This solo truck driving RPG is exactly the kind of thing that grabs our attention. Just look at it! “You play a long-haul truck driver trying to make their way home. Every day, you’ll hit the road, navigating treacherous highways, fleeing from menacing threats, and dealing with the psychological impacts of isolation. And at the end of each day, you’ll find a payphone, make a call, and leave a message for the most important person in your life.”
Speaking of beautifully designed things, friend of TEETH, Emmanoel Melo has released an expansion module for CBR+PNK called Mind The Gap. It even comes with some appropriate sound effects. Well worth checking out.
Research this week led us, of course, to Prince Rupert’s magical dog, Boy. A white hunting poodle who died at the battle of Marston Moor and primary pet of top English Civil War cavalier Prince Rupert, Boy was “"able" to find hidden treasure, was invulnerable to attack, could catch bullets fired at Rupert in his mouth, and prophesy as well as the 16th-century soothsayer, Mother Shipton.” Now that’s a good dog.
INTERVIEW!
Agent of Dee: Paul Baldowski
This week Jim had a chat with prolific indie RPG writer Paul Baldowski, whose work you will almost certainly have encountered if you’ve been reading and playing in the indie TTRPG space over the past couple of decades. Mr Baldowski has worked on a huge range of games, from the 2004 reworking of the Paranoia series through to Symbaroum - he’s been running the Iron Pact website, providing resources for that beautiful game. He’s also behind the much loved lovecraftian adventues of Cthulhu Hack. Most recently Paul has been providing us with Elizabethan monster-hunting and supernatural-battling in The Dee Sanction, and so that’s where we start…
JR: I want to launch straight in with your most recent work and talk about your game of "Enochian Intelligence", The Dee Sanction. I think this might be my favourite setting for a game in recent memory. Can you talk a bit about its inspiration, inception and production? How much research did you need to do? How do you feel about it now?
PB: Thanks for coming straight to the point, as, at the moment, The Dee Sanction remains front and centre in my mind. I must admit, I have been asked a similar question in the past, and I struggle with a precise answer!
My degree in Historical and Political Studies and a general love of history at school likely served as the inspiration. I had excellent teachers who made you love the subject matter rather than just teaching it at you. I always found the pre-industrial period interesting, especially the period where science and magic walked hand-in-hand. It meant throughout my degree, when I had the chance to choose modules, I trimmed everything back to the good stuff.
In the Noughties, I was lucky to get a bit of writing work for Arion Games. The owner, Graham Bottley, licenced a reprint and expansion of the 80s paperback classic Maelstrom — one of the original historical RPGs. Indeed, the game took place in the Elizabethan period with magic included in the form of the titular Maelstrom, a chaotic whirl of energy at the heart of creation.
It wasn't until late 2013 that I started jotting down thoughts and playtested adventures for The Dee Sanction. I think the name came first, along with the notion of the legalisation of magic under the right circumstances, skewing existing history. In reality, the 1563 Act Against Conjurations, Enchantments and Witchcrafts targeted those who would work magic to kill, cause bodily harm, or deprive the Crown of access to buried treasures as a means to protect the Queen and her finances. The 1564 amendment of the Dee Sanction extends the intent to make the defence more proactive.
Anyway, I wanted a generic ruleset for a few setting ideas I had bubbling around at the time; The Dee Sanction was the only one that survived. But the final product didn't come without a struggle. I spent seven years trying to find a system that worked, and, in the meantime, I wrote The Cthulhu Hack in 2016. I wasn't expecting to write almost a dozen other adventures and supplements, but that happened. The Dee Sanction took a back seat.
Then COVID happened, and it gave me a lot of time to think, collating my notes and ideas into a ruleset. I had adventures sketched out, and the aspiration was not to deluge people in chapters of setting. They could read in almost any history book or sum up by watching TV or a movie.
Before I knew it, I had a spreadsheet filled with figures and a queasy ride toward running a Kickstarter. I'm happy to say that the November 2020 campaign went well, and we delivered bang on time in April 2021.
JR: How much did the achievements of your previous games influence The Dee Sanction? Do you feel like there's been a creative journey there?
PB: The Dee Sanction owes something to the Maelstrom Beggars Companion and The Cthulhu Hack. The Beggars Companion presents a dozen additional types of vagrant as potential player characters along with the concept of a beggar only campaign, background on the treatment of the wandering classes and an adventure. I love research—filling books with highlights and tiny sticky marks. My excitement for delving into a pile of books and come back with brief notes suited to gamification definitely filtered through here.
Mechanically, The Dee Sanction takes a step away from The Cthulhu Hack but carries on the notion of a terse and fairly tight couple of mechanics. There's a notion of the Usage Die (from The Black Hack) that The Cthulhu Hack turned into investigative expertise and Sanity. In The Dee Sanction, rolling a 1 or 2 doesn't mean you drop a die size. Mostly.
I would say that I've been learning lessons all along, publishing all the material for The Cthulhu Hack, including a bunch of stuff on Patreon. That learning curve of creating a game system and setting means I hit The Dee Sanction with a stronger sense of what I wanted and needed... Once I'd broken the barrier of finding a core mechanic that felt right.
JR: What is your philosophy when it comes to RPG rules? I might be way off here, but your work strikes me as leaning to a place that recognises the benefits of being streamlined while also providing quite a lot of moving parts to play with?
PB: I prefer concise principles when it comes to running a game. I think that reflects in my writing and the games that I create. When I wrote The Cthulhu Hack, I latched on to the Usage mechanic from The Black Hack. I saw that as a way to simulate both the slide into ruin and the means to emulate Lovecraft's investigations — where each new discovery robs you of some scrap of your humanity. You could read that whole book in minutes and get on playing.
On the other hand, I enjoy tinkering with mechanics. When I started with The Dee Sanction, the system had elements that survive — like Tradecraft — but the mechanics had almost no relation to the published rules. When I buy a new game, I can feel the sub-processes running in my head, questioning the game system and wondering whether it might be better if...
I read Call of Cthulhu 7th edition and changed the character generation system before my first game! It wasn't that the writers hadn't done an excellent job, but that I just get the urge to tinker. I break stuff down, seek out simplicity, and make the game work in a way that makes sense... at least to me.
JR: Let's talk more broadly about influences: if there was to be a shelf of RPG books which explained Paul Baldowski, what would be up there? And what's on the shelves from other genres and why? Is there anything on there you wish you'd written?
PB: Just one shelf?
Well, Call of Cthulhu spawned my love of horror games and Lovecraft's stories, while Middle-Earth Role Playing and FASA's Star Trek were early joys that showed you could create incredible new stories within familiar settings — even though sometimes those aspirations to creativity might get you in trouble with the license holder! I have a couple of shelves packed with these incredible games.
Numenera and the Cypher system have a half-shelf (on my actual shelves); the system presents a highly flexible design and a pretty straightforward set of mechanics. I like the way you can boil a creature down to a number with a couple of quirks to make it stand out, and the notion of a skill list without definitions certainly has had an influence on me.
The Black Hack, The White Hack, the 2400 series and the books of Kevin Crawford — like Silent Legion and Worlds Without Number — are recent influences that show the incredible potential of the small publisher to produce fascinating games with immense potential to themselves be hacked into something more. I think as a game writer and a GM, there's enormous value in looking at those sorts of games as fine examples of what you can create. In a bookshelf, they take up such a small space, but the contribution they have made for me is worth one hundred times that space.
Other genres? I have a pile of history, plenty of sci-fi and horror, and a fair smattering of popular science. It's all good stuff. To be honest, I rarely finish a book—I tend to graze about ten of them at any given time, depending on the room I'm in! I read a LOT of Lovecraft, usually reading and re-reading in pursuit of a new angle on an adventure or an entity.
Anything I wished I'd written? I would love a stab at something Doctor Who. Or to write a new Lords of Creation.
JR: How do you feel about the relationship between indie RPG press and Kickstarter?
PB: I'm not sure I have a feeling about it. I can see that a lot of people rush into running Kickstarters ill-prepared. I spend months toiling over a spreadsheet with the wisdom of a close friend. I also took to heart the insight of Kevin Crawford about what you need to have before a Kickstarter—like a sample of the art, a bit of layout, and a finished product!
I fear a few people barrel in with sketchy thoughts and very little else prepared. On the other, I do see many small publishing get the breath of support and publicity from using crowdfunding. There is good coming out of it.
There's a balance between fizzing enthusiasm and the tedium of basic accounting!
JR: We always see your name high in the 'thanks' for the Symbaroum books - can you talk a bit about your relationship with that gorgeous series?
PB: It's more than five years since I discovered the Symbaroum RPG, and I launched the Iron Pact website soon after. It was the art that hooked me in when it appeared on IndieGoGo, but I didn't back it. That said, the moment Modiphius stocked it, I grabbed a copy, and I haven't looked back.
In the years since, I have written more than 150,000 words of articles and resources on playing the game, meeting the challenge of the journey across the Titans, and venturing into the darkest depths of the Davokar forest. I wrote most of that content in the first couple of years and garnered the attention of the Symbaroum team in their pre-Free League days when they were Jarnringen.
I had the privilege of meeting, talking and working with Mattias Johnsson Haake, one of the creative forces behind the game. He allowed me to contribute both creatures and adventures to the setting, and that's been brilliant. Mattias is a universally awesome guy and, in my mind, one of the finest and most generous people in the RPG community.
I guess somewhere along the line, I earned my spurs and became a part of the wider Symbaroum family! I'm really pleased and excited whenever I get the chance to contribute in any way.
JR: Which games are you most excited about in the RPG space right now? What are you insisting people pay attention to, and why? Is there something you would like our readers to pick up and play tomorrow?
PB: Rather than engage in specifics, I would insist that people try more games! I appreciate that everyone is different, but I feel that people who only play one game or one system will miss out on so much. I envy the groups that have run the same campaign for thirty years, but equally, I wouldn't change my own experience. I think several hundred one-shots has helped me become the gamer I am, with a critical appreciation of mechanics and so many awesome games.
JR: What advice would you give to people starting out in writing their own TTRPG material? Are there any hard rules?
PB: Find your Unique Selling Point. Don't be afraid to tinker. Returning to a blank page is not defeat; it's just a step along a new road toward your destination. And something I picked up from Graham Walmsley is, don't write rules your game doesn't need.
The USP is crucial because it will set you apart from the masses. I wrote The Cthulhu Hack with the principle that the game mechanics should support the theme absolutely. I would also set aside all preconceived ideas, writing supplements and adventures from reading and re-reading Lovecraft's stories. For the last five years, all other Lovecraft-inspired games went in a black box. I didn't stop buying stuff, but when I did, they would get set to one side and go unread — I'll get there when The Stars Are Right.
Tinkering is critical, in my mind. Play other games and systems. Try them on for size and see what works; make notes of anything that catches your attention or warrants further thought. Game mechanics can't be copyrighted, so you can use other people's ideas; that said, I guarantee you will find the greatest satisfaction if you take ideas and really make them your own. The Usage Die I mentioned before was about not tracking consumables in The Black Hack; in Cthulhu Hack, it handles the slide into darkness, tracking the breaking point of your personality. And I think it works really well as a concept and reinforcing the themes of the game.
The blank page shouldn't frighten you, and playtest might occasionally mean you have to go back to it. The Dee Sanction went through iteration after iteration. I ran some adventures using multiple iterations of a system because I had confidence in the background of the setting but couldn't find the right mechanics. I won't pretend it didn't hurt a bit when things didn't work right, but playtesting provides essential external feedback that you can't generate alone.
At the same time, expectations can also be a bad thing, and sometimes you have to re-align players to understand your game. Games don't need rules to cover every eventuality, just those that matter to the story and the setting. For me, in writing a concise game, that's just a fact of life. If it isn't important, don't write it up. Otherwise, players will use it and turn the game into something you never intended. A game might not need rules about fighting or falling — make that evident from the outset by explaining why they aren't relevant. Don't be tempted to write those rules. Skip that bit and move on.
All that said, just do your own thing. Creating games about make-believe worlds shouldn't be torturous or bound by rules and restrictions; making games should be fun!
JR: Are you playing with a group right now? If so, what are you playing, and how is that going?
PB: I'm running a game of the Delta Sanction, which is unsurprisingly a mash-up of Delta Green and The Dee Sanction that reinforces that I can't leave anything alone. I run a weekly 2-hour session, and we're just done with the first of the adventures in the Impossible Landscapes campaign. That is a fascinating set of adventures that has totally screwed with my mind and, thankfully, seems to be having a similar effect on my players.
JR: Paul Baldowski, thank you for your time.
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More soon! x (Including part 2 of my Idle Chat with Marsh.)