The Right Side Of Witches: An Interview With Pale Tides's Paul Canavan
Hey! We are Jim Rossignol, and Marsh Davies, we make TEETH RPG. 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:
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Links!
Pale Tides's Paul Canavan on horror, tarot and staying on the right side of witches.
Hello, you.
Gasp! Five hundred and sixty-odd Bundles Of Holding have been sold, and we’ve still a few days left to run! If you want to get hold of our entire back catalog, then this is the cost-efficent way to do it. Please do circulate, share and so forth.
Meanwhile, Late Pledges are still running on our Occult Pirates RPG, GOLD TEETH.
We’re currently deeply involved in playtesting of the book, with everyone brushing off their vocal skills as we send two West Country murderers and a Frenchman into the punchbowl. Marsh continues to design, illustrate, and lay out pages, not to mention all the world creation and other materials. It’s going to be a very big beast - over 350 pages! We’ve a way to go yet, but it’s already looking glorious and we’ll keep you updated the whole way.
We’ve got a lovely interview with TEETH-friend Paul Canavan this week, and next time we’re planning to get into some nitty-gritty with some RPG readthroughs. If there’s something you’d really like us to talk about, however, drop us a line, or make a request over on the Discord, we’re really just open to suggestions!
But first go and read about Paul Canavan’s new RPG, Pale Tides!
Love,
Marsh & Jim
Links!
THING OF THE WEEK: Deep Cuts. Mr John Harper, he of BLADES IN THE DARK and AGON, has released a big supplement for Blades, and it’s a lot of supplement. 118 pages encompassing factions, technological developments and a whole load of design changes which fairly radically change the what the game is and could be at the table. It’s fair to say we’re pretty serious about our love of this ruleset, having based a series of RPGs on it, so it was with excitement and trepidation that we got hold of this: but we want to get into the nuance of that in more detail (there’s a lot to digest) so we’re planning to get it to the table as soon as possible! Thoughts will follow that occurence. In the meantime: get this, it’s rad.
While we’re waiting for rules discussions, this on Mothership’s combat was certainly haunted food for thought, and had our regular players discussing how they might improve the sci-fi frightener’s combat sequences.
Armchair Dragoons had a thought-stirring interview with Nils Johansson on designing the artwork and graphical elements for tabletop wargames: “Then there’s this additional constant in my approach in which I’m trying to re-frame and revisit the idea we have of any given period. A lot of games covering, for example the Vietnam War, seem to reuse the same visual elements that in fact originated much later in the 1990s whereas I would look for cues in period material, magazine covers etc. As explained in another interview, I tend to push back against an ‘official’ history or an authoritative discourse around events. Does it all really break down to this one iconic image? I find it more interesting to look for little details around events that we had forgotten or hadn’t noticed at first; impressions, patterns, peripheral figures that linger in the background of our memories and to bring these back to the foreground.”
Our kid Gillen did a Heart actual play, which you can listen to over here.
Crowdfund to buy this house and run TEETH games in?
Pale Tides's Paul Canavan on horror, tarot and staying on the right side of witches
Folk horror and witchcraft game Pale Tides is currently up on Kickstarter and I'm enormously excited about it for a number of reasons. Firstly, I know Paul Canavan, its creator, and he's one of the most powerful art directors alive on this planet today, and perhaps beyond—a true behemoth of creativity, a dark leviathan stalking across the world of games, dispensing pixels, wisdom and unfathomable justice wherever he goes. Secondly, I've heard about this game's gestation across the course of many years, and it's paralleled our development of Teeth, drawing from some similar sources of inspiration. And thirdly, its blend of tarot and dice, where the phases of the moon change the stakes of the game, sounds utterly fascinating. Bewitching, almost.
In the game you play as Hexen, a coven of war witches, battling against the influence of a vampiric church, whose oppressive regime has set nature out of balance and unleashed otherwordly terrors into this dark fantasy world. Fear, mystery and detective work are at the heart of the game, as you seek to return monsters from whence they came (by either violent or non-violent means), tempting confrontation with the church all the while.
To find out more, I drew a sigil in blood and salt, and after muttering words of some diabolic tongue, words that no man should speak, I was able to channel Paul's spirit into a mandrake root and have a lovely chat.
Marsh: Pale Tides and Teeth are both cut from a similar cloth: you explore, identify monsters and prepare for some sort of showdown with them. But we came to this similar fantasy from different places—barring the occasional game of Hunt: Showdown together. What were the inspirations for you?
Paul: Its original incarnation was a one shot of Numenera that I ran for some friends who weren't super familiar with RPGs, people who were maybe excited about the concept but a little bit nervous about all the rules and were like, "Oh do I need to do a voice?" So I thought I'd run Numenera because that's pretty easy to pick up and play, and I figured I could strip it back even further and create a little horror game. Really it was like the simplest thing ever: you arrive on an island, there's a scary building, what do you do? And there was one monster encounter. It was very Lovecraft-y, because of course it was. There was no way for the players to win, they'd all die in the end: a satisfying, spooky conclusion. They absolutely loved it! So the idea of an easy pick-up-and-play horror game has lived in my head for years, but it didn't really have a soul, it didn't really have a significant direction until we played Hunt: Showdown. And there's something to the structure of Hunt that really grabbed me, and I'm sure it grabbed you in the same sort of way, where it's just like: you drop into a place with a clear purpose. You know there's something here, but you don't know where or what it is, and you have fun finding your way to it. Rather than, you know—you're all in a tavern, and you have no reason to communicate. Anyone who's new to roleplay is just like, wait, what, what am I doing here? So yeah, really, it was just an exercise in stripping out a lot of stuff newcomers find off-putting about roleplaying games, and then Hunt came through as a kind of veneer to apply to that.
Marsh: Tell us more about the structure of the game. Are there distinct phases for investigation and so on, as there are in Teeth, or is it treated much more fluidly and narratively?
Paul: It is phase-based. One of the other big influences was The X-Files. I really liked the idea of doing a kind of monster-of-the-week procedural thing, but making that a little bit Rogue-like-y as well. So you start off in your coven, which is an area that you can upgrade, and you are presented with a series of potential cases to investigate. You prepare for the mission as best you can without knowing exactly what you're going into. And then you basically just fast travel to the area and embark on an investigation phase, looking for clues to figure out what kind of entity you're dealing with. Fear of the unknown is a big aspect of this. You have a witch's grimoire that you're consulting, and each entity in the game has a series of clues, and every time you learn a clue, you'll be more prepared to fight them. And then the next phase is you dealing with the thing. Nonviolence is always an option.
Marsh: Oh yes, the possibly of nonviolence was something that really excited me in the Kickstarter pitch. How does that play out? Are there repercussions for the kind of path you choose?
Paul: It requires more effort and more research to unlock that outcome: you have to know why this ghost is haunting this place, why this thing is killing these people, before you know how to prepare a banishing ritual that will get rid of this thing without destroying it forever. You get better rewards for doing it, but it mostly just felt appropriate to the game—I didn't want to have another Kill Everything All The Time game, especially since witches are historically not really warriors—they are more the oppressed, you know.
Marsh: Right, being true to the traditions of witchcraft is clearly important to you. Can you tell me a little about the magic system? And will actual witches fuck you up if you get it wrong?
Paul: So that was actually a genuine concern, honestly! I actually have two real witch consultants on the game. But I have to basically find a space between D&D's Fireball and four-day-long rituals. You need to find something in the middle that, again, fits the kind of pick-up-and-play approach. A lot of it comes down to finding analogous spells from historical witchcraft books. So you do have your fireballs—you have to have some version of that—but those kind of spells are much more rare. A lot of it's more to do with influencing people, charms, subtle invocations, which can be done for free. There's a great book by Alix E Harrow called The Once and Future Witches, which was a big influence on this. It has some wonderfully evocative descriptions of how spellcasting works, this sense of building power and then channelling it through an action. So like a character having a snake's fang in a pocket and sort of pricking their finger to like unleash their power to influence people.
Marsh: How does the tarot deck come into it?
Paul: It's a sort of simplified card battle against the storyteller, essentially. There's a tarot deck that lives on the table. It's shared by everybody, including the storyteller. It represents magic being expended and also links directly to the phases of the moon, which change the way the game plays. They provide boons for certain abilities and certain approaches—making investigation easier or harder, for instance. Or they can empower certain entities, making them much more powerful during the full moon—and you don't want that to happen. Casting spells basically expends the deck. When the deck is expended, it's shuffled and two more Major Arcana cards are shuffled in and the moon phase moves forwards, and the game changes a little bit more. If you draw one of the Major Arcana cards when you're casting spells, it has an immediate impact on the world. It could empower something, it could summon something, it could damage something, it could kill somebody. Big, big things. At the start of the game, they are left out of the tarot deck, but they get added in every time it gets shuffled, giving the game a creeping sense of escalation that can be managed by the players by not casting spells too much. It always needs to be a conscious decision whether you're going to actually cast such-and-such a spell or try and attempt a certain ritual. The idea is to create a sense that the game is constantly changing around you, so you can't just keep using the same spells again and again. I really wanted to avoid the kind of D&D combat slug of just, okay, here are the five things I do in every time it's my turn. You know what I mean?
Marsh: For sure. What kind of big changes might a mismanagement of magic precipitate?
Paul: New enemies can be introduced. The church can come in—there's always a chance when you're casting big spells that you're attracting the attention of the Inquisition. They're kind of like the Hunters from Bloodborne—they're infinitely harder to fight than anything else because they seem like you. They're basically mini-bosses that you really don't want to have to deal with.
Marsh: So, in terms of the tarot, can you give us a flavour? What happens when you're casting a spell and you draw the hanged man. What does that mean for the game?
Paul: I'm not going to remember them all off the top of my head because I have too much ADHD, but every one of the Major Arcana's effect is based on roughly what a reading of that card would do.
Marsh: That's so cool.
Paul: I'm still playing around with the idea of inverted versions. But basically everything has to stay somewhat true to that witchy baseline; the tarot cards link directly to their meaning and link into the paths the witches can take: Ash Witches are aligned with the flame, for example. You're building a relationship with the cards and you really want certain Major Arcana cards to start coming up, because they can work well for your character.
Marsh: Tell me more about the island setting. It draws from Scotland and I guess Scandinavia as well to some extent—is that right?
Paul: Yes. There's a bit of Finland in there, Scotland, Ireland, and England as well.
Marsh: Did you consider setting it somewhere and some-when real?
Paul: Yeah, originally it was going to be to set in our world in the 17th century, but one of the things I was really interested in was manifesting a fear of the unknown. Standing on the edge of the loch or the edge of the ocean, looking out, and you're like, what's over there? And if the players are like, "It's France," you know, it's just a little less exciting. And historical settings have a lot of baggage. You need to know your history and be able to tweak it accordingly. I'm not good enough with that stuff, quite frankly. It made more sense to me for this game to be fantasy loosely based on on our world. It takes place on a single island initially but I have plans for where that will go in future stories and hopefully open up to more mythology, folklore and weirdness.
Marsh: Paul, you're a Mega Artist—I believe that is your actual job title. I'd love to hear about your take on Pale Tides' visual identity.
Paul: The art has gone through so many iterations. It's unbelievable. Originally, the plan was to do none of the painterly fantasy concept art stuff that I do for games, because I wanted it to have a very different visual identity. So I experimented a lot with it being entirely charcoal-based, entirely paint-based. At one point it had almost scrapbook style because I wanted the player book to be an entirely in-world document that had no rules, nothing like that. Basically the witches' own guide to the universe. I tried for probably about a year to make that work! And it was just too convoluted. It's too hard to both introduce the mechanics of a game to somebody and also give them a beautiful world document that doesn't require them constantly jumping between two books. So now the art style is almost kind of like slap bang in the middle: it has the big painty stuff but it's still a little bit scrapbooky. And that means I can be faster because the reality is, as you'll know, if you're bouncing away from your art style constantly, it slows you down quite a lot.
Marsh: I feel this very deeply, yes.
Paul: I realised I was getting a little bit too carried away with the idea of having this insanely consistent art style. And actually, what made more sense was that different covens had contributed to this document, which means I can get away with having different artists, different writers and so on appearing in there.
Marsh: Oh that's awesome! Is there any trepidation in allowing someone else to visualise this world that you've been so close to for so long?
Paul: Honestly, no! I actually genuinely love art direction more than I do making art. So I'm excited. I've had quite a few art friends contribute bits and bobs over the years but I'm just so hyped to be like, hey, I can pay you now.
And with that, the conjuration expired, and Paul's soul was torn from the mandrake root, which withered to a blackened nub, screaming all the while. Anyway, back Pale Tides, why don't ya?