The Vast In The Mörk
It’s the TEETH RPG newsletter! Vast and dark in your inbox. Written by Marsh Davies and Jim Rossignol. And hey, you can buy our tabletop games! (More on that, soon.)
Hello, you.
Links!
The Vast In The Mörk: a conjunction and a report.
Hello, you.
Now, given the precepts of occult science of Engagement, I normally wouldn’t squeeze out a newsletter at a weekend, but this one has an element of timeliness to it, because the bundles on Bundle Of Holding are very relevant to our interests, as you’ll see below in this week’s essay.
And speaking of essays, real life has been getting in the way of the usual stream of consciousness, but so there’s a backlog of things we want to talk about, including a NEW (!!) Teeth-adjacent game from our comrade Alex Wiltshire, as well as reports on some of the other stuff we’ve been playing that isn’t Teeth-y, Gold Teeth testing reports, and More!
In terms of TEETH stuff happening soon, we’re still not 100% on a date for that beta PDF, but we have X weeks of internal playtesting, writing, and designing to be done, where X is the length of time it takes us to be happy and productive. And we are both of these things! But it’s a big old book, and that new ruleset is one we want to get right.
But there’s also going to be an opportunity to get your hands on the remaining zines, maps, and books from the original print run, direct from us, next week. So I will be bothering you again sooner than usual, but just wanted to give you a heads-up here: Temporary Teeth Shop will be a thing, and stocks will be extremely limited.
In the meantime, enjoy further wittering, and don’t forget you can check in at the Discord, or for swing by for supporting guff and thinky business over on Old Men Running The World.
Love you!
-Marsh & Jim
LINKS!
We rather like the look of Our Farm Becomes The Battlefield. “Our Farm is a tabletop RPG for 3-5 players. You play as displaced farmers piloting magical golems - farm equipment retrofitted for battle - to take back your land from the wizard Tysanto, who gained a monopoly on food production and forced you into sharecropping… You’re fighting this wizard, yeah, but you’re also fighting the system that ensured that this would happen in the first place.”
I was going to suggest we review the fancy D&D VTT, Sigil, but uh.
World Wizard sounds like the sort of thing that our 3-GM group would excel at, bask in, and delight with. “Follow the development of a fantasy setting through four Ages: Primordial, Prehistoric, Ancient, and Present. Using an action point system, players take turns adding regions, terrain features, civilizations, demigods, heroes, monsters, events, and more, supported by simple rules that determine outcomes when those elements interact. 10 different tables are provided to prompt ideas.”
Type Help is a rare thing that is best tackled knowing very little about it.
A couple of people linked me to Owe My Soul To The Company Store, and Oh No, we’re going to end up playing Mothership again, aren’t we?
Our kid Gillen solved your D&D scheduling issue with a patch for the Player’s Handbook.
Less savoury thoughts included! There is no way that this should have inspired me to create a driving system for TTRPGs, but there’s one sitting in my drafts right now.
Broken Veil is a podcast of UK spooks, and really good stuff.
The Vast In The Mörk
A strange conjunction has occurred. Not an alignment of celestial objects this time, but an alignment of TTRPGs played and their distribution via the internet. Let me explain.
The story began when I found myself thinking about Hex Crawls. That’s the sort of game where you have a big blank hex map and you fill in the details by generating them as the players explore. You know, in all my years I had never run one, despite having a few sat up on the shelf. It was time! My partners in Tuesday Night, Gillen and (Chris) Gardiner, agreed, and so it was that we embarked on a thing which I had in fact run before, but not like this.
The scenario was The Vast In The Dark by Charlie Avery-Ferguson, an individual who, as comrade Grant Howitt observed, can write AND draw in the most unfair way. Long-time readers might recall that when I had previously taken a stab at this superb zine, I had skipped over the hex crawl stuff, and simply ran it as a hyper-atmospheric scenario with Knave v1.0 as the rules. In fact, it came as a part of a delirious sequence from a Blades In The Dark campaign a few years ago, where the players were thrown into a dream by hunting a Leviathan, and while their characters remained the same, the mechanics of the dream were to run different game systems, as a sort of break from the reality our Blades campaign. They escaped intro Troika too, and even Numenera very briefly. All very silly.
This time, however, we would play both the extended zine, and do so by running The Vast In The Dark more in the way that it had been intended by the author. To do so we would need a rules-lite OSR-adjacent sort of thing, and selected grimdark rules-lite darling, Mörk Borg. The combination was a near-perfect amount of material for a half-dozen sessions. No grand campaign, but far more than a one-shot. Enough to soak in the atmosphere and to flesh out some character, but not enough to have to really work for it.
But wait.
Here I shall explain the conjunction. The Vast In The Dark and Mörk Borg are both on Bundle Of Holding. Right now! You can go and buy them! You should! I mean, you don’t even need to buy Mörk Borg because the Bare Bones edition is enough to do what we did here, and free, but that’s still a lot of extra stuff for low, low prices. It’s a fantastic deal, and it almost looks like I planned it to coincide with this. But it was, in actual fact, a pure fluke of internet.
Anyway! Yes. Just in case you require additional convincing, I shall tell you a little more about our campaign.
The Vast In The Dark is a zine about a sort of hell-dimension. It’s dark, obviously, and an ash-waste desert spreads out in all directions. This infinite plane is lit only by an ambient light a little like that of the moon, although no moon is visible. Indeed, the sky is pitch black, and rumbles ominously, as if made up of distant gargantuan machines. The ash wastes are punctuated by the ruins of mega-structures, once dwelt-in by some unknown race of humanoids, and jet-black monoliths, which rise up into dark in the most dramatic manner possible.
It’s not just this darkscape of psychotic geography that awaits, however, there is also a vibe which is soul-gnawingly Grim. Monsters here are given names from myth - ogre, cyclops, minotaur - but they are all part of a nightmarish amalgam of mutated quasi-undead hybridisation known as The Crawl.
Worse, the Vast eats memory. You are being consumed by it, and when you forget who you once were in the other world, you are lost to it.
Mechanics like these meant that we did have to adapt Mörk Borg a little to make it fit. We had to have a new field on our sheets to represent the erosion of memories, and we elected to have the number of lines on the sheet be the number of slots in our inventory. The Vast itself suggests using multiple lines and fractions of lines, depending on the size of objects, but that all started to get a bit much.
All that said, the combination of the setting and the system seemed to work pretty well. Abilities and spells that Vast suggests work alongside those from the other system without ever feeling out of step. Mörk Borg creates fucked up little guys with a range of weird abilities, while giving you a d20 system with the simplest of procedures to fight and stat-test in moments of jeopardy. All very straightforward.
As a GM I had a couple of other considerations to make sure we did not stumble.
One was that Mörk Borg meant that our protagonists were quite fragile. There was a fair chance they would die (they haven’t yet!), and so I needed backups in case that happened. The backstory, therefore, was that they were part of a gang of tomb robbers in the Mörk Borg world, and by implication other members of the gang had also woken up half-buried the ash-dunes of The Vast. That way I could have other fucked up little guys cross their path if someone was decapitated, and still have a coherent path to the end of our short campaign.
Another was that The Vast’s navigation system is pretty great, with items that assist with navigation building up your dice roll for when you need to move between hexes. This meant that I had to make sure that the players had something in their inventory that would assist for when they were weren’t just exploring blindly, and I dropped at least one useful object in their path to make sure that this system worked in a way that entailed risk, but also made use of what was a pretty evocative bit of procedure. The players themselves leaned into this and, when they did get a chance to build on their navigation inventories in a well-equipped settlement, much silver was invested in making sure they not only had food, but spyglasses, lantern oil, compasses of lodestone -- ways to ensure they ended up in the intended hex on the next travel phase.
Finally, the random lookup-table nature of the hex-crawl itself meant that we were going to have to deal with whatever The Vast disgorged and ride that wherever it went. That is great, and I certainly leaned into the chaos, but I also wanted to make sure that I got to play with things that the Zine provided. We had to explore hyperstructure ruins, for example. We had to have the Vast change our characters, gifting them with weird quirks, abilities, and magical talents. There are also a selection of factions and NPCs which are beautifully conjured and give the setting a flavour that I really wanted the players to spend some time with.
This didn’t take long to materialise: while there was some time spent in the horrid wilderness, facing survival conditions that are one part psychic and one part environmental, the dice quickly threw up a settlement, and I was able to introduce factions (an band of Vast-serving armoured Might-Makes-Right types) and NPCs (Sindr, a “pyromancer”, whose fiery magics are extremely useful in The Vast, and potent against the horrors of The Crawl.) Setting the pyromancers and the Vast-fascists in a struggle immediately gave a sense of tension between the human portions of the setting and I was able to kick those back across the generated path of the hex-crawl as the adventure proceeded. To be clear, it’s absolutely not necessary to do this, but The Vast In The Dark works particularly well as one of those toolkit/toybox type open-ended scenarios, and so it was a delight to get those out and find out how the players would interact with them.
Finally, one of the mantras of the zine is that there is no way out of the Vast, and that it is endless. It is an infinite plane beneath a black, rumbling sky, and all who wander will one day be lost to it. So of course I had characters parrot this line, and then imply that actually, there is a way out, if only they can find it. Of course there is. But will our protagonists survive that long? Will they want to escape, in the end, or will they already have been lost?
It’s all good stuff. We had some highly atmospheric dungeon crawling and, in the spirit of “if you are rolling, you are losing” we had some energetic solutions to perils which did not have to lead to deadly combat across the half dozen sessions we will have ended up playing.
But what will happen next? What are they heading for in the final session? Even I don’t really know, since we’ve been relying on the book generating happenings for us. I have some ideas of what the ending might look like, but I don’t want to push anything too far. After all, the hex-crawl is the realm of the look-up table. I am simply its horrid caretaker.
The Vast In The Dark is one of my favourite zines. Not just because it’s a fantastically atmospheric piece with fantastic writing and art, but also because this is basically the perfect scaffolding for how I improvise campaigns. Give me just enough material to drop something weird, interesting, or frightening into every scene, and the GMing arrives like some higher being is dictating it. It’s rare that it arrives this effortlessly.
A final note: I have indulged in these hybridsations before, and not always successfully. However, The Vast and Mörk Borg both have an absolutely heap of stuff going for them, and it’s rare that I find myself adapting both zines and rule systems in a way where they seem primed to compliment each other. If you want to follow the same path then, well, as mentioned, there’s the current Bundle(s) of Holding. And there’s plenty more in those bundles besides. Hell, I am looking at using another one of these zines in much the same way once we wrap up. It probably won’t be quite as Dark. But it might be just as Mörk.
A little translation joke there, for you.
Sorry.
x
Okay okay, I'll pick the bundle up! Jeeeez!