There's Gold in them there Teeth!
This is the TEETH newsletter, a more-regular-than-it-was-last-year transmission about our adventures in the very secret land of Tabletop Roleplaying-Games. We have published a whole series of our own TTRPGs now! Please check them out. Night Of the Hogmen is Pay What You Want if you'd like to check out our style for a price of your choosing. More games are coming! And we shall also play many others, and then report on those experiences right here. There's a lot going on. There's even a Discord server. Wonders will never cease.
This newsletter is written and compiled by persistent barnacle Jim Rossignol and luminous anemone Marsh Davies.
Hello, you. But also: incoming games off the starboard bow!
Links!
Thoughts on our ongoing campaigns.
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Hello, you.
What is that, hoving over the horizon? Could it be some sort of nautical adventure? By George, it could!
We've got a busy 2024 planned. Multiple projects are in the works, a couple of which are closing in on public release as Pay-What-You-Want downloads through teethrpg.itch.io. One of these will be REAVER, a standalone Forged In The Dark ruleset for high-seas chicanery that can be plugged into your other roleplaying games to provide a framework for the kinds of travel, combat and aquatic tragedy for which the Age of Sail was famed. Need rules for sailboats? We're aiming to provide that. It'll come with lightweight rules for land, too, based on TEETH-related Forged in the Dark rules, and likely some prompts for possible scenarios—but is otherwise setting agnostic.
We want to see how REAVER holds up on the roiling ocean of a wide release, so if you are interested in playtesting it and providing feedback, do get in touch. Better yet, drop by our Discord server, and let us know. We may make an early version available to interested parties in the coming weeks.
The insights we glean from your keen intelligence will help us hone the ruleset into the basis of our big project for 2024, set once again within a cursed corner of the 18th century. GOLD TEETH will be a crowdfunded book of a comparable size and quality to our previous Kickstarted effort, building on REAVER, and providing a setting every bit as grotesque and troubling as the original TEETH, though this time much further from the shores of England itself. Expect supernatural piratical peril, colonial conspiracies, rebellion, revolution, and all the buckles you can swash!
And also expect more on our other upcoming releases in future newsletters.
That's a lot to digest. We'll give you a moment.
-Marsh & Jim
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LINKS!
This book is about megastructures is so our jam that I might explode, covering everything in… jam. It’s not an RPG sourcebook, no, but it sure as hell could and should be used as one. My ongoing read through Banks’ Culture books has me very much in mind of the very large things that might be possible, and this is an astounding encyclopaedia of those distant possibilities: “It contains everything from orbiting space habitats to solar system spanning stellar engineering projects. Each of the 40 structures in the encyclopaedia includes a scientific explanation, followed by paintings and diagrams that bring the concept to life.” What if— what if! What if I did a Culture-like space campaign feature these structures? No, Rossignol, no! You have enough to be getting on with for the next decade! Rein in your creative impulses like the untameable space worms they are!
Turtle Hat (of RPG Talk and Mountain Home fame) has created a Trophy Dark incursion called The Narrow Passage.
Also quite into Durf! You’ve probably had your fill of OSR rulesets lately, but this is a particularly lovely one.
There’s a few days left on the Kickstarter for Two-Hand Path, with a nod to Riley for bringing this to our attention! “Level-up by drawing rings, bracelets, tattoos, and scars right on your character's hands. This is your entire character sheet, and everyone's sheet ends up unique.” Very handy.
We must acknowledge the contribution of obscure Youtuber Quintin Smith to this set of links, as he pointed us over to this article about Petit Marronage on Rascal News. It’s a game about the fate of the Great Dismal Swamp Maroons, who were the people who inhabited the ominously named swamp region having escaped enslavement in Virginia and North Carolina in the 18th century, a period and topic that is quite significant to us.
This isn’t RPG related in any way, but it delights us enough to share: giant redwoods are in the news this week because of how successful they have been in the UK. There are now more of these giant trees in the UK than in California, thanks to half a million having been planted since the Victorians began doing so in the 19th century. What I like most about the giant tree facts which accompany this is that they can live for over 3000 years (the oldest one in California could be 3200 years old!) so if you planted one this year, it could still be around in 5024. What I am saying is that we should, as a nation, hell, as a global civilsation, get even more into giant redwood planting. Yes! Let us cast down the billionaires and build new forests of enormous trees that live for thousands of years! Let the people of the future look back on us and sing our names: praise the tree people! Praise those who buried the tyrants beneath the roots of giants! They planted a forest that spanned the millenia!
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Some Thoughts On Current Campaigns, part 1: B-b-back to Blades In The Dark.
A few folks have mentioned that they'd be interested in hearing a bit more about the ongoing campaigns we've been playing. I am going to do a bit of that, but what follows is more of a motivational muse than a battle report. Why have we done this? What have we learned?
We previously finished a short homebrew Mothership campaign about unexpected passengers and weirdo-religious space eels, which I will talk about another time because I want to coincide that commentary with the arrival of the box set, which seeeeeems to be pending, given the ecstatic-sounding emails we've been getting from the creators? Space-fingers crossed for that.
I am also playing in a Conan 2D20 campaign run by Failbetter Games’ Chris Gardiner, which is great fun, and quite different to what we would normally indulge in. In this case I am going to wait until that's done before trying to be articulate and in any way analytical or otherwise thinky about it. It’s a really interesting system and one that I definitely didn’t quite get my head around in this campaign! But anyway, that's all for another time.
Which leaves us with the current Blades In The Dark campaign, the third with my regular group. With so much out there, why did we choose to go back again? The RPGs are literally piling up on my desk, and each one of them demanding attention. Eat the Reich! Stonetop! Deathmatch Island! To exclaim but a few. Yet there are reasons. Good, wholesome reasons, for why we went back. Partly it is because we are hopeless fanboys of Harper’s work, but primarily we were struck by commentary about the game from the past couple of years since we played it and wanted to run a game which explored these thoughts a little.
The thoughts were basically this: we never really played Blades In The Dark as it was meant to be played. This time, we thought, we’d get it right.
The parameters for this new campaign are as follows: I don’t get to prepare anything in advance. If I am not sat at the table, GMing, then there’s nowt to be done. Where possible, we roll stuff up from the tables in the book, and otherwise improvise based on what the players want to achieve. The motor for the campaign is the faction part of the Blades book, with advancement of the crew being the primary focus of everything we are doing. The crew wants power and reputation, nothing else matters. We’re also making the crew Shadows (thieves and spies). This is hugely important because, it has been argued by better folks than us, the Shadows as a crew are the most faithful interpretation of the game’s themes. And yet, we have never played as Shadows! We rarely even have a lurk on the team. Previous campaigns were Smugglers and Hawkers. Hawkers was particularly tricky to tease a campaign out of, and they ended up straddling a messy not-really-magic-item pawn shop situation which left them behaving partly as Shadows (stealing magic items to sell), partly as Assassins (killing people over magic stuff to sell), and partly as Smugglers (getting magic stuff to a location to sell it), and rarely, really, the Hawkers or magic-shop owners they were intending to be. Then things went crazy, they ended up aboard a Leviathan Hunting vessel, and the campaign got super weird.
But anyway! This time we are doing the most faithful interpretation of the game we can manage, and the main characters are a Slide, a Spider, and a Lurk. No obvious killers here, either: they want to sneak and manipulate, and avoid death.
Death. Or more accurately killing. That’s something we played fairly fast and loose with on previous campaigns. One of the core bits of consequence-implying lore in the game are that bells ring when someone dies, the crows from the tower head out to find the body, and the Spirit Wardens turn up to incinerate corpses to avoid ghost-happenings. In previous campaigns we sort of used this, but actually killings and death were far less prescriptively dealt with than they should have been. Not this time.
The motivation for all this is that what we really want to get to grips with as deeply as possible are the meta-systems of the game: the faction system, primarily, as a driver for action, as well as the way Heat and Entanglements interlock with that, and how Downtime actions — everything that isn’t the action of the score — bind together to produce a game that is less a classical RPG campaign, and more a highly proceduralised engine for emergent chaos.
We rolled up the first score, partly out of the book and partly invented out of the players’ contacts, and it was a score that was far over the heads of our team: they had to break into the Spirit Wardens’ crematorium and steal a body before it was destroyed. So quick to hit that Spirit Warden death theme! This they did successfully, and perhaps rather too easily, but the chaos and vastly higher tier of the faction they were acting against generated a huge amount of Heat immediately, and keeping that in check (or choosing to just let it rise) is clearly going to be one of the central decisions of the campaign from the very outset. They managed to not kill anyone, but there were plenty of other complications that they are now going to be dealing with, most importantly upsetting the Spirit Wardens and pleasing the Gondoliers. The numbers on that faction sheet were always a part of our campaign, but this time they're a focus and a totem.
By the completion of the second score (stealing freakshow animals from The Menagerie at the Docks to undermine another crew and being sabotaged by a disturbingly-powerful ghost they had met in the previous score) we were already locked into the demands of the downtime systems. One of the characters had been knocked out by stress-overload and others had been so stressed out that they'll need to use multiple downtime actions to manage their situation. Not only that but they had previously committed to a long term project that would craft a magic masks to better hide the identities of the crew. Where were the actions going to come from to make that happen? We could soon see that house-keeping phase of managing consequences is going to have to be neglected at some point, and then the game’s entanglements will start to overwhelm our ambitious little gang.
What is most interesting about all this, for me — and I have noted this in discussions of other games, such as Trophy Gold, but it’s really brought me back to the thought with this campaign — is the extent to which downtime activities, rather than action sequences, end up powering the TTRPGs we play. Am I more interested in what our heroes do to mitigate the fallout of their actions? Are these campfire moments and organisational intermissions what makes these superheroes human? Are they the equivalent of the “filler” episodes of old TV shows (when TV shows had filler episodes)? Or are they the core story with the action sequences making up the fluff?
Don't take me too literally: the flowering event of the game is still the action sequences of Blades, with flashbacks and hard-negotiated desperate actions hinging on cobbled-together dice pools for might-just-work last-ditch cinematic leaps of faith. Of course it is. But I wonder whether the substrate it grows in matters more to me now, as we play and design more of these kinds of games than ever before. I certainly move forward with an eye to that stuff, and an awareness that, while Blades’ straight-to-the-action philosophy is what (rightly) what has commanded attentions, there’s much more going on, and the subtle, procedural, and interlocking nature of that design is actually the part which I am most intrigued to emulate, evolve and, well, just to play with as a GM.
A friend has suggested they might write up an alternative Heat system for the game, which as a more general proposition is something that sparks my interest. What if we didn't change the setting, or the actions, or the playbooks. What if the modding was in Downtime? Where could we take it? What would it generate when we sat down at the table?
We did a fair amount of this in the TEETH games, to be sure, and that has certainly sharpened my thinking on the topic. Yet I still feel like I need to learn from the master. This time we're playing Blades so that I can immerse, and whet a creative knife on this stuff. Somewhere in those dice rolls and notes scribbled on a playbook, the next thing is growing.
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More soon! x
Oh, I am not actually sure what we’re talking about next time! Surely exciting mysteries await!