Trying To Find Redemption Before The Sea Claims You
Welcome, favoured adventure-folk, to the TEETH newsletter! This is a (sometimes) weekly transmission about our explorations in the very secret land of Tabletop Roleplaying-Games.
What appears within this letter is written and compiled by veteran game critic and designer, Jim Rossignol, and former Mojang alumni and famed illustrator, Marsh Davies. Why not come and join us over on the TEETH Discord! Free tooth emojis for everyone!
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Well that was a loooong week. Yes, it’s been a while since the last newsletter thanks to Jim and Marsh being up against a mountain of work and real-life stuff. This means SO much has happened in the meantime! Let’s get into it.
Thing That Happened: We’re nominated in the Best Free Game category at the ENNIEs! This is for our very fine zine, FALSE KINGDOM, the PDF version of which you can pick up here. FALSE KINGDOM is still in the TEETH setting, but stepping back six centuries into early medieval times, a scenario in which you take on the role of deranged courtiers attempting to address the whims of a ludicrous, self-declared monarch. It has our usual fantastically horrible writing in it and some of what I think is our most interesting design: you can best survive the tyrannical reign of the False King by becoming their favourite, doing great deeds on their behalf (or pretending you did them), and then narrating your account at court in a way which flatters you and besmirches your fellow sycophants. However, time is running out for you and the pretender to the crown you serve: the real king is on his way, and will definitely NOT be happy when he gets there. Timing your betrayals is everything!
Anyway, it's free, or at least Pay What You Want, so we'd be delighted if you'd check it out and, importantly, throw a vote our way when the ENNIEs permit you to do so. You could also voluntarily pay a couple of bucks for it, if you wanted: a noble way for you to support the work we do, this newsletter, and so on and so forth.
The Other Thing That Has Been Happening For Months: Obviously, we’ve been making the book! GOLD TEETH is coming, and actually a version of it will be here relatively soon, as we pull together a Beta version of the game. This will be rolling out to all backers in short order, and then later getting a general public release. What does it contain? Well, the current version of the rules, and juuuust enough world for you to run a game or three.
Here’s a thing we should get straight. Our games are based on Forged In The Dark, but this doesn't mean we've always steered close to that ruleset. With GOLD TEETH, we diverge even further. Core mechanics are stripped down and rebuilt to suit our purposes, while entirely new structures are hammered into the gaps. Blades is one of the finest pieces of design and rules-writing available, and these are broad shoulders on which we stand, but ultimately we have cobbled together our own thing: at times more fluid and open, at other times more mechanical. We expect that GMs will, as always, adapt it further to suit their own style, too, leaning into its opportunities for free play, or relying more on the prescriptions of structure as they desire. We have already talked about the fact that Stress is a very different beast in GOLD TEETH than it is in either TEETH or the Forged in the Dark games from which we have taken it. Here we replace it entirely with a shared pool of Ship’s Luck, which can be spent and regained in play - a dynamic, ever-fluctuating currency that represents not just the erratic winds of fortune but also the self-reinforcing power of the crew's superstitious beliefs. Making it a single pool for all players has been fantastically effective at emphasising that players are a crew, and on whose interdependence the entire enterprise rests. It's one of the key things we want your feedback on in the Beta. We’re hoping you will dig it, but also get into stress-testing that economy. It’s been a hell of a design task to balance it all!
The playtest campaign has already given us a huge amount of feedback and allowed us to change things accordingly. One such aspect is the Pirate’s Curse. This is our timer for the campaign: the curse is creeping ever onwards, changing you into something monstrous. Getting ahead of this means pursuing your agenda and trying to find redemption before the sea claims you. We’ve tuned the pacing of this, but also toyed with the sorts of conditions your character develops as time goes on. Some have narrative and role-playing implications, others are mechanical, giving you new powers and abilities. It creates some really chaotic and extreme combinations that are by turns enormously silly and deeply grim - which is just how we like it.
Of course the really big system in the game, one that presented us with the most challenges and opportunities, was ship combat. As we’ve discussed elsewhere, this is a phase change that moves you from playing individual characters to representing the crew of a ship in aggregate. Players take on control of different stations, each with their own responsibilities and abilities, all able to take actions to influence how things play out. But your roles here represent not just the things that the ship can do, but also the people that do them: the GM turns to the Long Guns not just when they are called upon to fire cannon, but when anything affects the crew there. What is their mood? How do they react to the listing of the ship as they try to steady their aim? Consequences for partial success or outright failure ricochet among the stations: a fumbled change of course causes a great wave to crash through the gun ports, prompting reactive rolls from those below decks. In this way, everyone becomes a part of the living ship, working as one to defeat terrible weather, creatures of the deep or colonial foes. Or, as in one of our playtests, accidentally blasting a neutral ship clean out of the water, killing everyone and delivering its valuable cargo straight to the depths. Cue every jack aboard our vessel whistling innocently as we sail right along…
The world stuff too has been intriguing to write, and a bigger challenge to understand than the more familiar locations and history of England itself. The diversity and complexity of the 18th century Caribbean is enormous, and there is only so much detail we can convey in our book, and only so many stories we can represent. Our own version of the place creates a new, fictional archipelago - just as TEETH carved out a new vale in the north of England - and loosely follows the same approach in dividing up and threading together locations, but with the added complication that some opportunities must be investigated on land, as your pirate personas, and others at sea, as the ship and crew.
There is much still to finalise. How do the phases hand over to each other? Is each agenda well-served by the content and equally rewarding? Precisely what can you do “at anchor” (our downtime activities) since this could be in a harbour, with all the amenities of a port town, or just in some quiet bay near a deserted island. There are new rules for all this.
My favourite new rule might be that for earning XP by inventing ludicrous nautical jargon. “If that sets your pig-lines to rattle, you might well consider peeling degs and spanking your bobber all the way back to port.”
That and the Golden Ape.
More (and GOLD TEETH beta) soon.
Marsh & Jim
LINKS!
THING OF THE WEEK IS THAT: Wyrd Science has relaunched its website and stuff. It’s super cool! There is a new Volume of the magazines coming soon, too, as we understand it, and those you absolutely should be getting hold of and reading adoringly, feeling the smoothness of printed material against your soft hands. More on this in future newsletters!
Mythic Bastionland continues to make monumental waves. Jim and Kieron had a skim of it, but Quinns is miles ahead with a big old video review. He’s quite good! Go join his Patreon so we keep getting this stuff. The true genius is Bastionland’s Chris Macdowell, of course, and he’s not hanging around. Take a look at this video of his mech game. But also this deep dive on Mythic Bastionland itself.
Also on Old Men we did a big write-up of our lovely Conan campaign.
Ex Tenebris, a grimdark space mystery game by veteran cleverfolk Josh Fox and Beccy Annison, which we take to be a sort of 40k Inquisition without the 40k, looks enticing indeed. The Kickstarter is Soon.
The talented David Blandy wrote an intro to making your own Solo RPG.
Research brought us to the Cephalophore: “A cephalophore (from the Greek for 'head-carrier') is a saint who is generally depicted carrying their severed head. In Christian art, this was usually meant to signify that the subject in question had been martyred by beheading. Depicting the requisite halo in this circumstance offers a unique challenge for the artist: some put the halo where the head used to be, and others have the saint carrying the halo along with the head.” Pretty sure this is a Mork Borg character class.
Tremendous 1970s FitD space vibes in Forged In The Sun.
This thread on Bishop Bernward of Hildesheim’s candlesticks is better than any thread on candlesticks we have ever read.
Love you! x