Wave Your Teeth At Us
This is the TEETH newsletter, a regularly irregular transmission about our adventures in the very secret land of Tabletop Roleplaying-Games. We have published a whole series of our own TTRPGs now! More games are coming soon! And we shall play many others, and then report on those experiences right here, too.
This newsletter is written and compiled by warty retainer, Jim Rossignol, and stalwart overseer, Marsh Davies. And hey, BUY OUR BOOK.
Hello, you.
Links!
Other Things
Hello, you.
As we mentioned previously, we enjoy biting off as much as we can chew and, sometimes, even more than that. It is with this philosophy of overloaded mouths that we approach the next batch of TTRPG things. We have already mentioned that we’re working on Occult Seagoers, and so there are pirates in your future, and even in your present, if you choose to check out the Reaver rules. But did you know there will also be jesters?
Yes, yes. Jesters. Gleemen. Our second project is now rapidly taking shape, and this zine-length piece will be getting medieval across a number vectors and delivering us into a world of TEETH things happening in an even earlier century than we previous tackled. We think you’re going to take particular delight in this one!
Project Three is also emerging from the bog of contemplation and design, so more on that in the future!
See? I said we bite off a lot. Don’t worry, we will take our time with the chewing part. All shall be swallowed and, ultimately, digested.
Also, you know you can come and lurk silently over on the Teeth Discord, don’t you? Better yet, wave your teeth at us, and say howdy.
M & J x
LINKS!
Thing Of The Week is the arrival of Inevitable here at Teeth Towers. It’s a VERY large book, taller than anything else in our library and extremely handsome, like an actual Cowboy Knight, as you can see here. It’s what’s on the pages that truly charmed us, however, with a challenge dice pool system that lends itself to narrative and character, and escalating quest system that leads to quite thematically coherent showdowns. It’s absolutely packed with superb writing and inventive worlding. There aren’t physical copies available, currently, but I’d keep an eye out for some in your near future. It also has TWO ribbons, which makes me quite weak at the knees.
The SECOND Thing Of The Week is the next update of science-fantasy The Electrum Archive, which is just inexcusably lovely. I missed the Kickstarter, but leapt to grab the PDF anyway, with no regrets. Fantastic illustrations, exquisite writing and design. Issue One is over here.
RRD’s monster-duelling RPG Hollows is blasting through their stretch goals like a demonic locomotive. You should consider it.
What did you make of Quinns’ Vaesen review? It certainly sparked an eddy of feelings in the overall flow of TEETH thought, but more on that another time!
We’re excited about the reprint of Warpland.
Indie Game Reading Club did a read of Deathmatch Island! It’s worth a nose, if you’re interested in that sort of thing. “What struck me at the end of our season was how fourth-wall-breaking the experience is. The “Win or Break?” form is filled out by the players. The trust-building checklist is held by the players. The players can come back to DMI for another season fully informed as to what their previous characters ran into in previous runs. Over and over, the game plays hard with the player/character divide. This might lead to the fun kind of bleedy for your table – or it might be the bad kid, given how aggressively PvP the game is.”
No-Tell Motel is a fun single player muder-mystery RPG! “Every night at the Stellar Motel is a menagerie of the human condition, and you watch it all from your vantage point behind a desk and some plexiglass. Last night was different: someone was murdered, and no one seems much interested in finding out who did it or why.”
The Moral Economy of The Shire talks about Sam Gamgee’s labor-providing role in the capitalist idealism of Lord Of The Rings: “The Gamgees are likely tenants of the Baggins, or at least dependent on them for access to agricultural capital. They likely send much of their income up to Bag End in rent, and provide services, as gardeners, batmen, valets, traveling companions, etc. They also provide support, in a social and civic sense, as we see. If Frodo had gone to the Free Fair to run for Mayor, the Gamgees and other tenants would have voted for him, and would have accompanied him in public, to demonstrate his status and prestige.”
Other Things!
This month has been a sort of piecemeal one with many things happening at once and so I wanted to reflect that in the piecemeal nature of the final third of the newsletter.
First up, I have had my head back in the sheer ‘90s buffoonery of my long lost Rifts collection, miraculously returned to me unscathed by a childhood friend. I was going to list further highlights, but that can wait for a future instalment and instead I will share with you this incredible illustration of a psychic UFO-pilot alien.
Yep, that’s what they went with. What I loved about Rifts as a kid -- that it just threw every fucking thing in there -- is one of the things that makes it seem most ludicrous now. The alien depicted here is one from a series of “Dimension Books”, which were sourcebooks detailing the other dimensions that Rifts’ post-apocalypse Earth of Mad Max-with-wizards was connected to. Consequently these dimensions were barely relevant to the original setting at all, and this one, Dimension Book Three, was about distant galactic empires which were effectively two infinity hops away from Earth, but a chance for the Rifts writers to produce material about space wizard empires and starship ninjas, and for Palladium to sell another book to me, Jim Rossignol, via the now-defunct RPG books shop on Canterbury high street. Well done, Siembieda. You win again.
I’ll write more about this later, but the sheer breadth of Rifts still makes it a fascinating resource (Magic bio-borgs? Evil robots that are good, actually?) even while much of what is in there is a little long in the tooth. See what I did there? One of those clever writer tricks, I’m sure.
But let us talk, albeit briefly, about games that we are actually playing (although not Actually Playing, for we are too shy for that!) For our regular group has we’ve moved to a slightly less frequent schedule for the Blades campaign, this time to accommodate a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay session, run online by Comrade Wiltshire. I know it’s impossible to keep the sheer vastness and variety of any given fictional universe in one brain at one time, but it always wrongfoots me when I stumble over the sheer wealth of materials available to fantasy RPGs. Unlike Rifts, which was never very good at maps, the VTT which we are using for Warhammer (Foundry? A locally-hosted, one-off payment VTT, seems like a neat solution to me! Maybe more on that another time) is packed with maps, including a vast hand-drawn version of the Old World Empire which I can’t find a version of online to post here, but let me tell you it is fucking incredible, and how we gasped, how we zoomed in.
We’re now half-way through the classic setting “A Rough Night At The Three Feathers”, with potentially more classic Warhammer role-playing in our future. We already got pick-pocketed and learned how many shillings make up a gold piece! The possibilities of RPGs are infinite.
Anyway, TEETH was at UKGE as part of the Soulmuppet stand! Did you pick up a copy? Let us know! You can still get a copy via computer shopping.
Finally, you aren’t likely to have missed me hooting on about MILESHIPS, but you might have missed us answering questions about whether there will be a Mileships RPG set in McQue’s universe. The answer is: possibly, even probably, it’s something we are actively looking at! But the definitive answer won’t be until next year. McQue’s art book is very much a world-build, but the focus is on his art and vision of years of painting, rather than adapting it to be lore for any RPG we might have in mind. Once we have the art book done and dusted, we’ll look at adaptation. Ideas are already making themselves known to me. We’ll let you know when there’s something more concrete to be said. You can still order Mileships! We’re leaving the pre-orders page up until we finalise for printing, which won’t be for a few months yet.
More soon! x