Where Do You Get Your Ideas From: Stalker, The Zone, Eeriness Between Hedgerows
Hello there! 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? Huh, why not? Come on. We won’t bite.
This week:
Hello you.
Links!
Where do you get your ideas from, Mr Rossignol? Oh, just this one place.
Hello, you.
It’s been a busy few weeks, as you can probably tell from the slow turnaround on this latest transmission. We’ve been cracking on with the playtesting and production of GOLD TEETH (late pedges still open!) where we’ve been having a very merry campaign-starting adventure scenario, and testing some of our sea-going and downtime rules, while creating and destroying parrots with our sea magic. (In the game.)
Here’s some of Marsh’s latest fantastic illustrations, in case you missed them over on the Kickstarter updates page. We’ll get more GOLD TEETH material live for you soon, so keep (but don’t put) an eye out!
We also went to Dragonmeet! And we didn’t spend too much money, which was a relief, and met some lovely folks, which was cheering, and watched Gillen, Howitt and friends do a Heart game live, which was hilarious and ludicrous. We look forward to more of that in the future.
The next newsletter will likely be after the holidays, as we're both undertaking travels and work projects for the duration. If you want to come and chat over on the Discord that would be super. There is an active Looking For Group channel there, with GM and Foundry-finesser Snowkeep organising games right now. If you want to do the same, or jump into a game yourself, then please swing by!
Oh and we’re on super-good podcast Yes, Indie’d this week, talking about TEETH and grotesquery, real and imagined! Check it out.
Finally, computer game STALKER 2 came out, which triggered Rossignol into writing about STALKER. Again. It happens.
-Marsh & Jim
LINKS!
I forgot where I found this, but it was probably on Bluesky because hey, that’s the place now. Join it and come and find us! Anyway, Squashbuckler was worth the entry fee. “You are a blade-wielding garden vegetable. Sworn to serve no lord and no country, you roam the earth seeking one goal: the defeat of all vampires.”
The Lancer Problem. “More people want to play Lancer than want to run Lancer.” Hoo-boy.
The Time We Have is just an brilliant idea for a game. “A two-player storytelling card game played on opposite sides of a closed door. A TTRPG about brothers in the zombie apocalypse and the final days before one of them turns.” You slide cards under the door! One of you turns into a zombie! Amazing.
Quintin Smith is doing his best. The mystery of the identity of skydiving thief DB Cooper might finally have been solved? This is one of the most interesting crimes ever to have gone unresolved, and even has its own annual convention in Seattle. (The crime concept itself also strikes me as a one-page RPG setup or limited loop videogame.)
Research into the structure of walls this week reveals that “the phrase "crinkle crankle" is an ablaut reduplication.” Essential linguistic and engineering facts, we’re sure you’ll agree.
Where do you get your ideas from, Mr Rossignol? Oh, just this one place.
I break through a chain-link fence, into a landscape reclaimed by nature and quarantined from humanity. Swallowing my anxiety, I set out as twilight descends. The bark of a lone dog echoes across the dead trees and rolling hills. Somewhere something rumbles. Distant thunder?Something worse? Ahead of me are shattered ruins, their rusting bones poking through the sky-blasted concrete. I glimpse a distortion and feel a flicker of static upon my skin. The geiger-counter whirs and clicks. I approach with dread, feeling a terrible sense of foreboding and trepidation. And there among the winter-burned weeds something pulses and throbs. It glistens in the half light. It’s… it’s an idea for a book! Or a videogame! Or… Gingerly I pick it up. With any luck, I can sell this one on the black market and pay for food for my children. If I can get past the guards. Past the Cordon…
Yes. The landscape I most often find myself wandering in, creatively, abstractly, intellectually, although not yet literally (that would be the English South West) is that of The Zone Of Alienation. It runs through my work like a heavy seam of radioactive inspiration. It seeps into everything. And it’s fair to say that between the eeriness of the English countryside, and the overwhelming gravitational pull of the Zone’s anomalousness, there’s a through line in my work that could easily be identified as an ongoing project. If only someone was available to conduct such a survey…
Regular readers might note, perhaps with some distress, that I often come back to JG Ballard telling ID Magazine that “my advice to anybody in any field is to be faithful to your obsessions. Identify them and be faithful to them, let them guide you like a sleepwalker.” So often do I return this saying, in fact, that I feel like quoting that advice is one of those obsessions. I am resolutely faithful to it. But I’ve also long done what Old JG suggested and identified The Zone as one of those obsessions. Part of the job he’s setting out, I believe, is not to be naive or incurious about our influences. What is it about them that offers such a pull? Why do they speak to us particularly? How is it that we make use of their anomalous materials?
I can make little claim on being esoteric or original in such matters. I am far from the only person to have been captured by the Zone’s ideas, to the point where there are fifty years worth of books, tabletop games, movies, and even Stalker events held in a number of countries (Ukraine primarily among them). There have been serious works written about the movie, and multiple documentaries made about the real-world exclusion zone. And then there have been games. There is even an RPG which I have owned for years, and yet somehow never brought to the table.
Like poisonous sediment in a slow moving river, it has built up in the Rossignol creative psyche over years. Out of temporal order: there was Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel, which I read once before knowing STALKER the game, and once after, interpreting and experiencing it as effectively two different books as a result. Then there is the post-industrial pastoralist capriccio aesthetic and weird poetry of the movie by Andrei Tarkovsky, in which little happens, and which was shot twice in environments that went on to kill some of its own crew. Not least by any means (although by some degree of removal, my being an Englishman) there were the socio-political events which led to the destruction of the Soviet Union and the meltdown of the reactor at Chornobyl.
And then, critical to to my late-00s mentality, a series of Ukrainian videogames of the most ambitious kind.
I have occasionally been overwhelmed by the extent by which I have been able to make these influences/obsessions meet with other genres and other tropes that I have picked up along the way. Many of the Rossignol things meet and touch palms with the idea of The Zone: the abandoned computer-planet of Tölva, the robot-blasted hedgerows of Sir, You Are Being Hunted, and — relevantly for this newsletter — the 18th century military cordon of a magically contaminated stretch of the British countryside in the tabletop RPG, TEETH. They all take on some motif of that fiction, and fold it into their proposition. There are clear and repeating themes. Connected ideas. Evolutions, retargets, improvisations, and experiments. And I am not remotely done with the idea of The Zone.
I’ll try to draw that line through some of that.
The primary attribute of the zone is spatial. It’s in the name. A zone. The Zone. “A stretch of land having a particular characteristic or quality.” It is in part the idea of the Zone as a pocket within reality, having qualities distinct from the world outside, that makes it so useful and so creatively fertile.
At its simplest, the idea of protagonists in a fiction going into a hostile space from which they need to fetch something is a fantastic and fundamental one for games. It is the very base of the pyramid in terms of the structure of a quest. It works within the parameters of what games often need: distinct boundaries, a possibility space for perilous things to happen, and an overriding goal. More thrillingly, you’re trapped in here with something that is dangerous and you must survive, but also you need to go on, and to explore as you do so, to bring back a thing, or to keep going to the heart of it, and to face revelation.
The specific concept of the Zone Of Alienation is of a place that is different to elsewhere because it has been transformed. It becomes a bubble of difference. Usually it has suffered to have had the parameters of reality shifted in some way that is toxic by virtue of its alienness. It’s this reconfiguration that thrills me personally. You can see it at work in Sir, You are Being Hunted with the player character crossing over into a British landscape that lies in ruins. And you can see it in TEETH, where a familiar tale of 18th century landed corruption becomes corruption of another dimension entirely.
But what comes before this, and woven all through this, is the aesthetic: the vibe. It is this that people will pick out about the STALKER games before anything else. The tone of how the world is depicted is the element of the Zone that people respond to most immediately. And while the STALKER games and Tarkovsky’s movie of the same name both rely on the same post-Soviet industrial landscape, and Chornobyl particularly, there is nothing that ties this vibe to that landscape exclusively. In Roadside Picnic the |one is a tract of Canada exposed to extra-terrestrial contact. In Annihilation it is a southern American swampland. In TEETH it is Northern England.
Dereliction and decay of man-made structures and the return of nature are a given, but these qualities appear in all manner of post-apocalyptic fiction. There’s something distinct and uncanny about how the Zone presents that particular visual theme. Consider that Fallout and Stalker might use similar palettes, textures, locations, and even notions of contamination and radiation, but there is not much similar about the tone with which it references this human ruin. The space of The Zone is one underpinned with weirdness and threat. It is hostile to human life specifically by virtue of a trait of alienness, and its contamination (whether man-made, occult, or extra-terrestrial) is one that is sinister, in all senses of that word.
The places that are the Zone are not straightforward post-apocalypse of a brand that we see throughout other fiction, but instead something more of a borderland. STALKER has zombies, but it is no zombie fiction setting. It has survival, but the surviving is not just about physical threats. As with radiation in the real world exclusion zone, The Zone of games is one in which an invisible (and, to normal human cognition, inscrutable) alien threat underpins everything.
This was the observation that was made so brilliantly by Roadside Picnic: that we are just animals, and some of the things we might encounter (leftover by aliens, by wizards, or by Cold War industry) are just as baffling and threatening to us (often in ways we can’t even perceive) as human litter left by the roadside is to wild animals. It is this eerie feeling of brushing up against something monstrous and somewhat imperceptible which makes the Zone so compelling. It was this that we tried to tap into in The Signal From Tölva, with its non-euclidean spaces, ghostly spectra, and implication of vast, incomprehensible intelligences. This is also one of the toughest aspects of the Zone to articulate in a game or fiction, but it’s one that I personally find the most compelling.
I think it sits on a line between the weird and the eerie. It links, to my mind, to the same thread of aesthetic response that is identified by the landscapes essayist Robert Macfarlane in this article about the eeriness of the English countryside (which is perhaps why I too so readily connect both the Zone and the English countryside in my work).
In that essay Macfarlane describes how responses in literature, art, and music to this quality have made up entire subcultures of processing our pastoral heritage as a dark and unsettling fabric. Shortly after this article was published we walked together through woodland in winter, near Cambridge, while Macfarlane talked about a dreamlike experience of seeing a horse crossing in the forest. We laughed off the eeriness of it, but the unsettling thoughts remained. Adjacent, I considered, to my own creative obsessions with the Zone.
Perhaps what is most compelling about the concept of the Zone, though, is not simply the sense of aesthetic arousal we get from its treatment of the space, but the fundamental power of the Zone for transformation. This is deeply woven into the first-order zone fictions of Roadside Picnic and Tarkovsky’s movie. They also appear explicitly and monstrously in Vandermeer’s Southern Reach books, too. This adjacent work I think most people have encountered in the form of the movie Annihilation. Again, that movie is a fiction which explicitly works with the idea of the Zone, but it leans even more heavily on the notion of it changing not just the landscape, but the people who move through that landscape. The eerie final moments of the debriefing scene are some of my favourite in recent cinema. I long to write a game in which your characters are not the characters you thought they were, or even the characters they think they are.
The theme of transformation appears centrally in The Signal From Tölva, in which the planet (and by implication the universe beyond) is transformed based on your journey. It also remains central to our new RPG, GOLD TEETH. In this the pirate protagonists find themselves trapped in the uncanny archipelago of “The Punchbowl” and are seeking a chance for redemption. They are already afflicted, but The Punchbowl will only further change them unless somehow, desperately, they can seize on that redemption.
And so the line continues through my work.
I had originally envisioned this piece as a way to talk about STALKER 2, but as you can see, I haven’t really found a way to do that. So I’ll say this: that sequel, appearing seventeen years on from the original, faithfully and skillfully continues the Stalker project, which over the three previous games never fell very far from its essential template. The fourth game continues almost where the others left off. There’s something profoundly reassuring in this: that the Ukrainian developers, distanced as they have been by time and change, understood how vital the Zone has become as a cultural lexicon and as such did not dilute their handling of it with the ready-to-hand tropes which other “Zone” games have picked up and used in a way that meant they were, in the end, not faithful to the idea they sought to be obsessed by.
The STALKER 2 developers have overcome real tragedies and actual horrors to bring us back to the Zone, and to the place where my interest was first most vitally transformed. Perhaps that dedication will become an inspiration to others, too. I hope so. The Zone is one thing, but the dedication and faithfulness of human beings to an idea is another.
I’ll leave it at that.
-jim