Where We Take A Design Detour
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You are reading the TEETH newsletter, written and compiled by Jim Rossignol and Marsh Davies. This is a newsletter about table-top role-playing games: our own - that we’re publishing over here - and some by other lovely people whom we link below. Want us to see your work? Get in touch in the comments! Or on Twitter (linked above).
Our latest release is STRANGER & STRANGER, a 63-page, beautifully designed and illustrated campaign-length adventure based around the perilous tribulations of a gang of mutated villagers, an abomination, and a rather convincing stranger. Low prep and highly entertaining. Please do check it out, and, if you are interested in supporting our exploits, including the ongoing production of this newsletter, please do buy a copy!
It’s been testing week here at Teeth Towers, as we’ve been getting into the deeper detail of how a big Teeth campaign should work. We’ve already spent some time on this, having written tens of thousands of words over the past year, and while the world and the core rules are already clear to us (we’ve written the entire setting, created the monsters, and converted Forged In The Dark’s moment to moment action to our playbooks) the back and forth has been about the wider structure of Teeth as a Forged In The Dark game.
One of the things which sets Forged In The Dark apart as a system is the way it specifies its phases, and prompts different kinds of action as they unfold. There are freeplay moments as you’d be familiar with in most TTRPGs, where you role-play and discuss and generally decide what to do in the world, but then there is the job itself and the actions you can perform to decide how the opening moments of that situation will go - information gathering and the engagement roll. Once this is over, you have the fallout and respite of the Downtime phase, something that gives rise to very specific opportunities for role-play and invention. I love this piece of design particularly, because as an arc it is about mitigating planning, and dropping players right into the action in just the same way that a movie or piece of fiction might be able to.
I love games with no setup, just action from the first moment, and FiTD achieves it particularly well. In its most stripped-down form, for example on Emmanoel Melo’s CBR-PNK, you can just hit the actions as soon as the characters are defined. In our first game of CBR-PNK things were instantly desperate, their quarry had a gun to his own head, things were on fire, it was chaos from the first dice roll. Escalating things from there was one of my personal favourite moments of GMing in the past few years.
In Teeth I had become snagged on the idea of how to tie this to the monster hunt, and in our first two major playtests I had tried to apply a bespoke format to make the job part of the game about the showdown with the monster. This, I soon realised, was a mistake. We had taken a design detour which made sense while we were writing it, but was going to grief as we tried to run it.
In trying to be overly explicit about two ideas (the monster hunt, and the no-planning job) I had failed both. In truth the full Teeth campaign setting needs to be just as flexible as any Blades In The Dark game, and so although it might have been thematically coherent to make our information gathering into a “tracking and hunting” phase in which you unpick the knot of a particular monster, the ramifications of doing so mean the game as a large campaign book becomes tied into a formal, prescriptive system, limiting what players can end up making it about.
It also, I discovered as I ran my own system, places a burden on the GM which I don’t think FiTD games should be about. Quinns (SU&SD) originally sold me on the idea of Blades In The Dark on the basis that he did no prep and “just played to find out what happened”, which I have found to be the case, and have been hugely enamoured by. Making this true for Teeth has been one of my key goals during this process. Loosening up Teeth’s design to make all kinds of things possible - closer to the “situations/encounters” we had in the one-shots - and yet still cohere with our lore and framework, has been the trick.
It’s this stuff - the reality of playtesting - that shines a light on how wrapped up it’s possible (for me at least) to get in a specific concept, without reference to the practical process of running a game. It’s perfectly possible to write a load of coherent, interesting stuff that just isn’t that great to run. There must be RPG books which are a fantastic read, but aren’t that great to play. (And I can think of a few.)
That’s not to say the wizards of design can’t pull off the trick of imagining something and having it work first time: I have played games in the past which were not playtested and worked just fine, but if the one-off Teeth adventures taught us anything - and they taught me a great deal - the fun of them is a function of any game design is how people interact with it, and that’s best understood in actual play.
Anyway, I am nearing the end of this rewrite and big Teeth is finding its final form. I just realised that we’d neglected to add any famous robbers and highwaymen to the world - a cultural icon during this point in English history, so we’ll go ahead and do that, too. In terms of future waypoints, the next big one is for us to get on and fund the book.
We’re not yet 100% sure when we’re going to go ahead with the Kickstarter, due to a few things that need to be a touch clearer. That whole thing with the world running out of printing paper for books certainly gives us pause, but we’ll transmit more concrete intentions once we ourselves have the plan in place! In the meantime, thanks for joining us on this journey.
And in the meantime, there is always the promise of links…
LINKS!
Thing Of The Week (should that be a thing? I mean, it’s likely never going to be something that came out that week, because this certain isn’t but it could be the thing of our week, if you see what I mean - and not just because it has echoes of The Thing, the ‘70s horror movie, because this is ‘70s horror, wow I am disappearing down a rabbit hole in this parenthesis, forgive me) is indubitably Let Us In. I mean, you only have to look at it to see why, but look closer and there’s a sinister game set in a ‘70s modernist mansion (a personal weakness of mine) with collapsing humanity for all players, and a system that can be learned and applied across horror games. It’s great stuff, and uses lots of orange, which I feel is an undervalued colour in the TTRPG design space.
Another week, another very clever idea by the prolific Mr Bissette, this time a hex-based advent calendar-type adventure. You haven’t missed it! So get involved here.
Can the Blades In The Dark clocks system be used to plot a novel? This person certainly seems to think so. Will it make me redraft my lockdown novel? That’s less clear.
A lovely list of “All Ages TTRPGs” here on itch, with a bundle to boot. Useful for me, Parent Man, because although my son skipped straight ahead to playing D&D (and is now part of two campaigns, one of which is organised by the local council, much to my amazement) my daughter isn’t quite ready for the great beast, despite interest, and so have options for her has been useful. Perhaps I’ll let you know how we get on with that.
One more itch link for the week: Arcane Ugly, “a whimdark” TTRPG. Aha, yes. I sort of wish I had thought of that particular play on words. But that’s not really my reason for recommending, no - the reason here is that it is gorgeous and wildly inventive, with the sort of identity and playfulness that makes the likes of Troika so immediately appealing. Be warned you’re getting a beta version here, but damn, that promises much, and has a Youtube series accompanying its creation.
Research has been richly rewarding this week, including discovering there is a place in Northumbria called Cocklaw Tower, which if I wrote it in a document would doubtless be edited out for being too silly. And yet… Anyway, the things that made this week toothsome included this amazing map of London, a real beauty, and this little snippet about the relationship between highwaymen and streetlighting (which I had heard before, but assumed fallacious): “During the late 17th and early 18th centuries, highwaymen in Hyde Park were sufficiently common for King William III to have the route between St. James's Palace and Kensington Palace (Rotten Row) lit at night with oil lamps as a precaution against them. This made it the first artificially lit highway in Britain.” (Rotten Row! Again with the unlikely-yet-actual place names.) And yes, brutishness and violence hidden behind ironic gentlemanliness has long been a trope of the English. One, I suspect, that will persist for some time to come.
OBLIGATORY BUT DELIGHTFUL AD FOR OUR OWN STUFF
Please consider the campaign-length TEETH scenario STRANGER & STRANGER!
63-pages of gloriously weird and perilous adventure in a monster-stalked 18th century setting. The pre-made character playbooks, maps, and mutation tables all add to the fun. It’s easy to run, and highly rated by Jim’s mum. No greater commendation is required.
Unsure what to expect of our stuff? You can name your price for NIGHT OF THE HOGMEN!
Prefer your 18th century with gown-wearing ingenues and ornamental gardens? BLOOD COTILLION is for you!
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More soon! x