Would you trust a man you found inside a clam shell?
Welcome, beloved netfriend, to the TEETH newsletter! This is 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! That series is expanding. In this regular publication we also look at other RPGs, play stuff, interview people. It’s a whole lot of newsletter.
What’s within is written and compiled by patched eye, Jim Rossignol, and woodened leg, Marsh Davies. Come and join us over on the TEETH Discord! Free tooth emojis for everyone.
And hey, if you can wish to support us and also get a fantastic 320-page RPG, you can BUY OUR BOOK. If you aren’t already a member of that rather cool and highly exclusive club. And remember, there’s a whole range of TEETH RPGs to go along with that.
Hello, you.
Links!
GOLD TEETH
Hello, you.
We’re heads down busy on our occult pirates RPG, GOLD TEETH. This will be our next major release, with a crowd-fund for a 320+ page book coming soon. In the meantime, we’ve written a little about what to expect, as well as some of Marsh’s new art, which you can check out below.
As always, we appreciate your support. Do come and say hello directly over on the Teeth Discord.
Love,
Marsh & Jim
LINKS
THING OF THE WEEK: It is impossible not to point to the funding of UVG:2E sequel, Our Golden Age. I mean, just look at it! No surprise it was heading rapidly for $250k the last time I checked.
We’ve namechecked Wyrd Science a few times, so this is your regular reminder that they run a tight, cool ship, and Issue 6 is imminent.
I am in no way getting back into Warhammer, but I couldn’t help watching this nostalgia-review of the first Skaven codex.
And it has taken inhuman discipline not blow my budget on these Röknaut Space Dwarf Bikers. For those of us who yearn for the space dwarves of old -- hell, I still have my space dwarf of old, purchased from Games Workshop in Canterbury in 1993 -- this project is like catnip.
And an off-topic video game recommendation to finish. The supremely chill Flock by our friends at Hollow Ponds. I am playing this with my daughter and it is delighting us both.
Coming Soon: GOLD TEETH
We thought we’d spend this newsletter telling you a little more about our forthcoming book: GOLD TEETH.
This new, piratical step in our universe of folky horror and occultist adventure owes a great deal to the original TEETH book, our core RPG setting, but is completely standalone and will contain everything you need to know to run an extended campaign in a world of cursed pirates. As such, you can expect to read an enticing web of overlapping lore, with the situation the players find themselves in caused by the premature detonation of an occult weapon, ferried across the sea by the British in pursuit of their bloody colonial aims. The weapon was aboard a vessel transporting it from where it was unearthed in the Vale Of Deluth to… oh, well, that’s something else to discover.
The Vale, TEETH readers will recall, was the contaminated scene of another magical disruption, where the original game is set. In GOLD TEETH’s escalated situation the effect is much greater, and the consequence is that a range of the colonial powers are trapped in an oceanic anomaly surrounding the Antilles. They’re all going to have a really bad time.
As ever, what is most appealing about this book is the extent to which it has provided Marsh and myself with a fresh and broad canvas for us to explore our own creative endeavours within the context of a historical setting that we both love. Our games aren’t attempts to be historically accurate, as discussed elsewhere, but GOLD TEETH is certainly a game in which we draw on the mad modernity-being-born-and-resisted energy of the late 18th century, as well as getting to play with some of the finest figures and archetypes in all of sea-going reality: pirates.
Which brings me to an interesting point, I think, which is this: the TEETH series does its best work by making the tropes we’re working with our own. Just as the core book was recognisable 18th century England but in a flavour I don’t think anyone had really encountered before, so our high seas setting has a fevered intensity which I am already enormously pleased with. I feel like our sense of comedy-turning-into-horror-and-back-again is one that we’ve refined and improved-on over time, making for a game world that is fascinating and amusing as it traces the strange places we’ve taken the 18th century setting. TEETH books at the table should (and do) provoke laughter and gasps of horror in the same scene.
We’ve been developing these concepts for GOLD TEETH over the past months, writing up disturbing lore for how living suits of seaweed might be made use of, and how the players will encounter things like the eerie Seaborn. These are a mysteriously-beloved strain of individuals who have found themselves living among the people of the islands of GOLD TEETH, having been cut from the belly of ghastly sea-creatures found washed up dead on the many beaches of the archipelago.
The Seaborn, wherever they are found, quickly settle into their new communities but, strikingly, also dream of each other. Even if they have not yet met. Indeed, when a newcomer arrives, the dreams spread across the sea in waves. The Seaborn are quite open about this, and discuss their dreams with anyone who will listen, which is everyone, because who would not want to hear these wonderful, wholesome people speak of their tranquil, familial nocturnal visions?
Yes, this should give you some sense of the sort of setting we’re going for. If the first book was an extrapolated encyclopaedia of the off-kilter eeriness and sense of threat implicit in the British countryside, then GOLD TEETH is near beserk rendering of the terror of the ocean and the maniacs who thrive upon it. Hell, the sea is practically a horror setting by default, and casting into that sensibility for lore and rules is a distinct and horrible pleasure.
Ah yes, the rules of play: once again we’ve been delighting with bending things to reflect the cursed nautical nature of our game. If there’s one thing that is truly rewarding about writing an RPG book it’s making the systems for play support and reflect the setting, and we’ve already had some real fun doing that here. There are therefore some very significant changes from what you might previously have encountered in TEETH, although it overlaps in some ways, too. Just as we previously wanted you to have a palpable sense of trepidatious travel through wilderness provided by the procedures of the game in our invented north of England, so GOLD TEETH is a game of exposure to the formidable challenges of sea travel in a blighted and isolated archipelago. Our rule systems are therefore broadly expanded into LAND and SEA. The LAND rules you will likely already be somewhat familiar with, based as they are on individual playbooks and the adapted FiTD rule set that we used in the previous book, albeit with extensive adjustments for the pirate-y character types and the nature of the pirate’s curse (not forgetting possible redemptions.)
SEA, however, is something different: it is a ruleset for the use of sea-going vessels in exploration and combat. As such we’ve created a system which reflects the way in which a pirate ship is a complex entity in its own right, with its own state of functioning, crew, and potential actions. Any sailing ship is a large, multi-faceted system, capable of doing things and facing situations that are impossible for individual characters. This is what we wanted to explore on GOLD TEETH. If you downloaded the Reaver rules then you saw an early version of what we’re doing with this.
All this adds up to a significantly more ambitious book than anything we’ve tackled before: sea battles, the looming curse of the player-pirates, some of the weirdest locations and creatures we’ve yet conjured, and of course a new cast of grotesque and alarming people to populate that world. It’s tough not to be inspired when you’re starting off with source material such as this, but as weird as reality is, I think we’ve gone the extra mile to make it even weirder. What would a supernatural sea-shanty say if a supernatural sea-shanty could speak? Are sharks people? Can crabs read and write? What if seaweed wanted to help you? What happens when a lighthouse knows things, and wants to use that knowledge to kill you? Would you trust a man you found inside a clam shell? Even if he was really polite? What’s the most horrible thing you could fish from the ocean and still be keen to eat?
In GOLD TEETH you are going to encounter the answers to some of these questions, but also you’ll get to pose many more of your own. We’re pretty excited about it. And we’ll have this book on a Kickstarter near you, quite, quite soon.
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Untiul next time! x