You Can Buy A Physical Copy Of TEETH. Also: Subjectivity.
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! And we shall play many others, and then report on those experiences right here.
This newsletter is written and compiled by spectral gatekeeper Jim Rossignol and wizened doormaster Marsh Davies.
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CONTENTS OF THE WEEK
Hello, you.
Links!
We Finally Played Brindlewood Bay
Hello, you.
We were expecting, nay hoping, to announce the release of a beta-test version of our next PWYW zine this newsletter, but it will have to wait a few more days as we iron out the corruptions and mishappenings exposed by our playtests! It will be worth the wait, for certain. We will probably do an extra special announcement bulletin when that comes in. But in the meantime…
IMPORTANT NOTIFICATION
Did you miss the Kickstarter but still want a physical copy of the beloved cult monster hunting TTRPG, TEETH, by Jim Rossignol and Marsh Davies? Then we have a solution! And there are still copies available over here: https://soulmuppet-store.co.uk/products/teeth And consider, as you purchase, more products from our respected and distinguished distributors, SoulMuppet Publishing.
ALSO: if you backed the book and haven’t claimed your copy, why not do so? You have an email from SoulMuppet Publishing with the details! If you can’t find that then get in touch as soon as possible. The same goes for PDFs and stuff. We know a bunch of you haven’t got your bits, so please let us know and we can help.
And hey, if you want to share TEETH thoughts with us, or even unrelated TTRPG opinions and feelings, there’s The TEETH Discord! Please feel free to swing by say hi.
Hi.
-Marsh & Jim
LINKS!
THING OF THE WEEK: Keen readers will possibly recall that we loved Guy Pradel’s beautiful zine filled with drawings of fantasy cities, Archol. It was proper fabulist architecture stuff, which you can check out here, and even secure a copy since there’s been a second printing. Even more exciting, though, is that friend Guillaume Jentey has created the RPG, ARCHOLEOLOGIE, that we said the original work seemed to imply. Guillaume explains: “a game, in 4 pages, to play a team of archoleoalogues [archaeologists for archologies?] who visit abandoned cities in order to discover their secrets, and the habits of their founders and inhabitants.” Great work, everyone, this is absolutely our kind of thing.
Next up: I don’t know if “Jordan Sorcery” is Jordan Sorcery’s real name, but even if it is not then he’s nevertheless just the person to interview all time fantasy art legend Ian Miller, which he does over here. It’s over an hour of discussion and recollection and covers a huge amount of ground. Well worth a look and listen if you are a fan of Miller, as you rightly should be.
Speaking of art things, I was entranced by this timelapse drawing of an isometric dungeon map. Perhaps you will be, too? Entranced, I mean. You would never be isometric to us.
Quinns has been doing the hot damned rounds on the old podcast scene, which reminded me to point you at Chris McDowall’s appearance on The Lost Bay podcast, and also Quinns’ appearance on Chris McDowall’s Bastionland podcast. Circular! And that’s a lot of pod for one newsletter, eh readers?
BUT THAT’S NOT ALL THE POD. GOD DAMN IT: We appeared on one, too! Marsh and Jim (that’s us!) were invited to chat times by the delightful Deborah L. Davitt on her Shining Moon podcast. There we talked about writing RPGs, and in particular creating a series called TEETH, which is reportedly quite good. Listen! We are cheery folk with lots to say, even if I did trail off for a moment when I got distracted by my children bursting in like pleasant aliens.
The MILESHIPS Kickstarter is on the cusp of $100,000 at the time of writing! Hot damn! Perhaps YOU will be the person to get us over the line? It’s cool if not.
We Finally Played Brindlewood Bay
So no, I still didn’t get around to writing up my Mothership notes, distracted as I was by all the other things that have been going on around these parts. Among these things was a single session of Brindlewood Bay, run for myself and Chris Gardiner by comrade Kieron Gillen. (Thanks, big man!) I only had a faint understanding of the game, which was that it was a mystery-solving lark where you played as older women, structured with a Powered By The Apocalypse sort of ruleset, with maybe a whiff of Cthulhu about the place. These things were all true! But it was fascinating to learn how it actually played. This was a One Shot, of course, so we didn’t get into the bigger-picture campaign stuff of Lovecraftian horror tropes represented by “The Void”, but these things still made a bit of an appearance in the form of spooky fish and other omens.
One of the best bits of our session was the opening, where we montaged our characters into existence in the opening credits of their Mystery Solving TV show, broadcast on the ‘80s TVs of our minds: Brindlewood Bay is heavily based on the tropes of that decade’s many detectives and light-entertainment action series, with a range of well known detective characters, such as my personal second favourite Quincy ME, and the classics such as Columbo, Michael Knight or B.A. Baracus. These end up gifting the Mavens -- our older lady detective protagonists -- with the mode of their special gift or power. For me, Barbara Thorne (barb thorn? I am a writer) it was Quincy’s medical bag leftover from my own career as a doctor, abandoned to become the wife of a doctor, and now taken up once more in the manner of retired widows who solve murder mysteries. For Chris it was a motorbike with a name and a sidecar.
Anyway! It was the manner of the solving of the mystery that really sparked conversation, as replies to our kid Gillen’s posts on the internet’s premiere (and in fact only existing) social discussion website, Bluesky, ended up noting: are you really solving the mysteries of Brindlewood Bay if those mysteries don’t actually exist in the first place?
Eh? What is this? Am I back studying philosophy in 1998? Are we having a discussion about the objective reality of imaginary objects? Is this game really about the relative value of authorship? Well, sort of! You see the way Brindlewood Bay works is that you do your moves, based on your stats and things, and end up collecting clues. Once you have enough clues to make solving the mystery viable, you can do the mystery-solving move. This involves the players attempting to string together a plausible narrative based on as many clues as possible. The more you can make fit into your explanation, the larger the number added to the roll. So the more clues you have, the more likely it becomes that your explanation for what happens is The Truth of the mystery. Which means that there is no authored answer to the mystery and there is nothing in the scenario which explains what’s going on: the explanation is the one you propose, and is the answer only if the dice roll decides that you did well enough!
Whether or not you find this satisfying seems to depend on personal preference, but I do wonder whether it works for you depends on a) whether your imagination is sparked by the tangiblity of there to be an authored reality behind RPG plots, and b) whether you have a strong relativism skew in your brain in the first place, and c) whether you are big improv clown like me. Both authored and game’d solutions are good and valid, but I suspect there’s a frisson of creation you might get from this that you would not get from the pre-prepared solution? Likewise there is a missing element of having Actually Solved A Puzzle. There is certainly a different experiential flavour to uncovering a pre-existing reality than to inventing it! God, thinking about this really did give me flashbacks to hazy dorms of the late 90s, where my idiot friends would attempt to tackle the enormous questions posed by Wittgenstein or whomever, when in no fit state to tackle anything beyond cooking some oven chips. Is there any objective truth? Do we really have free will? Or does having the munchies imply that we are simply an expression of a complicated mechanism trapped inside an illusion? And why are my eyes so red?
My take is that I love this solution to mysteries, because it brings everyone in from the same direction. It’s challenging and involving for players, and means that even the GM gets to be surprised. As such I think it’s one of my favourite bits of design I’ve encountered in the past few years. I already instinctively lean super-heavily on improvisation to furnish the storylines of the games we play, and the more RPGs I end up running, the more I want to share the process of creating and delivering stories with the other players, as we’ve been doing in recent games of Blades In The Dark. Hey, it’s not laziness, not as such, it’s about letting everyone play to find out what happens, including me, the GM. Brindlewood Bay does that with style, and in a context that I will find irresistible to run myself in the near future. Whether we can resist designing systems with similar inspirations in the near future remains to be decided. Perhaps by dice. Sinister Cosmic Dice.
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Next time: Teeth beta stuff, probably. Wish us some luck! But also what about Ideas For New GMs? That’s something we’d like to tackle soon, too. Hmm. x
