An alchemical catastrophe ravaged the countryside decades ago, unleashing horrors beyond comprehension upon a cursed corner of 18th-century England. The Crown has quarantined the area, known as Vale of Deluth, but as a Hunter, you are allowed entry to help drive back the monstrous beasts that lurk within. This is the world of Teeth, a new tabletop RPG from Jim Rossignol and Marsh Davis that just hit Kickstarter. In order to get a better sense of their new game of occult criminality and monster hunting, we had a chat with them about their history and inspirations.
Both Rossignol and Davis worked in the video game industry prior to working on Teeth. Rossignol was a founder of Rock Paper Shotgun and developed games such as Sir You Are Being Hunted and The Signal From Tolva. Marsh worked at game publications like Edge and PC Gamer and was also part of Mojang, the studio behind Minecraft. They have always been deeply interested in both mediums, often looking at the way they can learn from each other design-wise.
Rossignol: “Well, as a player RPGs have been my thing longer than video games. I had a D&D manual before I had a home computer, so that has always been there. As a teen I had wanted to write RPG sourcebooks for a living, but imagined it would be impossible to achieve. So really this is a bucket list item for me, enabled by the skill and focus of Marsh. As for the game design practice stuff, I think most of the traffic has been the other way: there is so much innovation in TTRPG and boardgame design that it’s these areas which are informing how I am thinking about and approaching future video game projects. That’s particularly true for meta-game design: the downtime and upkeep approaches of RPGs over the last few years has been particularly fruitful – you can see that across game design.”
Davies: “What Jim says about the direction of influence is definitely true. In terms of honoring player choice through narrative, or creating systems that allow for open-ended improvisation, video games are often reaching for the sorts of freedom that TTRPGs allow. That said, I think some of the ways we’ve abstracted the tracking of stats or information – filling meters or clocks – does feel a little video gamey. The free-wheeling improv of roleplay is a beautiful thing, but we are also trying to help GMs evoke a specific experience, so that little bit of structure is useful – and it probably is informed by the language of video games.”
The game has been described as The Witcher meets Jane Austen or Blackadder meets Stalker, which may sound like a strange combination of tone, but they say those influences made their way in naturally in the world they wanted to create.
Rossignol: “I feel the reference to these cultural markers was more instinctive than explicit: the influences crept their way in from different directions, and when we came to look back and survey what we had done, those were the obvious tropes that had found their way in. And perhaps that was inevitable as we went along: I am not sure there has ever been a period comedy with quite the reach or cartoon grotesquery as the Blackadder series. There is, obviously, quite a thin line between what makes us laugh and what instills other responses in us. There is something horror-inducing and funny about a giant spider climbing out of a pie. That was always going to be the route that Marsh and I were going to take, because at the table we like to be silly, and we like to be scared. The head tilt to Stalker though I think has more of a structural conceit — the journey into a “zone” or otherwise contained landscape — is just one that works brilliantly for games, and I return to it again and again. Stalker is philosophical and aesthetic-driven, but the true power of it is spatial and based around landscape and place. It’s a place you expect to be changed by, because it’s not like the outside, but there’s also a powerful reason to be there, and not leave before your task is done.”
Building horror into the world of a tabletop RPG has always been something important to Rossignol, stemming back to his early days of playing.
Rossignol: “I think a sense of threat, a sense of the uncanny, and the journey from something being eerie to be full-blown horror, end up being some of the best moments you can have at the table. I remember running a campaign as a kid where I had one of the players not come up from a blind swim the group did through a flooded basement. Their panic was thrilling for everyone, and I never forgot to try and provoke that sort of response again and again. Years later in our Blades In The Dark campaign we had the group hiding from enemies in a lightless attic, only to realize they were trapped in the space with a centipede as big as a dog. The disgust and horror of that moment electrified everyone. When we came to write Teeth I had to not just enable but prompt those sorts of situations.”
Teeth is a Forged in the Dark game, meaning its rules are based on the popular TTRPG Blades in the Dark. Many designers have taken this ruleset and twisted it into different genres, and Rossignol and Davies have added their own flourishes for Teeth.
Rossignol: “For me it was partly wanting to acknowledge what a huge influence Blades had been on me personally, but also wanting to take advantage of the opportunity that the game being put on Creative Commons offered. I think I would probably write my own system next time, but working so closely with a brilliantly conceived ruleset was both beneficial and educating, and I think it was the right decision for Teeth. Blades is simply an incredible system, and although we had to do serious work to Teeth-ify it, the magic remains.”
Davies: “As Jim says, we’ve built a lot of stuff on top of Blade‘s core rules. We introduce different phases that emphasize things like traveling a wilderness, or the sleuthing required to piece together the identification of a monstrous foe. We track the players’ corruption by occult forces and their subsequent repulsive mutation. There’s an entirely new system for magic that aims to get players to be more specific and intentional with their improvisation, and prompts them to devise absolutely ludicrous and elaborate rituals that they enact as a group.”
Prior to this campaign, they digitally released three different small-scale, standalone games set in the world of Teeth, which are now available as zines in the Kickstarter. They say these adventures were not only a good way to get players a preview of the world they were creating, but also allowed them to feel out the game as a whole.
Davies: “We learned a lot while writing those and that certainly fed back into the design of the main game. Certainly, they gave us a huge appreciation for the Blades in the Dark rules: how elegantly they help to conjure the themes and core activities of that game; how subtle some of their interactions are. You can’t just yank rules out of this intricately constructed edifice, it turns out! More broadly though, designing the standalone modules helped us understand what we wanted Teeth to be, and to focus it on evoking more specific kinds of experience. I think when we started on Night of the Hogmen, the first standalone, the nascent form of Teeth was quite generalized. It was a fun setting, but there wasn’t a powerful hook to what the players were doing there. Making the standalones helped us realize how important that was.”
While Teeth is primarily focused on your party being tasked with hunting strange and dangerous creatures, the game is definitely built to have a long-term overarching narrative that plays out over the course of the campaign.
Davies: “Players are hired to identify, track and slay monsters, and doing so naturally creates an episodic rhythm to the game. But this is cover for the players’ true agenda! Secretly, they may be agents of a foreign power at work against the English Crown, cultists intent on resurrecting some hideous alien god, or puritans determined to put an end to the blasphemous magic at work here – even if that means putting an end to a good chunk of England with it. We’ve suggested five different Outfit types each with their own hidden agenda. Some are grand, world-changing schemes, others brutally intimate. Whichever the players pick, their attempts to further this goal form a larger, ongoing drama that inevitably becomes more desperate as the seasons turn and their time in this cursed land ticks down. Stay too long, and they may never be allowed to leave!”
Through the Kickstarter campaign, you can get the aforementioned three standalone games (Night of the Hogmen, Blood Cotillion and Stranger & Stranger), but the focus is on the massive main rulebook for Teeth, either in digital or hardcover.
Davies: “It’s a big old book at 320 pages – 135 of which are dedicated to locations and other important information about the world, like what kinds of cheese are available. Locations are the bulk of this though, and not only describe the physical nature of a place, but also the people therein, their motivations, the terrible vendettas they nurse, and the sorts of schemes they might be up to. Each location also has a list of “Rumors, Clues and Opportunities,” which outline any number of different happenings and lines of inquiry which might interest the players. And these things interconnect across the entire book, with page references letting GMs quickly move from intriguing clue to a rich discovery without bearing the heavy cognitive load of keeping a big conspiracy in their heads. Or they can take what they want and improvise the rest!
“The bestiary, meanwhile, contains extensive descriptions of over thirty horrendous creatures, each with their own telltale clues, disgusting predilections, battle tactics and exploitable weaknesses. There’s a big table that lets GMs generate their own distressingly mutated adversaries too.
“As for pre-written adventures – there’s nothing quite as guided as, say, Hogmen, but the way we’ve written the locations in some cases suggests a sequencing of events that amounts to a mini-adventures in its own right. We suggest kinds of encounters you might have in the wilderness, and some of these scenarios invite an escalation into larger quest-lines. Also, each of the Outfit types we’ve created has their own version of the opening scenario, and a breadcrumb trail that should lead them through the material in very different ways.
“Also, you didn’t ask this, but I have to tell you: we have tables. So many tables! There are tables for weather, landscape, mutations, monsters, magic devices, English names and more. There’s a table that allows you to generate your own cursed pies, from descriptions of the sweating, inch-thick pastry crust, to the gelatinous discoveries within, the appalling or amusing effects upon your person and likely means of remedy. Come for the monster-slaying, stay for the cursed pies. Or because you’ve grown a twitching proboscis from your neck and the guards won’t let you out.”
The Teeth Kickstarter campaign runs now through May 19 and can be found here.
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