In October 2024 we invited customers to take another bite of the not-at-all-poisonous October Horrors apple with the TEETH RPG Bundle featuring TEETH, the fantasy-horror RPG of occult crime and monster-hunting in a cursed corner of 18th-Century England. A grotesque tragicomic meld of Blackadder and The Witcher, TEETH adapts the Forged in the Dark rules for monster-hunting in the benighted Vale of the Deleuth, which glories in revolting mutations, occasional insurrection, murderous Hogmen, and also-murderous pies. You’re supposedly a Hunter, charged with driving back monstrous incursions and protecting the trade in occult artifacts. But that is subterfuge! Your Outfit of bruisers, scholars, trackers, and sappers (explosives experts) share a Secret Agenda, and a one-year time limit before occult contamination corrupts you. If you execute your mission and escape the Vale before Winter ends, you can claim victory – however horrible the cost.
They say reality was breached in the Vale of Deluth and Hell poured through. Or perhaps something worse than Hell – horror of an unknowable kind, or unknowable to most. You, the Hunters, have crossed paths with the occult before. Your diverse experiences have led you to form an Outfit, commissioned by His Royal Highness King George III to drive back the horrors that contaminate this remote place and safeguard the plunder of its otherworldly treasures for the Crown. But not even His Majesty knows your Secret Agenda: perhaps the purifying zeal of Redeemers, or the bloody justice of Avengers. You might be Foreign Agents or Cultists, or an international syndicate may fund you as their Brokers. You, the players, choose your motives and goals.
After a setpiece opening scenario based on your Agenda, a game session proceeds in five distinct phases: Opportunity (find leads and decide what to investigate), Wilderness (dangerous travel), Investigation, Engagement (the scenario climax), and Aftermath. You may confront common creatures like Cheesers, Vulpids, Dogmakers, and the ubiquitous Hogmen; rare beasts like Myriaclids, Shank Demons, and Covetous Wretches; ultimately even unique adversaries like the Curse-Woman Bragwyn, the Shambling Vast, Kramley’s Worm, or Jack of Rags.
Through these self-contained monster-of-the-week sessions, your Outfit tries to fill the 24 spaces of its Agenda Track before the GM fills the 16 spaces of the Season Clock – and (you hope) before your failures and bad choices fill the 16 checkboxes on your individual Corruption Track. Every fourth Corruption tick gives you a Mutation like “Segmented, wormy protuberances emerge from each elbow” or “Your presence causes nearby musical instruments to detune rapidly” or “You bleed steadily but not fatally from every orifice. Still, you have a lovely singing voice.” The last Mutation checkbox is labeled “No longer human, or indeed playable.”
After a year in-game (perhaps 15-30 sessions), your Outfit’s story draws to its grim close. If they accomplished their Agenda and stashed enough Coin, the Hunters might retire, after describing how “the memory of their deeds in the Vale warped the remaining days of their life.” But if the Agenda is incomplete, the Outfit’s paymasters enact terrible revenge. “Some groups may play on to see if they can still achieve their Secret Agenda. They are now on a suicide mission. Even if they succeed, the Hunters should be forced to sell their lives dearly, describing their expiration in the most melodramatic and bombastic fashion.”
So who are the designers who bared their TEETH like this? For decades Jim Rossignol wrote about the video game business on blogs such as Rock Paper Shotgun, which he co-founded in 2007. His 2009 book This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities described online gaming culture in London, Seoul, and Reykjavik. Jim also co-founded the computer game studio Big Robot (Sir, You Are Being Hunted).
In March 2021 Jim and writer-illustrator Marsh Davies (former head of creative writing at Minecraft publisher Mojang Studios) started designing a tabletop game as escape from pandemic stress. “We wanted to combine the breezy, improvisational roleplay and slapstick criminality of Blades in the Dark with a monster-hunting procedural, and set it all in a histrionically Gothic version of a landscape we love: the bleak but beautiful moors of England. Other inspirations include the videogames Stalker and Hunt: Showdown, the mysteries of Sherlock Holmes, monster-of-the-week serials like Buffy, and the macabre, parochial silliness of the League of Gentlemen. If you think ‘The Witcher meets Jane Austen,’ you won’t be a million miles off the mark.”
Jim and Marsh started a delightful free TEETH RPG newsletter with news, reviews, links, and a steady trickle of info about a forthcoming oddball historical RPG. This constructive promotion helped lift their April 2023 TEETH RPG Kickstarter campaign to success, and they successfully concluded a piratical sequel campaign, GOLD TEETH.
This all-new TEETH RPG Bundle presented the whole line to chew on: the complete 320-page TEETH: A Roleplaying Game core rulebook along with the pay-what-you-want introductory scenario Night of the Hogmen and the False Kingdom campaign.
Those who paid more than the threshold (average) price got a second bite of the apple with our More Teeth Collection, including the aptly named expansion More Teeth and the standalone scenarios Stranger & Stranger and Blood Cotillion.
We know you’d give your eyeteeth to grab this TEETH offer, but it bit the dust in November 2024.
