Fan Club “Blog” #7: TEETH & Swyvers are both fantastic

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This is a TERRIBLE blog post to be writing, and I’m afraid it’s just going to be the first instalment of a terrible series.

Today I want to tell you about two smokin’ hot TTRPGs that I loved reading, and I know I’d love running... but that have been pushed off of my shortlist of stuff to get to my table by other games due to time constraints. So it’s unlikely that they’re ever gonna get a full review on Quinns Quest channel, which isn’t fair at all.

All I can do to try and coax some karma out of this situation is to see if I can get you folks excited about them, in the hope that some of you might buy them and play them on my behalf.

The games I’m talking about today are TEETH, by Jim Rossignol and Marsh Davies, and Swyvers, by Luke Gearing. These titles have quite a bit in common- they’re both games about being scoundrels in the 18th century, they both deal in horror but can’t stop making themselves laugh, and they’re both unrepentantly, repugnantly British.

Let me just give you the pitch for each of these two games, and then I’ll end the post by talking about why they got muscled off of my shortlist by other games. 😭 

First up: TEETH.

(That photo makes it look awfully dusty, doesn't it? It's a beautiful book. Sorry book.)

Game designer Jim Rossignol has a famous love of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. videogames, where the player searches for precious salvage in an irradiated wasteland full of factions & beasties. This gives us a helpful analogy with which to describe TEETH, which is more-or-less “S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in an irreparably haunted, cordoned-off bit of 1780s England. But with more jokes. ...Good jokes.”

You could also think of it as “The Hills Have Eyes but they Also Have Tricorne Hats.”

Your party of players is given a royal writ to spend exactly one year gathering magickal artefacts from “The Vale”, where monsters and man alike grow stranger each decade behind a military cordon.

This immediately gives TEETH a peculiarly bittersweet tone, where I was very happy that the designers put a clock of 12 months on your story since that makes it more plausible that you’d run (and finish) this game... but also, about 230 pages of this 318 page hardback are given over to describe the sprawling, interconnected tapestry of everything & everyone you might find in the Vale, and with a 12 month time limit GMs are going to be stuck flashing just a fraction of this game’s ideas and Terrible People in front of their players.

It is unquestionably worth buying TEETH just to read all of this stuff: Enemies include “Dogmakers”, wispy things that create dogs from whatever substance is available, or “Child-O’-Rain”, a bus-sized spider able to form its palps into the shape of a pale, subtly bifurcated human. There’s a queasy surfeit of inbred nobles that have held onto their ancestral lands despite being in a quarantine zone for centuries, which feels like a metaphor for the UK in 2024. Also, while the landscape has this marvellous specificity that captures the dour grandeur of rural England, there are also a scattering of locations that have broken it utterly- we’ve got a place called the “Downward Library”, we’ve got an extra-dimensional university-cum-prison, and a whole giant territory that is not on the map you give the players because it’s undergone too much exposure to magic and has just... folded itself out of reality. I love it all.

I’ll add here that while plenty of fantasy RPGs draw on European history, TEETH is singular for being truly English. Rolling on the travel tables in Winter might tell you that you are in “Bare, wind-worn hills, the peaks blasted back to their black granite bones...” while the weather is “A filthy day, the colour of a bruise. Winds thrash the land with unrelenting rain and sleet.” Ahh! It’s no exaggeration to say such copywriting makes me feel dimly nationalistic.

Also, where plenty of TTRPG books capably succeed at being what I will now uncharitably describe as “A Big List of Cool Things”, TEETH manages something a little more admirable: Every little Pokédex entry for a location, creature or NPC ends with a bullet point list of all the other creatures, NPCs, locations or adventure hooks that it’s connected to. In doing this labour the writers of the Vale turn it from an encyclopedia into a tapestry, offering your players the troubling impression that stuff has been happening in this terrible place long before they arrived, and allowing them to darkly speculate on what will happen after they leave.

At every turn TEETH says you are merely a visitor here; you are not the main character, you are mere grammar in a run-on sentence. And this is where it succeeds most as a horror game, I think- to choose a dumb example, when players encounter a carnivorous fungus that turns human skin into cheese, they only then realise the provenance of the excellent cheese sandwiches they bought.

There’s a lot of food-related horror in TEETH, actually. It’s certainly the only book I’ve read with a Cursed Pie Table:

The Cursed Pie Table might just be a bit of mortifying fun at the back of the book, but there’s something about it that summarises TEETH’s entire design ethos- I imagine Jim and Marsh going back and forth in a google doc, trying to gross one another out with worse and worse people and situations, until one of them starts making the other laugh, and then the other considers the natural consequence of this worldbuilding, until someone eventually says “Ah we’re just being silly now” and does the authorial equivalent of clearing their throat and inserting a new piece of mouldering paper in the typewriter. This makes TEETH a wonderful title for the game not just because it’s so ominous, but because it additionally captures how much you and your friends will be laughing.

And what about the rules? The rules, interestingly, are those of Blades in the Dark. Despite Teeth seeming like a natural fit for a hexcrawl in the style of something like Dolmenwood, the designers actually went with Blades’ stern-yet-swift structure where the game catapults players from act to act, deleting a lot of the faff in between: A session of Teeth might see players getting an opportunity in the opportunity phase, then travelling and rolling on some tables, then when the players have got the lay of the land they each frame a scene investigating the problem (which is most likely a monster), then we instantly skip straight to an engagement roll where we see them facing down the monster, followed by an aftermath where we can tally up points to see how this affects their crew’s larger operation in the Vale.

Does it work? I have absolutely no idea! I haven’t played the thing, and it breaks my heart to think I may never play it. 😭 But what I can say is that a benefit of TEETH using Blades’ rules is that it’s allowed the authors to write inventory picklists for each of the character classes that you can draw from using Blades’ ‘Load’ system, and the results are just spectacular:

I had so, so much fun reading TEETH. It’s a truly tremendous work of love and imagination, and it’s also the most bitter, acid-flecked love letter to historic England you’ve ever read.

If you think it sounds like your kind of thing, the .pdf is available here for $27.50, which is a steal for a book that is as dense & sweet as an ancient fruitcake (seriously, there’s not a dull page in it).

But if that’s a little dear to you the authors just this week released FALSE KINGDOM, a smaller (but still 78 pages!!) spinoff game about terrible medieval people in the same style as a pay-what-you-want .pdf. So you can pick up that for a song and then buy the TEETH book proper if you fancy a second helping.

Now, let’s talk about Swyvers!

Swyvers is illustrated by David Hoskins and written by Luke Gearing, whose work I first became aware of when I was gawping in awe & quivering in terror at the Gradient Descent official megadungeon for Mothership.

This is gonna be weird to write, because I feel like I’m going to use a lot of the same vocabulary from when I was talking about TEETH but in a slightly different order. 😅

Basically, where TEETH is a comic horror game about nasty Englishmen gadding about in the North that uses the bulk of the system from Blades in the Dark, Swyvers is a horrible comic game about nasty Englishmen skulking about in a city, with a not dissimilar narrative setup to Blades in the Dark.

Sound good?

Basically, you play thieves (the titular swyvers, just one part of the wart-studded, entirely fictional slang that colours this book), but where Blades in the Dark has a touch of Steven Soderbergh about it, with heists and flashbacks and twists, Swyvers is about playing just the nastiest little criminals who have no narrative framing devices at their disposal at all. You start the game with a shank and wearing “‘Orrid Rags”, you might later contact such diseases as "Beef Sweats" or "Pastry Legs", and one of the upgrades for your HQ is "Smut lending library".

I tell a lie: If you don’t want to play a Swyver you can alternately start as a Ratman (where you’ll begin with a randomly-rolled infectious disease under your fingernails), a Ruined Nob (one of the traits you might roll is “Couldn’t conceive of performing Hard Labour”), or a Hedge-Swyver (basically just the same shithead as everyone else but from outside of the city, and so you must (a) have an accent and (b) have no idea what’s going on).

So, what are you actually doing in this game? It's an exquisitely simple pitch: Imagine a game of Dungeons & Dragons if you first used paint stripper to remove all of the heroic fantasy gloss that normally coats the act of stabbing folks & beasties, taking their stuff and seeking glory on your terms.

What Swyvers has in common with TEETH is that both feel like a very smart person couldn’t stop making themselves laugh while writing it.

Where Swyvers differs from TEETH, though?

TEETH feels like a project that’s so ambitious and dense you can smell the sweat coming off of the authors. There’s a whiff of exhaustion to it. The authors first stake out & fill this massive landscape (a county, really) that they’re envisioning together, and then you can read them start sweating again as they work hard to apply a ruleset that will hopefully make the whole thing maximally-efficient to play.

And I’m grateful for all of that work! But Swyvers is a case study in the exact opposite kind of design.

Swyver’s Luke Gearing... he isn’t quite a minimalist, because there’s a ton of stuff in this book (whole piles of items, a frightening array of demonic patrons, a first-rate bestiary, an excellent starter adventure for your players to burgle)... god, I mean just look at this table of terrible dog breeds:

(The full page has a total of 20 breeds, including "Snaggletoothed dunghound", "Anklebiter pancake" and just "Longdog")

But the scaffolding underneath all of this content is very selective, very sparse, and very straightforward.

To those in the know: Swyvers is a textbook OSR game.

...And now let me explain that term to those not in the know. 😅

Wherever possible, Swyvers wants to resemble the sort of roleplaying games people (theoretically) played in the late 1970s. Players are gonna be poking around dungeons that are in no way fair, they’re going to be using spells and items to bypass obstacles but mostly just common sense, they’re going to be getting hurt, they’re going to be dying, and they’re going to be fixated on the loot and coins that are the only way they can level up.

But perhaps most importantly, you’re all going to be making the world up as you go along.

This is the bit of Swyvers that is so featherweight as to float above your table: This city you’re playing in which the game calls “The Smoke”? It wants your group to design it at your table. And it gives you a whole svelte little toolbox to make this a piece of cake!

You’re gonna roll or pick from a table to generate a royal regent (“A melancholic teenager”?), a church (“Our Mistress of Splintered Glass”), districts (“Long Beef”, “Thatcher’s Hole”), rumours for each district (“A tattooist from across the ocean has set up shop”), a table called “Why is this district deserted" (“The rivalry between two families led to well poisonings”) and more and more and more, to make spinning up a terrible city that's unique to you and your table not just quick and easy, but as surprising and fun as playing the game itself. Sort of like you were playing the game Microscope, if your microscope was stolen and might have tetanus.

Now, the Quinns of 2022 wouldn’t have liked this as much as simply having a great city setting, like you get in Spire or Blades in the Dark.

The Quinns of today, though, has got to admit that inventing your city at the table might actually be better.

Why? Because, as the brilliant Thomas Manuel was thinking about this month in the terrific Indie RPG Newsletter (go subscribe immediately!!), the problem with an RPG offering you a city as a big, fleshed-out setting is that the player characters are meant to be experts in these cities, but the players themselves know nothing, leading to a hollow dissonance where players should be able to embody their character but instead feel like frauds.

If you INSTEAD create your city TOGETHER in session 0 - not only is it a fun and creative act where everyone can drink beers, roll on tables and toss ideas back and forth - when it ends everyone knows as much as everyone else, so whenever anyone has a question about the world during play, you all know the answer to that question doesn’t exist yet, and someone, anyone, can suggest an answer on the fly. And it’s not like the GM still won’t have total control over problems, factions and dungeons, so the game isn’t easier for the players, it’s just... well, better? Maybe?

Which isn’t to say all of Swyvers is simple and easy. Actually, there’s one part of it that requires a serious bit of legwork from the GM:

The structure of Swyvers basically involves the players deciding a place to rob at the end of a session, and the GM then goes away and designs what is structurally a dungeon but is thematically a location to rob (like in the Thief or Dishonoured videogames). Swyvers has exactly 1 starter adventure site to get your campaign rolling & show the GM what Luke intended, but then from there you’re on your own. Get your graph paper out, sucker.

And I’ll tell you what! While I don’t have a ton of interest in designing dungeons anymore (not sure why, maybe I have a vague ennui from a lifetime of dungeon overexposure), I would JUMP at the chance to sketch out complex, multi-layered burglary site using traps, factions and loot. Especially when my cast of players are going to be having fun roleplaying the worst, filthiest humans imaginable. And when I have access to a bestiary that’s this gosh darn good:

(There are several enemies in the bestiary that spray pennies at you or are otherwise powered by loose change and it's never not funny.)

Urgh, maybe I do have to play Swyvers. But I’m not sure I can!

Okay, let’s round out this post by talking about how on earth it could be the case that these exciting, hilarious games have both fallen off my shortlist of stuff I’m going to be getting to the table in the future.

(As I write these reasons out I’m imagining the designers reading them and scoffing at each one, but please, try and absorb them all in aggregate...)

Reason #1: My goodness, but I’ve had a lot of darkness, horror and gore on Quinns Quest recently. My reviews of Heart, Vaesen, and Mothership mean that a full 50% of Season 1 will have been horror games, and I’ve already got two more horror games blocked for Season 2. When my remit for the channel is to show the length and breadth of all the things TTRPGs can do, it undermines my argument and narrows the appeal of the channel to show game after game that trucks in darkness & where you can expect terrible things to happen to your player character.

Reason #2: Same as I have a cap on how much horror I want on the channel, I have a similar cap on what I will now do the disservice of referring to as “The D&D cycle of violence-for-profit”, even when it’s presented in a postmodern way (as it is in both of these games). TEETH and Swyvers both have structures where players represent characters nasty enough to go and kill even nastier folk in order to get loot & become more powerful. And to be clear, I love that shit! But when I’m trying to use Quinns Quest to show how different & wonderful TTRPGs can be outside of D&D... again, it just makes it harder to fit games like TEETH and Swyvers into the very limited slots I have available. And to be clear, I already have two violence-for-profit games coming in season 2.

Reason #3: I think it’s an extremely good decision for TEETH to use the Blades in the Dark ruleset! And Swyvers using tried-and-tested OSR systems makes it so easy for me to imagine having fun with it! But most of the games that have found slots in Quinns Quest season 2 have rules that are entirely of their own design, built from the ground up to help tell the unique style of stories that the designer imagines. And while this a way riskier way to make games & more often than not leads to worse designs (ones that would have been stronger with a tried-and-tested system), when a system is invented from the ground up and it WORKS, it makes for the sort of groundbreaking design that I'm looking to spotlight with Quinns Quest.

Addendum point here: If you use a ruleset that other games use, it additionally puts your game in a sort of competition with those other games when I'm selecting reviews for the channel. For example, if I decide I can only afford to have a single classically OSR game in a season of Quinns Quest, that means Swyvers has to beat out every single other OSR game for that slot. Not saying it couldn’t do it, just that it makes the journey more improbable.

Haha. Boy, I loved writing the beginning of this blog post where I was just waxing lyrical about these two games, and absolutely hated writing the explanation of why they weren’t getting reviews. Urgh.

Here’s the thing: Those reasons I gave for not proceeding with reviews of TEETH and Swyvers? I know they’re weak. These designers deserve to have their games played & reviewed on Quinns Quest, and I think TTRPG players deserve to know about them! 

But in the months since I launched Quinns Quest I’ve learned a couple of things. One, I think the “Quinns Quest guarantee” of playing games before I review them is categorically worthwhile. It’s not only an invaluable part of finding all the high points and low points of a game, but it lets me bring a personal, human touch to a medium that is so personal, and is so human: I can talk about what went down at my table, and that feels like it really elevates my reviews & makes them more true to the medium.

But the other thing I’ve learned is where my limit is. There was a point in April where I was running three different weekly TTRPGs at the same time- three different groups of players, doing campaigns with three different systems, plus occasional meetups to do one-shots.

And it wasn’t sustainable. I could feel myself burning out. And I can’t allow myself to burn out, because I wanna offer Quinns Quest for years... but that means I have be extremely calculating about which games I can afford to run campaigns of.

So something had to give, and this month it was TEETH and Swyvers. Worse, they’re not going to be the last games that get left on my metaphorical cutting room floor.

But this post feels like a fitting compromise, at least- a kind of letter of apology where I can at least give the games that so nearly made it a dull fragment of a spotlight, and encourage you folks to go out and play them.

And if you DO play them, please tell me what happens in your campaigns. I’d so, so love to hear about them.