The Skim: Teeth: False Kingdom

It is this organ’s firm and unyielding belief that one cannot review an RPG from reading it. You can review a manual, certainly, but you’re not reviewing the game in any meaningful way.

However you can skim and see what pops out.

This is the Skim, and this is what we got from skimming False Kingdom.

IN A SENTENCE:

It’s Medieval¹ Forged in the Dark² Paranoia⁴.

THE TEETH BOYS DOING THEIR THING

I’ve had the PDF before it had won an Ennie. I mean, I couldn’t be any closer to co-creator Jim if we were co-writing a TTRPG blog together⁶. I hadn’t even skimmed it properly – good to see another zine, but I didn’t give it the time. I gave it a glance. Wait, this one is Medieval and not 18th century? Wait, a butterfly, I’ve forgotten what I was looking at.

I cheered when it got a Silver Ennie, which should have been my cue to look properly.

What prompted this was having lunch with Jim, and he lobbed me one of the early print copies, that’ll be going out to backers when Gold Teeth goes out after its unfortunate delays. I was heading on a road-trip, so I lobbed it in my bag, and when I actually skimmed in the car I realised the awful truth: these fucking Ennie Judges Know Their Shit.

How did I miss this? It’s because this this is 100% a Teeth game in its mode, and its design and art (Marsh, in full effect), which perhaps hides the difference. I thought it was another Teeth game, with its Regency Grotesqueries, when it is in fact a game full of Medieval Grotesqueries. And it is another Teeth game, doing what the Teeth games do, and do delightfully, but it’s also does something with its own structure, which fundamentally steps it away from their other zines.

It’s Medieval Paranoia but we’ll come back to that.

PICK ME, GIRL

The game’s structure is that you all play desperate courtiers, trying to fulfil the random urges of the false king. There’s five kinds of false kings to try and keep happy, from religious zealots to priapic lotharios to That Really Annoying Child From Game Of Thrones Who Was So Terrible People Were Happy When He Died Horribly In Front Of His Family Oh Crap Spoilers, I Guess?

Each of the courtiers has its mission prompts. Here’s the first one I looked at…

Wolves are abroad and have eaten the abbess at Maudley Tower! This is no way to behave. The wolves must be converted to Christianity 

I laughed.

Here’s another.

A scriptural mistranslation has convinced the False King he must marry a pig. Gather the comeliest pigs from Hagwynt Marsh so he may select a bride 

I laughed.

Here’s a third.

The pious people of Smorton-upon-Gulpe have asked if they might hear the bible in English, so they may better understand God’s Word. Kill them all 

I laughed, and, folks, we’re still on the first pick list.

There’s similar tables for more general problems to fit all the kings, plus escalations, complications and all of that. I instantly see how I would run this at the table, and how players will respond. I present the problem – clearly impossible to deal with in any reasonable way – and then roll with the fall outs.

These are a great bunch of situations, and comedy in games is mostly born of situations. Players deliberately trying to be funny is rarely as funny as players desperately trying to navigate through an impossible, ever-escalating fuck ups.

OUR PREGENS COULD HAVE YOUR OCs

I’ve an article I want to write about The Things Which Are Part of My Design Aesthetic. Really, I want to do it, and then – the better part of the idea – turn the question on other designers. As in, what do you think is core to what you do?

If I did Jim and Marsh, I’m pretty sure one will be “We like giving pre-gens”. Ironically, in their big games, the Teeth boys don’t do it but in all these zines, they’re all over it, to excess. Night of the Hogmen – a one shot – had nine characters, each with a picklist of fifteen unique, character appropriate items which you could only select three from. In a one shot!

The Pre-gen-forward approach is a trend I think is particular Hot Right Now. Mythic Bastionland doesn’t generate a random sort of 100 knight know you are. You generate which of those specific knights you are. Yazebas Bed & Breakfast is nothing but Pregens all the way down, putting over 50 in an over-500-page book.

I love to see it.

False Kingdom puts 24 of them in a 70 page zine.

That’s 48 pages for them. Over half the book is their pre-gens.

They’re a bunch of weirdos, each an immediate call to action for the players (it’s a roleplaying game – why not give a firm role, and let people play it in their own way?) and immediately explain the tone of the game, and the specific awfulness of the cast.

They’re introduced with a name, a two-word bio, and a little teaser sentence. For example…

Ealdemodor Blye, the Unnaturally Ancient Wetnurse
Somehow still living. It’s unclear if God favours her or simply hates everyone else.

As well as the traditional personalised item list, they each have a couple of special abilities. Take Clotilda of the Sword, the Bloo-Drunk Widow…

Crop-Top: Clotilda reduces her Stress by 1 point each time she successfully decapitates a man without warning. 

.Good pun, I laugh,but I see how that would cascade quickly in play. See the choice words – unexpectedly. People are on tenterhooks any time they’re in a scene. Will she do it? I would cheer whenever it happened. She did the thing!

The main worry at a skim is how could I expect folks to pick between them, except then I realise that death is absolutely common. I can see myself being relieved when my character dies, as I get to play another of there weird ass freaks.

HOW MUCH SHIT IS IN THIS BOOK?

24 pre-gens, right? Overkill. 5 different false kings – one used per game. So five short campaigns. This isn’t a one shot – you will do 4-12 of these impossible quests per campaign. The math turns up an average of six – plus the down-time (which is its own take on the Forged Structure) and most importantly, explain to the King why you were the most important person on the mission, and no-one is going to contradict you, as they’ve all been sent to the tower.

How many scores do you do a session a Blades game? It’s between 1 and 3, depending on your group. So that’s a minimum 2 and a maximum of 6 sessions for the standard game of this. Four sessions average. Twenty sessions to play the lot, once.

This has way too much content in it. This game is a surfeit of lampreys, and dares you to consume them all, knowing you’ll burst, but that’s kind of the point.

WAIT, THIS IS AN INDIE REMIX OF PARANOIAS (BUT MEDIEVAL) WITH MODERN TECH.

You play a group of desperate lickspickles to a berserk tyrant, who gives you tasks which are likely close to impossible. Things escalate in the mission, turning an impossible situation to an ever more ludicrous one. At the end, you return to beg the berserk tyrant for your lives. Some of you are punished, perhaps even executed. Replacements are sent in, and repeat, until the world burns.

The structure of the game is the core of what made Paranoia sing, and does it with a lean set of rules and exactly what you need to get started. Why write a whole scenario, when you can just write a one line high concept, have a few escalation tables, light the fuse, set back and wait?

Comedy Is Situation, Escalating. And, to go back to Aristotle, Comedy Is About People Who Are Worse Than We Are. From a skim, this actually seems to understand Paranoia better than any version of Paranoia I’ve played. And it wasn’t even trying to be Paranoia. I asked Jim, to make sure.

You could only make it more 1:1 Paranoia in structure if you added a phase before they go on a mission where they roll on a few random tables to see which weird-ass magic items they were given to help solve the problem. Maybe I’ll do it if I ever run it.

But if I ran it, it wouldn’t be the Skim, as I’d be having opinions with actual weight and merit. And that’s not what the Skim is for. That’s not our thing at all.

Teeth: False Kingdom be shipped in physical form to backers of Gold Teeth next year, and is available from Itch.io now.

1. The bit between the fall of Rome (western edition) and the renaissance, a period you will know from being sticking a few dragons in, and becoming the setting for the World’s Greatest RPG⁵.
2. Forged in the Dark, the PBTA-derived system by John Harper, first seen in Blades in the Dark.
3. PBTA. Powered by the Apocalypse. The lingua fraca for a good chunk of storygame design. Hugely influential, beautifully constructed and I will unfairly boil down to “Roll 2D6, Six or less, Bad happen, Seven To Nine, So-so happen, Ten Plus, Good Happen.”
4. West End Games’ satirical RPG classic. “Imagine a world designed by Kafka, Stalin, Orwell, Huxley, Sartre and the Marx Brothers”. First published in 1984, which is pretty funny.
5. No, not For The Queen.
6. Which we are. Clearly, one should raise an eyebrow at me reviewing a game by a friend like this, and then shave your eyebrow off, because this isn’t a review, we said at the opening. We can skim the manual, but you can’t skim us. I’m sorry, but we don’t make the rules (except in our games, where we do make the rules, that’s kind of the job.)