(Header image is from Blood Cotillion by Jim Rossignol and Marsh Davies)

TEETH, or more specifically the streamlined, single-evening regency ball of Blood Cotillion, is worth your time. It is nasty, grisly, grimy, and so very, very funny. Jim Rossignol (@jimrossignol) and Marsh Davies (@marshdavies) are exceedingly clever in making something which, if taken at face value, should have you running into the night, never to sleep from the sheer horror. Instead, you giggle and grin through each page.

Before we begin, I know you are wondering, “Were there actual teeth involved?” Yes, absolutely. I can recall at least four separate times where teeth came up over the session, including a ghost politely requesting the players to hand over any spare teeth they had.

Some spoiler free highlights

The conceit of the session will pull anyone in. Every person I know wants to roleplay at a fancy dinner party. Add a layer of the players being assassins posing as eligible young women in order to infiltrate the ball and destroy an occult artifact, and you have a masterpiece.

Player abilities were truly perfect. One character could completely capture the attention of a single entity by describing the pose they make in a sufficiently cool way, no roll necessary. Another could communicate with ghosts (reminder, these assassins hate all things occult), but if they failed their roll they would instead spend 30 seconds screaming. Exactly what you want when trying to maintain a low profile at a fancy dinner party.

I love playing characters that just suck. Individuals so completely full of themselves that they are oblivious to any ill will, and assume every person in their immediate vicinity is dying to be near them. EVERY SINGLE KELMORTON fits that bill. You get to be the worst bits of every kind of high class asshole and it is perfect. We need more NPCs like these.

The best part of this module is the thought put into making it easy for a group to play. The full text is only around 45 pages, but the layout is masterful and easy to navigate, the player facing rules are only a couple pages long, and both the players and the gm get a nifty one page cheat sheet on who is important at the party and how major mechanics work. If you are nervous about prep and often find yourself with way too much material, this module is for you, and it is distilled in a wonderful way.

SPOILER CORNER

I truly only have one bad thing to say about this adventure, and it lies in its stated scope. They tell you this is intended for a single session, 3 to 5 hours. That is just not true. I finished in just under four hours and I had to cut SO MUCH from the game to hit that mark. They just filled it with too much tasty content, my players wanted to go everywhere and do everything, and we just couldn’t.

Here is a list of cuts I had to make so you understand just how much is here:
1. The players are intended to find 3 mirrors that can be used to open a portal to the blood shrine, I cut it down to a single mirror.

2. There is supposed to be a fight with mirror version of the PCs before they can enter the blood shrine. That got cut.

3. A bailiff is supposed to show up and arrest the most suspicious person at the party, requiring them to either convince the bailiff they are good actually, or sneak back in with no one noticing. Cut.

4. Two of the four Kelmorton sons had hardly any interactions beyond one getting absolutely mauled to death by a rabid butler.

5. Two players wanted to explore the poison gardens because that sounds cool as hell, but we just didn’t have time. I had to tell them point-blank they needed to go back to the mansion. It was so disappointing because I wanted to explore the poison gardens too!

6. The map of the manor is INSANELY detailed, but there was no way we had time for me to tell everyone about where the linen closets were or what would happen if they opened the door to the scullery (probably something absolutely gruesome).

TLDR; This game is amazing. Give it the time it deserves. I would plan for at least two sessions if you really want the full experience of gushing over the ball, sneaking around the grounds, and experiencing the full horror that the blood shrine has to offer.

Acknowledgements

Get Blood Cotillion here.

One more thanks to Jim (@jimrossignol) and Marsh (@marshdavies) for creating this adventure. Thank you to the four Secret Sunday Sampler members who set aside their evening to play pretend with strangers on the internet, it was truly a joy. And a special thank you to the designer of the Secret Sunday Sampler logo kraftpaperhat.

No AI was used in writing this blog (I assume. There is likely a deeper philosophical discussion about what counts as artificial intelligence and if we are truly just part of a deep simulation, and how can birds be real if our eyes aren’t real, but I truly don’t have the time to get into it.)

P.S. Here is a fun little tidbit since you made it this far: Buckleridge Manor, where this whole thing takes place? It is a part of the setting for the full game TEETH, but this ball is set 5 years before the canonical setting of the game. Through play you experience how the manor is shunted into its own demiplane.

P.P.S. Okay, I am almost done, I promise. I didn’t want to focus on this in the body of the text because I don’t think it is actually that important, but the combat in this game is not heavily fleshed out. Realistically combat should be one or two rounds max, and that gets messy for the final fight, which feels like it should be longer. Very quickly the PCs ran out of new moves to do and defaulted to “I just hit them again.” Luckily the combat was still only three rounds, so any monotony was quickly washed away, but don’t come to this game expecting drawn out tactical combat.