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There is a noise. A sort of shrieking, squealing sound, echoing through the storm. And it is getting louder.

“Hogmen!” screams the coachman, fumbling to load a flintlock pistol. 

“The Hogmen are abroad!”




TEETH: NIGHT OF THE HOGMEN is a grotesque, single-session table-top roleplaying game for 3-5 people. The players portray hapless travellers, forced to flee from a ravening horde of hogmen during one grim and grisly night in a cursed corner of 18th-century England. 

The game uses a simplified version of the Forged In The Dark rules to tell this troubling story of peril and unpleasantness, and, as a single-session game, is designed to be experienced as a complete one-off adventure.



(While stocks last, you can get a printed zine of NIGHT OF THE HOGMEN from our partners at SoulMuppet.)

If you'd like to hear about future TEETH developments, then why not subscribe to our delightful newsletter or join our friendly Discord?

The game was written by Jim Rossignol and Marsh Davies, with illustrations by Marsh Davies, too. Follow us on Bluesky, if you like: 

@rossignol.bsky.social
@marshdavies.bsky.social

NIGHT OF THE HOGMEN is a cut-down scenario based on our full-sized game setting, TEETH. We've also released two other one-shots of this kind. Find them, and anything else we do, on our main TEETH page.

GAME INFORMATION

Number of players: 3-5 (including GM)
Length: 2-4 hours
Release Date: 2021

23-page rulebook + playbooks.

Editable versions of the Playbooks compatible with Google Sheets are also supplied. Just copy them off and edit them yourself.


Updated 23 days ago
StatusReleased
CategoryPhysical game
Rating
Rated 5.0 out of 5 stars
(25 total ratings)
AuthorTEETH: A ROLEPLAYING GAME
GenreRole Playing
TagsHorror, One-shot, Period Piece, zine

Download

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Click download now to get access to the following files:

Teeth: Night of the Hogmen (PDF) 1 MB
Teeth: Night of the Hogmen (low ink version) (PDF) 236 kB
Teeth: Night of the Hogmen (spread format) (PDF) 1 MB
Teeth: Night of the Hogmen - Players Section (PDF) 718 kB
Teeth: Night of the Hogmen - Players Section (low ink version) (PDF) 101 kB
Teeth: Night of the Hogmen - Playbooks (PDF) 236 kB
Teeth: Night of the Hogmen - Playbooks (low ink version) (PDF) 194 kB

Comments

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This is so great. Forgive the pun, but the rules lite approach gives you just enough mechanical crunch to get your teeth into and so when coupled with the sparse but evocative world building, the whole thing comes alive so quickly and easily. 


As one shots go, Hogmen makes me wonder why we even bother with laborious character creation processes for campaign play. I want a supplement of characters as hilariously written and mechanically expressive as 'Sir Shartle Pudget'. 


Our group has played a number of Forged in The Dark Games but not for a couple of years and this was the perfect return. Having bought the other two modules, I can't wait to run them and eagerly awaiting the full release. Fab. 

So glad you had fun with it! The pre-made characters were  a joy to write, as you can probably tell.

(+1)

I ran this a few weeks ago as a relatively inexperienced GM with two totally newbie players. We had an absolute blast. Players really got into the characters thanks to the juicily lucid descriptions on the sheets. Running the whole thing felt pretty easy even with my absolute fear of being under prepped.  The clocks system was perfect for illustrating the rising peril.

Literally rising peril for one character who, stuck halfway up a ladder, found his ankle gradually gnawed away from below. Between a pig and a bell-tower, if you will.

Only slight concern (mine, players were happy) was the feeling that I railroaded the whole thing a bit too much, which I think was me rather than the scenario. It is a fairly linear setup which helps keep it simple to run and more accessible for the new player, I suspect.

Thank you Marsh and Jim - can't wait to try the next two out on some poor grubes.

Just ran this tonight with me on GM and 4 players! A really easily prepped two hours of game, though I did get some sounds effects ready before which really added to the atmosphere, and because I let people choose characters in advance the player on Laconicus Strong could prep some appropriate awful poems to drop into dialogue when appropriate. 

Overall thoughts:

  • It's a great introduction to some of the basics of the system; dice, effects, guts, and clocks. It's linear OVERALL so to get the most of the system I'd recommend keeping the encounters quite high level so they can really craft their own mayhem within them.
  • Make sure the difference between Dice and Effect are clear, and be clear the verbs under each attribute are how they're used.
  • I was too lenient with harm and guts spending, I absolutely should have been throwing more questions and tests at the players, tests on their worse stats (which alternatively forces them to push themselves burning their guts) and just generally more harm. I think the second part of the scenario can be stretched or shortened depending on how beaten up they are, but I think I would err on the side of desperation for a really cinematic climax.
  • Great advice from a later module: get the players to name any NPC they meet as it makes the inevitable messy death feel more personal (RIP in peace, Timothy Oliphant). 
  • A personal highlight: the player on Trode took to the game like a hog to mud, the ability for bonus effect by being disgusting lead to ever escalating displays of depravity (at one point he leaned in an started sucking an NPC's outstretched finger to assess his mental stability).

Blood Cottilion is next on the list, super excited for that!

Great feedback! Thanks so much for playing it, we really appreciate this sort of detailed response.

Found out about this from Marsh mentioning it on the crate and crowbar ages back. Really enjoyed running this for a couple of friends as my first time DM-ing

What I liked:

  • Each vignette, though concise in the text, provided enough meat for me to improvise some funny and frightening events
  • The character playbooks and descriptions really enabled my players to get into a role. I other games where I've been a player beside them they haven't been nearly as expressive
  • There's something delightfully theatrical about the situation and we couldn't help but all use expressive voices which isn't something I've ever done before

What didn't work so well (not necessarily the fault of the design):

  • Since it's such a frantic situation I kept forgetting to set up position and effect before my players would role and it felt weird to backpedal so I usually just made something up that seemed appropriate
  • We all didn't realise quite how many guts were available and quite how punishing Harm was and so we ended up in a situation where the characters had lots of guts left but couldn't use it to resist harm because they already had two minor wounds etc. One particular example of this was that one player goaded a slap out of an npc and then didn't try to resist because they thought it would be funny. They ended up regretting it!


Thanks a bunch for creating this! I'm looking forward to trying blood cotillion when I've got some more spare time and can't wait for stranger & stranger and TEETH!

Super useful review - thanks for playing! You make a good point about Harm and Guts. In longer campaigns based on the Forged in the Dark ruleset this is ameliorated by a downtime phase, but in a single-session game like this maybe that's something we need to tweak or flag up. Anyway, let us know how you get on with Blood Cotillion! 

I heard about this yesterday on the SU&SD podcast and printed it out the same day. Didn't have time to read the full rules or scenario before a few friends came over, so we just started with me quickly reviewing the rules, and reading the scenario as we played. It was super easy to run and get into and everyone had an awesome time. I love how short the whole package was and how I could read it as I ran it.

I've only played blades in the dark once (as GM) but I think that made it a bit easier to run. I'm super excited about the rest of the teeth system, but mostly to run more pre-prepared one shots like this. The pregen characters made it immediately evocative - from names to luggage to descriptions they really jumped off the page.

Eagerly planning running the 2nd one shot! 

That's lovely to hear! I hope everyone met a suitably melodramatic fate. Let us know how you get on with Blood Cotillion!

One suggestion I've got for others with small groups - I played with 2 players and so as the GM I played as one of the characters and killed them off as soon as possible. This helped highlight the tension and let me pick three items of luggage with large role playing potential to be left behind for the players to try and use. It was a real joy to see the players figure out something useful to do with a pickled octopus and a damaged brass trumpet :)

Also shouldn't the GM be called the Hogs Master vs Game Master?

Hogs Master, of course.

I ran this with my Blades in the Dark group last weekend and everyone seemed to enjoy it! My favorite part of the game was when my players leaned into the provided player characters' backstories, personality, and occupations – despite being minimal, they're well designed so it created a lot of amusing interactions – and I loved how the Hysterias only emphasized this further.

As a first time GM five sessions into our Blades in the Dark campaign, it was a little jarring that the Night of the Hogmen encounters are provided linearly but I ran it that way and my players didn't seem to mind.

If I were to run it again, I'd make a few changes to how I presented the game. Our session didn't feel dangerous enough – I think I started most social encounters in "controlled" because the NPCs had no reason to escalate but I think it created tame encounters – I think I'd go with "risky" next time. I'd also make the danger feel more urgent – there was indecision that felt out-of-place in the setting. I'd also be more explicit that they needed to prepare for a siege – it wasn't apparent until a few encounters in when they saw the clock ticking. And finally, I didn't realize it when prepping but a few encounters fall into common horror tropes and my players were quick to realize and avoid the consequences. If I were to run it again, I'd try to be less obvious. That being said, even without this, we had a good time.

Thank you for putting this together at a name your own price – I enjoyed it and I'm looking forward to future releases!

Glad it worked for you! I think you're right about the Risky position as default.

what are the special actions on the bottom right of character sheets? I dont see any explaination in the rules 

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Those are the additional moves you can perform by spending Guts. See page 20.

you gotta spend guts to ask “where can I hide here?”

Ah, i see what you mean - no, there's no special rules attached to that. Just prompts for asking for info about your surroundings. I can see that they should probably be labelled apart from the guts-spending rules.

(+1)

I had a chance to run this for some friends, some of whom hadn't played an RPG before; pretty much everything that could go wrong for the party did and everyone had a blast.

Will definitely but running it again (they only saw just over half of the game before the hogstorm got 'em) and very much looking forward to what's to come from TEETH. 

That's fantastic. Thanks for the kind words!

This is wonderfully put together and well-written! Time to start prefixing as many words as possible with 'hog' because it honestly seems to work for everything. 

I'm definitely tempted to run this for some new-to-RPGs friends too, it feels like the type of relatively simple but evocative concept that'd work really well.

Thanks for the kind words! Do let us know if you run it.

(3 edits)

I did end up running this and we had a great time! It was a little tricky managing the threat of the hogstorm, since the group became very interested in specific details of each encounter and setting... but I ended up being lenient (mostly) and it worked out well. Everything ended fairly spectacularly on a church roof that was very much on fire, and there may even have been a few sparks of unexpected friendship between Lady de Grope and Mr Wickle.

It was the first time I've run a Blades in the Dark system, so I found it a bit challenging to manage position/consequences, especially for partial successes. Overall, though, it a was a really smooth and fun experience - the players loved it.

Thanks for the kind words! Glad you had a good one with it.

Those Blades In The Dark dice rolls do take a while to get used to, especially if you are used to quite different systems. I couldn't see *at all* how it would work when I first read them, but now I am a total convert. (Obviously!)

I GMed this for our online RPG youth club and they loved it! Possibly one the best introductory adventures to the Blades system - such evocative writing and scenarios! Got that Sir, You are Being Hunted vibe ;-)

I now feel inspired to keep going on my Bridgeton Blades-hack... 

Fantastic! Thanks so much for the feedback. More coming soon.

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Idea looks pretty neat, do you have plans for translations? (Like, french?)

(+1)

No plans yet, but we would love to do so.