Chris (he/him)

(time for a new pinned post)

hail and welcome to the tooth & shore blog, where I share my art, writing and games, plus project updates and process notes. I'm tori (you can also call me tor!) and I make analogue games, collages, zines, and other experimental/hybrid odds and ends.

I'm very interested ecology, archaeology, folklore, fantasy, and people's relationships with art and with places, so you'll find these themes in a lot of my work! I love pushing at the lines between forms and genres, and looking for ways to encourage creative responses. over the last few years I've been finding TTRPGs to be a great medium for doing this. you can find my games on itch.io and all of the work I share here can be browsed using the #my stuff tag.

here's a friend – you can find him among many other digital collages I made to illustrate my mixed-media religion-building game Tending: a game of devotion

a game about relationships, joy, and overcoming birthday struggles!

'you are a kākāpō and it is your birthday' is a solo-journaling game about being the world's only flightless parrot, and knowing that anyone else would mess up your birthday party, so you have to throw it yourself!

You'll create your kākāpō character, lay out your forest relationships, and use those relationships to overcome problems that crop up in throwing the best party ever.

Inspired by this picture:

Live your kākāpō bday dreams here:

Go check it out and please share!

If you're local, come join us! We collaborate on events, doing game demos, working with local shops, do meetups, and other stuff! Most discussion is on discord.

Find out more here:

Now that The Frog Squad is out, I wanted to talk a little about how it's part of a series of sorts. The two other games are Wither & Grow (W&G) and The Serpent and The Spider (TSaTS). The games are not related to each other in system, setting, or themes really. So, how am I considering it a series? I'll try to explain!

Format!

These games are all made in the same format: a quarter-page (4.25"x5.5") zine. I print and assemble them with letter-sized paper that is folded, cut, and stapled. The Frog Squad and W&G use 4 sheets of paper each and TS&TS uses 3 sheets of paper. 4 sheets is probably the limit of what I will ever makes these games with. Beyond that, it gets a little tougher to staple easily and it just takes me more time to assemble each copy. I like making things that I don't have to send to get professionally printed and that others can (somewhat) reasonably print at home if they wanted.

Color!

These games are all intended to be printed on colored paper. Each game has a specific paper that I use when I print at home and I try to adjust the colors used for the illustrations and text to work well with the paper. Before I had any design ideas at all for The Frog Squad, I knew I wanted to use blue paper. I didn't know which specific blue paper I'd use until the game was nearly finished.

Mechanics!

My personal design style is simple mechanics utilizing common components. This usually means dice or playing cards. I want each of these games to be distinct without too much overlap in systems. W&G uses a d6-based dice assignment system. TSaTS has a simple skill-based system with d4 and d8's. The Frog Squad has a trick-taking card game system based on Hearts. While I can't make these games much more complicated due to the restrictions of the format, I wouldn't want to make them much more complicated because it wouldn't fit with my design tendencies.

Art!

The art in these games is done by me. In my other games, I often work with other folks for art, or manipulate public domain images, or use art packs. For these, I try to push myself a bit by doing all the art myself. When I was conceptualizing The Frog Squad, I was leaning towards using public domain art, and maybe do some collaging. This is something I still want to try at some point. But, I realized that I want to try a somewhat consistent feel in this series with the hand-drawn art style. So, I stuck with this restriction and took the time to draw (and re-draw and re-draw) each piece by hand. Not that I'm particularly skilled or am good at making art in other styles haha

Player Count!

The last parameter is player count! Along with the idea of blue paper, I had the thought to make this game specifically for 3 players before coming up with any other design ideas. W&G is a solo game and TSaTS is a duet game. So, I thought the natural progression would be to make a 3-player game. This is somewhat limiting for the future of this series maybe haha. I think I'd like to make a 4-player game. Maybe a 5-player game? Beyond that, no idea. The idea of playtesting a game intended specifically for 6 players is quite daunting.

The Format and Color restrictions are sort of what I imposed for the rules of the Lean Green Zine Jam. A big reason I created that jam is to set myself a hard deadline for making another game in this series. I had been noodling around with another one for more than a year, even partially designing a few that never progressed passed the google docs. The Frog Squad ended up being nothing like what I had brainstormed, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

An ultra-lite solo ttrpg set in a high fantasy universe. Play 1 of 4 characters and journal your way through adventure, danger, and friendship as you forge your own destiny.

Available in 3 languages and made to be printable!

Get it for FREE on Itch.io: https://brite-palette.itch.io/spark

More Women in TTRPGs.

Hello friend!

For folks who are curious, I did a bit of a deep dive into the many and wondrous ways trans women have influenced the tabletop roleplaying scene a year or so ago.

This one was something that I needed a minute to think about, because there are a lot of folks in the ttrpg world who probably either look like cis women or identified as cis women at one point, but have since then come out as nonbinary or trans-masc. (It turns out being allowed to play with gender in a safe space makes it easier to change it. Who knew?)

There are some designers who, if you had asked me just two or three years ago, might have made it onto this list. So I should probably put in a caveat for this list - all of the designers that I'm listing here identify, to my knowledge, as women. That may change!

content warning: a cis woman doing her best to point out and articulate an intersection of misogyny that doesn't apply to her. I'm also in the middle of a bout of insomnia so we're running with a pretty precarious scaffolding of coherency. We're riding by the seat of the pants here.

Why do you not feel represented by trans women?

I want to be blunt about this. Trans women are women. Right? It's a mantra we've been repeating for years now. Trans women are Women. That's the operative word in the terminology; Trans exists as a modifying adjective to inform the listener regarding relevant details of the women in question.

So let me rephrase the question. Why is it that, upon seeing a popular post celebrating how many of this industry's most influential figures are women, you felt the need to specify, and seek out only women who lack a single, specific demographic quality? Is there possibly some reason that you feel you cannot relate to trans women? Be represented by them?

I fear my tone is coming across as passive aggressive. I'm not trying for it to be. These questions are rhetorical, but I do mean them sincerely. Why do you feel the need to seek out female figures who aren't trans? What about cis female figures in this industry feel more relatable, or less represented to you?

More than half of the most important and respected RPG authors of the last 15 years are all women. I think it's really, really really fucking important that cisgender women ask ourselves why we feel uncomfortable that all of those are trans. Why we have trouble feeling like that's a win for us.

Because it is.