Interviewing Tor
By Alex White
- 4 minutes read - 675 wordsPlease tell me a bit about yourself
Hello! I'm Tor, and I'm a game maker, writer and artist from London. I publish TTRPGs under my imprint tooth & shore and I like to try doing something different with each project, and my games so far include Tending, a mixed-media journalling game where you create a sacred place inspired by nature and then spend time there as a pilgrim; The Sea Around Us, a collaborative storytelling and mapmaking game where the history of a place is tracked through the stories they tell about the sea; and my new project Kraldum which is solo again but much more mechanically complex. I also really love working collage into games, whether as illustrations or as an element of play.
What do you like best about designing games?
I like facilitating other people's creativity almost as much as I like making art myself, and as an interactive medium RPGs feel like such a great way to do that. Thinking about all the ways a game's design can scaffold storytelling, worldbuilding, image-making and more is endlessly interesting to me, and the feedback I cherish the most is when someone tells me one of my games helped them feel creatively energised.
What are you working on at the moment, and what excites you about it?
Right now I'm working on Kraldum, which is a solo fantasy mudlarking game. Mudlarking (searching river shores for valuable items) is another interest of mine and I've wanted to make a game about it for a long time. The original idea was to have it be a simple and fairly realistic little pamphlet game about walking along a river and what you might find, but the more I thought about how dungeoneering mechanics could map onto exploration of a tidal foreshore then more I wanted to make something big and complicated and weird. So it became a sort of personal challenge to make something much crunchier than I've ever done before, which I'm very excited about!
Can you tell me more about the mechanics you use for mudlarking?
I've gone a bit ham and it's honestly the best time. There's a core gameplay loop based on the tides: at low tide you go down to the shore below this huge ancient city, explore, encounter the creatures that live there, and hunt for items. The item-discovery system uses playing cards and requires you to add or remove extra cards to the table depending on whether the water is going out or coming in. Then at high tide you're in the city, studying your finds, trading them, and progressing your character. There's a bestiary inspired by the real ecology of the Thames, and encounters that can be resolved peacefully or violently. There are factions exerting power over the foreshore's existence and ways to align your character with each of them. There are so many tables for finds identification. And events. Also the phase of the moon is important.
What experience(s) are you trying to give to players?
For this game, I'm definitely trying to give players an immersive experience and a world that feels layered and lived-in. I'm also interested in making the writing aspect of the gameplay adjustable depending on players' tastes and needs – the game will be perfectly playable without having to write loads, but there's opportunities to lean into journalling and more detailed worldbuilding for those who'd like to. It is unavoidably a maths game, though. Everyone's going to have to do some number crunching.
Is there anything you would like to promote right now?
Yes! I have a crowdfunding campaign running for Kraldum at the moment, through to 27 October, as part of Gamefound's RPG Party. I'm hoping to fund a print edition and custom deck of playing cards illustrated with the items you can collect in the game. You can find out more here: https://gamefound.com/en/projects/tooth-and-shore/kraldum
Where should people go to follow you, and to find your products?
- I'm on Bluesky as @toothandshore.bsky.social
- Instagram as @toothandshore
- and my work can be found at https://tori-truslow.itch.io/