First pick your lawyer’s name. Make it suitabley evil and threatening sounding. Silly things are ok but maybe you should steer clear of the bad puns. And all puns are bad puns.

Who would play your lawyer in the movie version of your game session? This will help give you a better idea of what your lawyer looks, sounds, and acts like. If you can’t remember what the actor or actresses name is just write down who they played in what.

Dead Points: Many things in My Lawyer has Shark Teeth are measured in points, just cause. You have zero Dead Points, which measure how close to death’s icy embrace you are. Right that down on your character sheet, right now. It takes ten Dead Points to kill a fellow lawyer. Witnesses and other normal humans require only four Dead Points. Once you have enough Dead Points to kill you then you will, predictably, die.

Each Lawyer has the following attributes:

· Teeth: How good you are in physical combat, how strong, virile and durable you are, and how loud you can scream.

· Tongue: How good you are at lying, debating, and winning the trust of others only to later betray them.

· Suit: This represents the material resources you may call upon and the important asses you have kissed.

Divide thirty points among these attributes, with fifteen being the highest possible value and 1 being the lowest. If your relevant attribute is higher than your opponent's you succeed, unless they use Dystopia Points (described below). All actions are opposed; there are no free lunches here. Many times the gm will be forced to make up attributes on the spot. Sorry, maybe I’ll make a table or something later in the game. Most inanimate objects and forces of nature have 1 in both Tongue and Suit. If you are truly stumped as to what could be opposing the action you can always use Fate. Fate has 6 in every attribute, but it has a virtually limitless amount of Dystopia Points, though it rarely cares enough to dip in to them heavily. The usual difficulty scale is from 1 to 20. Fate, however, is very sensitive to the gm’s moods, and will lash out violently if the gm is ever angered. Do not be afraid to suddenly spring Fate’s wrath upon the players, and do not feel guilty about it later. After all, God hates lawyers.

This world is a very bad place and the shark toothed lawyer is a servant of that badness, thus Dystopia Points. Dystopia Points are very important and can be spent for many things. for instance, Dystopia Points can be spent to boost an attribute for a single action, on a one for one basis. Each Lawyer starts with forty five Dystopia Points. Unless you, the gm, want them to start with more or less than that. It doesn’t really matter, excepting how long a game you want to run. The general costs are as follows.

· 1: A single Dystopia Point can also be spent to uncover a mundane fact, or have an expert witness reveal a scientific fact, about the case, or any one witness, or to set an exact time for any one event relating to the case.

· 2: Two Dystopia Points can be spent to introduce an expert witness, whose area of expertise must be concretely defined, or single important document.

· 3: For three Dystopia Points the Judge will allow you to object to another lawyer’s current question to the witness, or make the Judge over rule that objection, or make change his or her mind after another player has spent three Dystopia Points to over-rule your objection, or make the Judge re-over-rule after your opponent spent three points to counter your counter to their objection, and so on.

· Four points will let you object to an entire line of questioning, gain a new witness, have a witness’s testimony stricken from the record, gain a new piece of physical evidence, or have a piece of physical evidence thrown out of court.

You won’t be spending more than four Dystopia Points at a time unless your trying to outbid another lawyer. Dystopia Points are something you should try save and conserve, but they are only useful when they are spent.

Each lawyer may pick one advantage along with one disadvantage. Players do not have to pick an advantage and if they decline they are similarly freed of any disadvantage.

The advantages are as follows.

· Steel Teeth: Every single Dystopia Point spent on Teeth counts as two. Also, you have shiny, metal teeth.

· Silver Tongue: Every single Dystopia Point spent on Tongue counts as two. Also, you have a three foot long, silvery-gray tongue.

· Sharkskin Suit: Every single Dystopia Point spent on Suit counts as two. Also, your suit is made from the skin of a dead lawyer inlaid with shark stones.

· Fucking the Judge: You’ve never had moral qualms about anything and going from lawyer to whore is a very small jump. Reduce the cost objecting to a lawyer’s question or line of questioning by one Dystopia Point and increase the cost of objecting to one of your questions or line of questioning by one Dystopia Point.

· Sniveling Assistants: You have a number of legal aides working underneath you. They are yours to use, abuse, mistreat, and order about as much as you could want. Essentially they let you take an extra action each turn. But your aides have attributes at half your levels, rounding down, half your current number of Dystopia Points, and cannot influence the judge or speak on the record. They can introduce evidence and witnesses.

· Whores!: The Remoras love you and your money. You can introduce a new witness, or cause a current witness to recant their story, for only three Dystopia Points, but other lawyers can expose your witnesses as the liars they are and have their testimony stricken from the record for the same low price of three Dystopia Points. Judges are unaffected by this advantage as they have their own whores already.

· Vampire: Vampires are actually quite common among lawyers and there is no stigmatism involved with the condition. You have fangs and drink people’s blood. This is actually quite pleasurable for both parties, and can be quite addictive for the human participant, provided you don’t just drink them dry. The only way to kill you is to stake you through the heart and cut off your blood, or expose you to direct sunlight with little or no cloud cover. Of course you’ll only be able to attend night court, but isn’t that worth it for eternal youth?

· Ghostly Medium: I sees me a dead people. The forgotten and tormented souls of the not quite damned assail with their thoughts and pains. Each turn you get to introduce a mundane fact for free. This fact cannot be added to the record but neither can it be contradicted by other facts.

· Psychic: Due to the mutant cancerous lumps in your brain you have developed a limited ability to read minds. Once per turn you can ask a player a personal question about their lawyer, or one of their lawyers legal aides, or witnesses. Judges are immune to mind reading, thanks to the pact with Satan that is required to become a Judge. Also, at some point after the game ends your lawyer will suddenly drop dead of massive brain aneurysms resulting in full on head explosion.

Taking a silly advantage gives you the privilege of picking a silly disadvantage. You could choose to pick a non-silly disadvantage, but that would just be silly.

· Gassy: You can burp or fart at will. Maybe you should start thinking about what you eat? If you are present you can one by rudely interrupt someone and decrease their Tongue roll by one.

· Sci-fi Geek: You can, at will, introduce a trivial fact from some science fiction book, game, movie, or television show. They don’t have to be true, they can even be from totally fictitious works, but they rarely have any real bearing or effect upon the case.

· Iron Chef: You are a member of the secret order of Iron Chefs and are trained in the ways of culinary combat. Once per game you may challenge someone to a Kitchen Arena Battle causing both of you to lose your turn. It might make you feel better when you out cook them, but no one outside of the Iron Chefs will really care. If someone defeats you in a Kitchen Arena Battle, by outbidding you with Dystopia Points, then you lose this advantage and they gain it. However you can still issue a rematch against that person. Kitchen Arena Battles must be declared at the beginning of the turn before any one else takes an action.

· Funky Swinger’s Pad: The music, the decorating, the furniture, the lighting, the colors, the patterns, it all points to a funky swinging party man. You gain a plus 5 to your Tongue when it comes to seducing and pleasing your fine funky prey. This gives no particular advantage to using this as leverage or blackmail, just the act it self.

· Crazy Hair-Do: Physically the average group of Shark Toothed Lawyers look pretty much identical, and they use their clothing, their scars and deformities, and their hair styles to tell each other apart. Your hair is wild, rebellious, and not a naturally occurring color. The young, the insane, and the pointlessly rebellious will treat with kindness, or at least grudging admiration, effectively increasing your effective Tongue by four points when interacting with them. However the uptight, conservative, traditional, suburbanite mother types of the world will look down at you, sometime even with fear, reducing your effective Tongue by four pints when interacting with them.

· Owns a Motorcycle: Ooooh, look at mister tough guy, with a leather jacket over his button-up shirt, tooling around town on his lunch hour. This increases your effective Teeth by 4 for intimidation purposes only, and your effective Tongue by four when interacting with people who want to think they are bad-asses but really aren’t. However, it decreases you effective Teeth and Tongue by 6 when interacting with people who really are bad-asses. The distinction is, yet again, a gm call. Lawyers are unaffected, though some of them might think it’s a bit silly.

· Snake Eyes: You can see heat, making it easy for you to track someone, hard for people to sneak up on you, and relatively easy for you to tell is someone is lying or flustered, giving a plus four to all these actions. You also have totally creepy yellow corneas with vertical black slits for pupils.

· Amphibious: You can’t drown a shark toothed lawyer, it just won’t work. But that doesn’t mean that they’re all necessarily at home in the water. You, however, are as adept at swimming as the sharks you descended from and can dive to any depth. You get a plus four to your Teeth when you are underwater. Also, you have webbed fingers and toes.

· Wall Crawler: Just like your favorite forty-five year old bachelor Peter Parker you can cling to sheer surfaces. Of course you can’t wear shoes and the palms of your hands and feet are always covered with a gooey adhesive, making handshakes something to avoid. Do not attempt to climb building in the rain. If it begins to rain while you are climbing a building, get down immediately! If you cannot get down seek out a ledge or balcony.

· Octopus Kin: Sure, our ancestors mingled their blood with sharks, but at least they didn’t fuck anything with more than four legs. You have the lower torso of an octopus. Big long tentacles, nasty beak in place of your genitalia, sharp edged suckers, that sort of thing. Think of all the possibilities! You can walk while holding up to five things! You can swim very fast in one direction, but are not necessarily any more agile in the water than usual. You get a plus three to your Teeth for the purposes of grappling things, including hanging on to things. You can shoot ink! And you can economically revert to using a quill at work. Your scream has a low, inhuman, gurgling sound to it.

And now for the much more fun set of disadvantages.

· Gingivitis Ex Mortis: Lawyers an actually regenerate as many teeth as needed, it is your gums that are damaged. You must spend two Dystopia Points to increase a Teeth action by one point. Perhaps you have had fragile plastic dentures put in, or perhaps you wear your stinking gums and yellowed stumps with pride.

· Droning Voice: Your voice has a certain pitch and vibration that turns people’s minds right off. While not effective enough to make you a super villain it can make it hard to carry on a conversation. You must spend two Dystopia Points to increase a Tongue action by one point. You voice sounds some thing like a cross between Barry White and Ben Stein but with a little more evil.

· Public Defender: You poor bastard. Perhaps once you were a successful independent, picking and choosing your cases. You probably lived out in the country somewhere with a nice mid-sized island and pod of fine young Remoras. But then you came to The City and you made a stupid mistake. And they dragged before a judge and this was your horrible punishment. You pray for they day when they will finally kill you and end this torment. Also, your pay sucks. You must spend two Dystopia Points to increase a Suit action by one point.

· Serial Killer: You murder people on a regular basis. Define your lawyers Modis Operandi (the manner in which you like to kill people, and no you can’t just say he has no particular preference) and his preferred type of victims. Be careful, getting convicted as a murderer will boot you out of the game just as quickly getting killed.

· Secret Identity: When the main way you tell people apart is by their clothing and hair getting a make over is the equivalent of changing your name and moving to New York City. You should decide what you did, or got mixed up in, that necessitated the sudden disappearing act and what horrible repercussions would come if your identity were ever exposed. The gm and other lawyers are free to introduce characters that are or were intimately involved with the event, whatever it was.

· Human: You are secretly a very cunning, and no doubt deranged, human posing as a shark toothed lawyer. Your disguise might include fake teeth, waterproof makeup, and a cleverly concealed underwater breathing apparatus. If your true race is ever revealed you will immediately be set upon by your once colleagues and devoured.

· Addiction: You are totally addicted to some thing that you will define. This could be a physical addiction, such as heroin, cocaine, or human brains, or it could be a mental addiction, such as gambling, comic books, or underage

· Pedophile: Hey, it’s topical. You don’t just want to kill and eat little children, like most shark toothed lawyers, you want to have sex with them first. Of course this generally frowned upon and technically illegal. Don’t get caught.

You may only take a silly disadvantage if you have already selected a silly advantage.

· Big?: You are actually a shark toothed law student at the young age of twelve given an adult body by a · magic carnival fortune telling machine. Act appropriately.

· Unusual Odor: Sure we all kind of smell like fish, but your smell id different. It’s not that you aren’t bathing, it’s just that you’re unwholesome. You get a minus 1 to your Tongue when interacting with someone if you are in close proximity to them. You should define exactly what it is you smell like, and it can’t be pleasant.

· Flaming: Shark Toothed Lawyers have no real sexual preference, they’ll fuck anything if it would be to their advantage. But your flamboyant, effeminate ways still rub some people the wrong way. You get a minus 1 on all Tongue rolls against confirmed repressed-homosexual homophobes. But you’ll probably have more fun than them.

· Messiah: You are the son of God. Or at least the most recent one. At some point in the game, at the gm’s whim, you will, one by one, do all of the following. Kill someone and then immediately resurrect them with but a touch. Turn the judge’s pitcher of water or blood in to a ninety proof wine. Accidentally fill something with stale bread and salted herrings. Question a witness causing hundreds of demons to leave their body in the form of panicked hogs. Attempt to dive in to a body of water only to find that you are "walking" on the water and just broke your nose. Have your mouth filled in with concrete. And be arrested, betrayed by your people, sentenced to death, crucified, tortured, degraded, killed and resurrected. When you die you won’t really die but instead directly ascend in to hell in a manner highly similar to dying but without leaving a corpse.

· Wereshark: You periodically lose consciousness, transform in to hideous humanoid shark, and hunt for living flesh. Every third turn loose consciousness for several hours, transform, and murder and then consume one witness, determined by the gm.

· Evil Twin: You have an, even more evil than you, identical twin running around who likes to mess with you, just for shits and giggles. Every third turn, or more if someone spends a Dystopia Point, your evil twin appears somewhere outside of court and screws with something. Encourage your gm to be creative.

· Flipper Baby: Your egg-sac was contaminated by chemical pollutants. Ether your crab-like hands jut directly from your shoulders, and you can’t carry too much at one time or wipe your ass without a stick, or your twisted lumps of feet hang directly from your waist, and you need a wheelchair or cart or something to get around on land. Either way you function normally underwater.

· Flammable Body Fluids: The fluids inside you are chemically similar to gasoline. Don’t get near any open flames. However there is an upside as you can easily make your own molotov cocktails. Or at least piss in a bucket, douse someone, and torch away.

· Eel Kin: You have the lower torso of a giant eel. You move normally underwater but are quite slow on the land, having to use your hands when you need to hustle. Also, your scream has a very disturbing high pitched screech to it.

· Kuato: You have a freaky mutant, telepathic baby face, with tiny midget arms, on your stomach. Every now and then it will possess your body and act through you, but it is very clever and will never knowingly get you in trouble. However you crazy siamese-twin is a well known traitor, dissident, criminal, subversive, radical anarchist, and probable terrorist. So try not to let anyone find out. In fact, you are one of many such afflicted, but for safety reasons you never work in groups, or even pairs.

My Lawyer has Shark Teeth play is divided in to turns, each of which is a full round of actions. I could have called these something unique and witty, instead of just Turns, but why bother? Lawyers can bid Dystopia Points to get first initiative through Screaming. Screaming is the means the shark toothed lawyer's anceint ancestors used to determine dominance within the tribe, or school. If no one screams back you go first. If you are opposed initiative goes to the loudest and most menacing screamer, determined by the number of Dystopia Points bid. The highest bidder gets to go the first, the second highest goes second, the third is third, and so on. If no one wants to go first then the first initiative will go to the player on the left of the player who went first last turn. If no one wants to go first on the very first turn then the gm will pick a number between one and twenty and all the players will guess, the player who gets the closest gets the dubious distinction of the taking the game’s first action. If two players both guess equally close then the matter will be decided in a match of rock, paper, scissors, best two out of three. If there is a tie between more than two players initiative will be decided by hair length, longest wins. But let’s hope it never comes to that because, whoo, that’s a lot of rules I just wrote there.

Each lawyer my take one action in a turn. The standard actions are as follows.

· Research and Investigation: This includes things like finding witnesses, evidence, and introducing a mundane or scientific fact. Every time someone creates a fact, person or thing it should be noted in either the gm’s notes or on the Fact Sheet Five. Witnesses and physical evidence can later be proven false but facts are inviolate and immortal, even if they cannot be proven in court. Facts that are introduced may not invalidate facts already in existence on the Fact Sheet Five. Mundane facts refer to specific instances, such as the witness’s apartment is infested with roaches, while scientific facts relate to any and all instances of a particular thing, such as cockroaches are the servants of the devil. These facts need not mach up with what we consider reality. Research and Investigation usually involves travel to and from the court, the lawyer’s offices, and various places in and around the city. Work with the gm to define the specifics of your turn’s action.

· Address the Court: Essentially this gives you free time to hog the spotlight with a dramatic monologue on which you can outline some particular logical, ethical, moral, or philosophical argument in favor of your case. All of these monologues should be concisely summarized on the Fact Sheet Five in a way that cuts through as much of the lawyer’s bullshit.

· Interference: Instead of working on their own case your lawyer can instead concentrate on delaying another’s. You must be very specific about how you are going to interfere, be creative about it, then your gm will decide on the relevant attribute, and the bidding war will begin. You can attempt to interfere with someone else’s interference. In fact it is entirely possible for every one to spend a turn interfering with each other’s interfering.

· Stalking: Sharks, and shark-like lawyers, have a quasi-ritualistic pattern to killing things. Before you can attack someone you must Stalk them for a full turn. During this time you follow the victim around, watching their movements, analyzing their weaknesses, and memorizing their habits, plotting the specifics of their demise, and working yourself up in to a blood frenzy. You must plan out the exact details of how you will kill your opponent now, jot them down, and let the gm see them. But be careful, don’t get caught. And if you decide to stalk someone before they have taken an action then be prepared when they start to stalk you right back.

· Murder: So you’ve spent an entire turn Stalking your prey. Now it’s pay off time. Each lawyer has ten Dead Points and everyone else has four. You must spend Dystopia Points to give your opponent Dead Points but your opponent can spend Dystopia Points to block your Dead Points or to protect one of their witnesses. So make sure you have more Dystopia Points than them. You cannot spend more the ten Dynasty Points to attack or defend in a given murder attempt. You cannot protect a witness unless you introduced that witness or you are questioning the witness in the same turn as the attempted murder. You do not need to spend a turn stalking if you someone if you attempted to murder them in the prior turn. But if another lawyer can prove that you are a murderer than you will be taken to jail, tortured to death, and eaten. If you are the last lawyer left alive on the case then your side wins.

· Argue Your Case: Also know as "I’d like to solve the puzzle". You must make a coherent argument, using the facts at hand, about why your side is correct. The other players must then use the available facts to cast doubt upon your argument. If your argument stands for two full turns, after it is introduced, without someone coming up with a plausible flaw then you win. Arguements must be stated in the form of a series of "If clause a, then clause b" statements using the contents of the Fact Sheet Five. You need not use everything on the Fact Sheet Five, only those facts that you think pertain to your arguement.

GM's Section

You all know what a gm is, right? I could have used something cooler than just plain, boring gm, like Lawgiver, or the Master of Fate, or Game Judge, or Satan, bu once again, why bother? As the gm it is your duty to keep notes and pay attention to the Fact Sheet Five so that you can stay up to speed on where the game has progressed, while also doing regular gm duties.

Sample Cases

Keep in mind that courts of the city defy our earthly expectations. These courts are not just legal, but also philisophical. Lawyers argue over truth it self, and the court transcripts are sent to the word priests of the City Library, wherein all mortal knowledge is both stored and dispensed. Thus lawyers may find themselves arguing over various points of view on almost any subject. All court cases must be summed up in a single question. There can be as many possible solutions as there are players present. If there are less players than the immediately obvious possible answers just assume that the others were vetoed somewhere within the great, faceless mass of the City's beaurocracy.

Here are some already thought up cases to get you started.

Who killed William Whately, the creepy comicbook store owner?

· He was killed by a local street gang called "The Squids" in a botched robbery attempt.

· He was murdered by his own children who were impatient for their inheritance.

· He was killed by supernautral forces.

· He was killed by otherworldly creatures from space.

· He is not dead, merely missing.

· He is still alive, his death was faked.

· He was murdered so as to prevent his summoning a creature who would have destroyed the world.

Should gravity held accountable for the deaths it causes?

· No, forces of nature are not responsible for their actions.

· No, because that would be physically impossible.

· No, because the good deeds done by gravity should outweigh its bad ones.

· Yes, it is our moral duty to condemn it even if it is physically impossible.

· Yes, we must create a personification of gravity and either imprison or kill it.

· Yes, we must put an end to this horrible plague we call gravity.

Does the sun revolve around the earth?

· Yes.

· No, it's the other way around.

It's Finally Over

So, yeah, that’s it, My Lawyer has Shark Teeth, that’s the entire game. Short like, huh? Well, have fun, don’t hurt yourself.

· Coming Soon!

Watch this website for the exciting future updates/supplements for you, assuredly, favorite game My Lawyer Has Shark Teeth! These include, but are not limited to, the following.

· A Tale of Two Lawyers A.K.A. the example of play!

· The City Primer the regional setting book!

And eventually (maybe)

· All Lawyers Go To Hell including full rules for unique judges, an exciting new playing field for your fiendish lawyer, and an almost, partially, fully complete experience system!