Ah, high school. Don’t you miss it, in a way? I often find myself longing for a simpler time, navigating a dystopian social landscape, boring classes, lame pep rallies, and my boneheaded classmates. I want to go back to when my greatest concerns were whether Dad would let me go to Joe’s party and who I was going to take to school prom – would Jill say yes? Just let a girl relive her fights against the eldritch horrors making themselves at home in the bodies that once held our faculty. And the part where she gave up and joined them.
Wait, did I say all that out loud? I think I’ve given too much away…
This is the flavortext I cooked up to interest my friends in a game of Monsterhearts 2, a Powered By The Apocalypse TTRPG created by Avery Alder. I played Dungeons and Dragons throughout most of high school, showing up once a week to roleplay a very by-the-book lawful good paladin. And also roll a bunch of dice and synergize different abilities with my teammates to kill monsters? D&D has always felt like two different games to me, a roleplaying system and a combat system rolled into one, and I’ve never much enjoyed the combat side. I usually play characters who hit things with sticks or arrows rather than spellcasters because I don’t feel like rifling through the ever-growing list of spells. So while I’m aware that this isn’t a new take, I decided to run a session of a game that was pure roleplay rather than a mix of roleplay and combat.
Enter Monsterhearts 2. Players are high schoolers who also happen to be monsters, in a world just a little more supernatural than our own. They pick one of several “skins” – types of monsters, ranging from the usual “Werewolf” or “Faery” to more human “Queen” or “Mortal.” Being a monster is transparently a metaphor for teen awkwardness, puberty, change, and also queerness. The vast majority of the game is roleplayed improv, where characters talk and banter with each other – the “rules” only come into effect in a few specific scenarios, where the characters execute “moves.” Basic Moves available to all characters are
- Turn Someone On
- Shut Someone Down
- Keep Your Cool
- Run Away
- Lash Out Physically
- Gaze Into the Abyss
I won’t get into the specifics of the moves, but they are generally used when someone is trying to perform an action in the narrative that matches their description. You roll to Turn Someone On when engaging in moronic high-school flirtation, and you Gaze Into the Abyss when you space out and try to remember what Dave was wearing last week. The consequence is that moves only come up, and dice are only rolled, in specific situations where you want to affect other characters in specific ways. There’s a lot less dice-rolling than your average game of D&D, and getting what you want isn’t as simple as casting Detect Thoughts. You need to have specific in-game reasons to use a move.
One other mechanic I’ll mention is Strings, which represent emotional leverage over a character. Characters “gain a String on someone” whenever they glimpse a moment of vulnerability, learn a weak point, or earn a debt, and they can spend that String whenever they want something out of their fellow monster. The mechanic is meant to encourage the angsty, messy character interactions that easily pop up in this game. I had a budding romance between two of my characters who gained plenty of Strings on each other, playing a savage game of teenage courtship with them.
Monsterhearts is a very open-world game. Each game is encouraged to start in homeroom to establish the messy social dynamics and characters of the session, but where it goes from there is largely up to the players. I didn’t prepare very much for my session – I whipped up a handful of side characters and decided that one of them would secretly be a robot escaped from a nearby lab. My characters were a quiet Witch, a disaster lesbian of a Werewolf, a Faery who knew how to tug on the Werewolf’s heartstrings, and a moderately insane Ghoul. As the rules promised, I didn’t have to do very much as the GM. My side characters – a clan of bullies, the weird shy kid – formed friendly or antagonistic relationships with the main characters, I slowly revealed lore about the robot kid as the players spent more time around him, and the game built to its chaotic climax practically on its own. (For those wondering, the Faery gave the robot kid over to the Faery King to fulfill her debt and be freed from the curse trapping her in the body of a high schooler. None of this was planned in advance, and the curse was not in the Faery’s backstory when we started.)
I really enjoyed my session of Monsterhearts, and so did my players. Freed from the adventure-oriented schema of Dungeons and Dragons, they had the freedom to build any character they wanted and then play that character to the fullest. And as the MC, all I had to do was build a world to provoke the characters, rather than whipping up an entire adventure story for the characters to slot into. The game exuded teen angst, created scenarios none of us could have envisioned on our own, and was full of joy and chaos. One critical note: it was super fun as a oneshot, but the same zany energy encouraged by the rules and settings would probably make it a bit exhausting to play for more than a few sessions. I’m not sure how well Monsterhearts would lend itself to a campaign setting. This might be more of my personal taste rather than a fault in the game, but I would probably give the players some in-game breaks from the non-stop messiness of monster high school. All that said, I had a blast MCing this crazy universe. It definitely piques my curiosity in Powered By The Apocalypse and other rules-light systems and Avery Alder’s other games published under Buried Without Ceremony. The next time someone says they want to “try playing D&D,” maybe I’ll try to reel them into a session of Monsterhearts instead.
