Wednesday, November 2, 2011

My Monster Ate The Principal

Alright, to keep my contribution to the blog this week from stopping at a bunch of fanboying, I figure I'll talk a bit about one of the two games I'd really like a chance to run. I was originally going to talk about Fantasy Craft, because I really, really, really like that game, but with Halloween barely come and gone, I figured I'd talk something a little more... monstrous. (Also, delaying the FC post further ensures I will be coming back to post more at some point. I go with what works.)

So, Monsters and Other Childish Things. What is it about? Well...

It's like Pokemon. Except your Pokemon is a fractal representation of a ninth-dimensional space squid, with tentacles that can reach through time. And your best friend has Einstein as Shiva, with crazy hair, four arms, and a third eye that dispenses atomic wisdom and atomic death in equal measure. And that girl that you have a desperate crush on and can't talk to without feeling like you're going to throw up has a swarm of zombie rats that disguises itself as a smelly hobo with a baggy old coat and floppy hat. And last week Albert the Destroyer got feisty during PE and blew out one wall of the gym, so you've all got detention, and she's crying because her rats ate her sister's poodle when it tried to chase them this morning and she's going to get yelled at when she gets home, and you're trying to think of something awesome to say to her to make her feel all better and maybe even notice you, but that bully that always picked on you is sitting two seats over and your squid is whispering to you dark paeans of vengeance and asking to be allowed to rip of all his toes and fingers and you're pretty sure that'd be bad but he keeps looking over at you and sneering and you're thinking about saying yes.

And that's before you add in cliques, wizards, family, mad scientists, grades, Men in Black, the angry vice-principal that hates you, and unknowable creatures from beyond the stars that feed on your misery.

 Benjamin Baugh, the man(iac?) behind the game, is a frequent poster on RPG.Net under the name Baileywolf, and the sense of gonzo craziness that infuses his posts there is what steered me towards MaoCT in the first place. I was not disappointed. The book drips with humor, dark and otherwise, and really sells you on the sheer weirdness of the game. The system is easy to pick up, a d10-based affair that has you rolling to collect matching sets, the higher the match the better. Character creation is doable in minutes, unless you're making your monster as well, and there's a random generator to make that a breeze as well. This is one of the big appeals of the game to me, that it could probably take me less than 20 minutes to get a brand new group from sitting down at the table to characters ready to go.

There are a couple of supplements released for MaoCT. The first one, The Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor, is really more of a setting book, but it's a fantastic setting, where you play orphans with strange powers adopted by a mysterious philanthropist and brought to a small New England town. Shades of Lemony Snicket. The other book is called Bigger Bads, which has a bunch of extra optiony bits for the game. You can have a monster the size of Godzilla, say. They also have the addition of Weird Skills, which let you make a character that can summon crows to feast on his enemies, or burrow through the earth like a Moleman. It's full of crunchy goodness.

So, the campaign idea I currently have tossing around in my head for this game is a sort of dark Harry Potter, with the students at a private school where things aren't quite what they appear. No-one will start out with monsters, but they'll be out there, in the halls of the school and the rural, oddly anachronistic countryside surrounding it. There might be other paths to personal gain the PCs can find as well... if they're willing to pay the price. It's going to be two parts just trying to survive long enough to graduate, and one part trying to figure out all the little secrets the Academy holds. I'll be going a lot more in-depth on my ideas here, but not in this post, it's already getting away from me.

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