Monsterhearts
| Designer(s) | Avery Alder McDaldno |
|---|---|
| Publisher(s) | Buried Without Ceremony |
| Publication date | 2012 |
| Genre(s) | Teen drama/paranormal romance |
| System(s) | Powered by the Apocalypse |
Monsterhearts is a game about "the messy lives of teenage monsters", developed from Apocalypse World. It is known for its handling of sexuality and queer content and its being nominated or shortlisted for five awards.
Monsterhearts is set in a fictional high school that along with the surrounding environment is named and fleshed out by all players during character creation. In order to start creating the setting, each player first picks a character class (called a "skin"), with each skin being both a type of monster and a metaphor for the struggles of a teenager. As a part of the character creation process and by using the elements provided as a part of their skins, the players define their characters' relationships with each other and with other elements of the setting.
Then the homeroom for their high school class is drawn, with the players filling in where their characters sit. The GM (known in Monsterhearts as the MC) then fills in some of the rest, leaving blanks for further exploration. At the end of character creation the characters will all have "strings" on each other that can be spent to manipulate, and more can be gained in the course of play.
Each skin comes with a collection of "Moves" or special abilities, (every skin starting with either two or three), a default "Darkest Self" that indicates what happens when things go really wrong, and a "Sex Move" that indicates what happens when that character has sex with another. In addition to the default skins found in the rulebook, two "bonus" skins were produced during the Indiegogo campaign, there was a Kickstarter with additional skins, and the rulebook provides guidance for making one's own skins.
The default skins in Monsterhearts are:
In Monsterhearts any PC may roll to turn any other character on, and all the characters have a sex move (as indicated above). This is explicitly because as a teenager you don't get to choose what turns you on, and because "Monsterhearts is a game about the confusion that arises when your body and your social world start changing without your permission." It also, because of this, has a double page dedicated to using Monsterhearts to explore queer content.
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