Look out, Tokyo, New York City, Sheboygan and a deserted Pacific island, 2002 is the year of the giant monsters!
Just in time for Origins this summer, Firefly Games released Monster Island: The Game of Giant Monster Combat and Mystic Eye Games came out with Giant Monster Rampage, two non-RPGs (although each has some elements that can point towards roleplaying) wherein the players create B movie-inspired giant monsters (or choose one from a selection of pre-generated examples) and then set them to beating each other up.
(And I must disclaim here that I wanted there to be a clear winner, because one of them, Monster Island, was written by two friends of mine, while I know absolutely no one at Mystic Eye beyond a handshake and a chat at conventions. And while I had nothing substantive to do with the creation of Monster Island, I have worked with Patrick in the past, and probably will again in the future. Grain of salt and all that. I should also point out that this review was written for Alarums & Excurions #327 before I saw the reviews of MI and GMR by Reidzilla; seeing those reviews inspired me to post this review here. Oh, and this is my first review on RPG.net, but I’ve been reviewing for A&E, Dragon, The Gamer, The Familiar, Abyss, Silver Griffin, White Wolf, Games Unplugged, Pyramid, Open Gaming Exchange, Campaign, and Paper Mayhem since the late ‘80s.)
Basics: Both of these books are 8 1/2 x 11 inches; for $10, Monster Island is 32 staple-bound pages long, while, for only $2 more, Giant Monster Rampage is 24 pages longer with a square binding (an example of the new printing systems in which books don't have to come in exact multiples of 16 pages, and possibly of the value publishers place in getting to that magical page count that'll allow a spine to be visible on a game store shelf when books aren't displayed cover out). The text in MI is a little denser than that in GMR, but not enough so that one book is a hard-to-read slog or the other looks needlessly padded.
Appearance: GMR has a colour cover by Ben McSweeney (something in me wishes that Ben had done the cover for MI, just to get Sweeney and McSweeney together on a single credits page) depicting a Godzilla-clone fighting a giant humanoid robot as the city's human inhabitants respond with panic and ineffective military strikes. Inside, there's a black & white McSweeney illustration every 4 or 5 pages, a few just being static group shots of different monster types, but most more active (my favourite being a giant bear throwing a giant toad monster). All are nicely rendered.
MI has a colour cover with a Godzilla-clone fighting a giant squid. It, as well as the black & white interior art, is by Bryce Nakagawa, and again it's very well done (my favourite here depicts an unconscious Gamera-clone being lifted by multiple helicopters toward Monster Island). The backgrounds of these illustrations are usually less interesting than those in GMR, but better use is made of shading to balance it. There's more art in Monster Island; a picture on almost every second page.
Also, Monster Island features an insert: a page of 15 colour cardstock monster figures that can be used as miniatures if you don't have a collection of appropriate rubber beasties and action figures. It would have been nifty if the figures were many times larger than they are, so that they'd be properly scaled to terrorize 25 mm lead or cardboard miniatures, and I can always try getting blown-up copies made.
Both games have a simple, readable two-column layout, but Monster Island does a better job of breaking this up with boxed material and inserted flavour text. Giant Monster Rampage, on the other hand, suffers from lots of layout problems, such as the last sentence of one chapter mysteriously carrying over to appear at the start of the next, and artwork that butts up against text without any intervening space.
Character Creation: Both games feature a point-build system for creating monsters; MI's using Gold Rush Games' Action! System, and GMR using Mystic Eye's Toy Battle System. In both, you start by choosing the type of monster you want to have (giant animal or human, robot, alien, mutated dinosaur, etc.), with your choice in MI just helping you to conceptualize the creature, while in GMR it has rules implications; e.g., a giant amphibian has access to powers like Poison Skin and Super Leap that aren't available to, say, a mutated plant.
In both games some stats are bought directly (like Strength), while others are derived from purchased stats (e.g., an MI monster's hit points are equal to 5 times its Life stat, while a GMR monster's weight is calculated from its Strength, Dexterity, and Toughness). Powers are then bought: from a single list of 13 generic powers (like Blast) that can be bought at different intensities and tailored with special effects (e.g., fire blast, cold blast, radioactivity blast) in MI’s case, or from a list of 27 specific powers (e.g., Energy Blast, Fire Blast, Freeze Blast) available to all monsters, plus a list of three powers exclusive to the monster type in GMR.
And this section reveals one of the problems of Giant Monster Rampage: a certain clumsiness in the writing and numbers. For instance, the calculation of a monster's weight involves totalling the three stats listed above and then multiplying the total "by 3, and again by 1,000," instead of simply multiplying by 3,000. Similarly, power costs range from 5 to 40 points, but since there aren't any power costs that aren't multiples of 5, the designers could easily have divided all numbers by 5 and ended up with smaller and more manageable totals.
Monster Island, on the other hand, has powers with simple low costs of 1 or 2 points per level of the power purchased (e.g., 1 point for every die of damage done with the Blast power), but on the other hand, while it's referenced a few times in the book, the Running power was somehow left out of the text; a patch can be found at www.firefly-games.com.
Rules: After character creation, Monster Island’s rules take up 8 pages. Giant Monster Rampage’s take up 11 pages; 20 if you count the optional rules (see below).
Monster Island’s combat system is the simpler of the two: you roll 3d6, add your monster’s Reflexes score to the roll, and if it’s higher than your opponent’s Evade score, a hit is scored. Special manoeuvres can be used, like a Ram that gives you a penalty to hit but increases your damage, and there are some modifiers, such as a distance modifier for ranged attacks or a 2 for attacking from behind. Powers like Armor or Immunity add to the victim’s Toughness score, and that number is subtracted from the damage rolled. If enough damage is done, the victim can be Dazed, and if it’s brought down to 0 Life, it’s dead, unconscious, or otherwise defeated.
Giant Monster Rampage’s combat is, again, a little more awkward. All attacks start with a base target number of 6 that must be rolled above on 1d10 for a hit. This number is modified up and down similarly to MI (and GMR has pretty much the same sort of special manoeuvres), but there’s more calculation to do, such as adding or subtracting (as applicable) the difference in the Dexterity scores of the two monsters, and there are more possible modifiers. There is no damage roll in GMR; all attacks are standardized, and cause a specific number of Wounds on a hit, but the victim gets to make a separate saving throw against each Wound point inflicted, attempting to shrug them off. Although I couldn’t find it explicitly stated in the text, I assume that going down to 0 Wounds finishes a monster off, although with the Healing round and powers like Regeneration I can’t be certain.
One major difference in play between the games is that Monster Island has the players simply roll initiative, and then each monster gets to do one move and one attack in initiative order, or it can choose to do neither and recover some lost Life points. Giant Monster Rampage has a wargame-like turn sequence. In initiative order, each player gets to work his way through six rounds: Atomic Power, where he randomly rolls to find out how much energy his monster has to devote to attacks and abilities this turn; Military Strikes, where the monster has a 1 in 10 chance of being subjected to an attack by a non-monster (the military units never actually appear on the board, but a random roll declares that a missile or some tanks caused him a Wound or two, or that a backfired secret weapon might actually give him an extra point or two of energy this turn); Movement; Ranged Combat; Close Combat; and Healing, where he rolls a separate saving throw for each Wound he is below maximum, trying to restore them.
Ease of Learning: Because Monster Island’s powers are open-ended and generic (that is, you can buy just a few or a whole bunch of levels of them, and you have to then define the special effects linked to them), character creation is more difficult for someone without a clear idea what sort of monster he wants to play, but more flexible for someone who wants to come up with something unique. Giant Monster Rampage’s situation is the exact opposite: its more extensive and less variable power lists give the player plenty of ideas to choose from, but there is little room to customize if, say, he wants a more powerful Mind Blast but only a limited Flying ability.
Thus the GMR character creation process is easier to learn.
But in actual play, GMR has more rules and more complications than MI, making it more difficult to learn how to play the game. For instance, the knockdown/knockback rules in Monster Island take up three short paragraphs, while those in Giant Monster Rampage take up a full page. If you’re going to be using the pre-generated monsters in either book, then Monster Island is a much quicker learn.
Still neither game is prohibitively difficult at either stage; MI boasts of 6- and 12-year-old playtesters and is recommended for ages 8 and up, while GMR is recommended for 12 and up, so neither can be really that hard.
Options: Monster Island has no optional rules, but Giant Monster Rampage offers 9 pages of them. Some cover things that are part of MI’s standard rules (hazardous terrain, picking up and throwing objects), while others aren’t covered at all in MI (weather conditions), or are slated to appear in an upcoming supplement (burning or flattening buildings). GMR has optional rules for flying or swimming at varying altitudes or depths (accompanied by a pair of very poorly designed charts, one of which is also on the wrong page), with variable range modifiers etc. There are rules to award experience points to monsters, or to penalize them with battle scars that affect their abilities, both allowing for campaign play with the same characters. And there are critical hits.
In some cases the lack of a rule in Monster Island is a drawback; the experience rules, for example, make winning a fight more interesting in GMR (although the rule in MI that a monster that defeats another must take a turn to stomp about roaring its triumph to the winds, leaving itself open for surprise attacks from other monsters still active does simulate the genre well).In other cases, there’s the question of how much you want to complicate the game. For instance, in order to speed play, Monster Island makes the assumption that all flying monsters are at approximately the same altitude above the playing surface: high enough to avoid hand-to-hand combat and ignore terrain features, but low enough to still be in range of missile weapons.
Giant Monster Rampage also includes 3 pages of tournament rules that get right down to the nitty-gritty of table setup, scoring conventions, time limits, bonus points for most unique-looking miniature, and troubleshooting things like ending up with an odd number of players in a one-on-one tournament. The rules work well enough, but I really question whether they belonged here at a level of detail more precise than maybe a paragraph or two about the general concept.
Resources: Both books include appendices with a list of appropriate monster movies to use for inspiration. GMR’s takes the form of a simple one-page list of movie titles. MI’s is in the form of a 3-page essay on B movies giving a bit of the history of the genre and including a plot synopsis of each film. MI’s list is, understandably, longer, and may be useful to casual fans of monster movies, although less so to true fans of the genre who already know about all of these films.
Each game includes a blank character sheet to photocopy; MI’s looks nicer, but both have useful rules summaries on them. Both companies’ websites feature downloadable character sheets and other freebies, and Firefly’s site also has a collection of monsters submitted in an online contest and then statted up by Firefly staff.
Background: Both games include a short back-story to explain why there are so many giant, mutant dinosaurs and the like tearing up the terrain: Monster Island’s invokes radiation, while Giant Monster Rampage’s talks about a virus triggering a latent gene. Both set combats on a South Pacific island where force field generators keep captured monsters from terrorizing populated areas, although GMR’s building destruction rules seem to assume that the monsters will get away sometimes.
Flavour: Both games capture the flavour of monster-to-monster combat well, but Giant Monster Rampage does a better job of simulating B movie tropes like entirely ineffectual military strikes against the monsters. The upcoming Escape From Monster Island supplement should even the score here, but that can’t be a factor in the review of the basic game books.
Monster Island does, though, have more discussion of the source movies, and includes scene-setting quotes from the movies at appropriate places scattered throughout the text (e.g., "Don’t be alarmed, ladies and gentlemen. Those chains are made of chrome steel." -- King Kong (1933)" before the Strength section). (My favourite of the quotes, though, was the last one in the book: "Uh, folks, we’re experiencing some moderate Godzilla-related turbulence. At 3,500 feet he usually lets go. At that time we only have to worry about Mothra. We have reports that he’s tied up with Gamera and Rodan at this time. -- The Simpsons.")
Sample Monsters: Monster Island includes 18 pre-generated monsters covering the spread of different monster types, while Giant Monster Rampage has 7 that do the same. MI also has those cardstock miniatures representing 15 of those 18 monsters.
Cost: Giant Monster Rampage costs 20% more than Monster Island, but it has 75% more pages. And that would seem to make it a better buy. But MI has significantly more words per page. Without hand-counting the words or writing to the publishers to ask for word counts, I’d have to say that it looks like you get roughly the same number of words per dollar in each book.
Conclusion: Going in, I was expecting there to be an obvious disparity between the books such that I’d be able to say that one was the better choice for everyone. Instead, the two both seem to handle the material adequately and provide good value for the money. Monster Island looks better, reads better, and is easier to play (especially for kids or novice gamers), while Giant Monster Rampage has a little more detail in a number of areas and is better priced if you’re not impressed by MI’s cardstock miniatures. Maybe when Escape From Monster Island comes out the scales will tip definitively toward that game, but as it is, this slug-fest was a draw.
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