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The long:
The greatest thing about Monsters and Other Childish Things - Benjamin Baugh's roleplaying game of plucky schoolchildren and the irritating bug-eyed squamous horrors that live in their backpacks, emerging at moments of stress to eat the neighbours and (worse) the neighbours' pets - is its absolute consistency of theme and style. Everything about the core rulebook contributes to the game's smart-alecky Buffythulhu vibe: the minimalist cartoony artwork and notebook-inspired design, Greg Stolze's insightful how-to essays, and especially Baugh's inspired writing, which maintains a tone of creepy-comical melodrama even when presenting dry rules material. It's a thrilling piece of work, and crucially, it makes gameplay sound easy and fun.
One of the hardest tasks facing RPG writers is illustrating how the rules enable interesting play in the spirit of the gameworld; Baugh manages to make each play sequence and action seem like another tool for the players, a way in and out of trouble rather than an arbitrary mechanical device. The first seven pages of Monsters lay out its thematic concerns and basic player activities with astonishing elegance and concision; Stolze's One Roll Engine is a huge help in this regard. The ORE requires no player arithmetic after each dice roll - only counting - and this seemingly insignificant formal feature immediately distances dice-pool games from D&D-style roll+bonus≥target systems. Because the ORE is so simple and the gameworld so evocative, Baugh can sail through the game's basic technicalities at the outset and simply treat dice rolls and other mechanics as pure storytelling elements.
And what stories you'll tell! The game handles government conspiracies, superhero antics, heavy domestic melodrama, grade-school murder mysteries, dark-comic childhood-horror fantasy, and John Hughes-style teen dramedy with equal aplomb; it's not a 'generic' RPG so much as a tonally agnostic one. It's the devil spawn of Calvin and Hobbes and Men in Black. Monsters combines the genre-promiscuity of shows like Veronica Mars and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (both namechecked in the text among several other TV series) with an incredibly fertile and flexible central metaphor - some kids have monsters - and Baugh insists right up front (on page 10 in fact) that the game is supposed to mean something:
Since this is a game about childhood, monsters represent lots of things. On the surface, they’re big, scaly, scary bundles of superpowers. Monsters can do just about anything. Kids can do the usual things, like play video games or send text messages or punch or pick their nose. But a monster with vast fuming nostrils can smell the thing you hate most about yourself, or blow caustic snotballs big enough to stick a Volvo to the wall. And if you dealt it, then he smelt it, and knows just who you are.Monsters are all about power.
Monsters also represent unconditional friendship. Monsters don’t judge. They’re monsters. No matter how mad, bad or smelly you get, your monster will still love you. Your parents say that a lot, but sometimes...well, when they look at you that certain way when you screw up bad, you have some doubts. With your monster, there’s no doubt at all.
Monsters also have a tendency to get you into trouble. It’s sort of inevitable.
They don’t exactly have great moral compasses. Monsters just ain’t people. They don’t get it sometimes. If your best friend Typhon is a fallen Titan able to forge stars into javelins and chew titanium like bubblegum, and the gym teacher says, “Take a lap, Nancy-Sue! Time for the real men to shoot some hoops!”, it’s pretty darned hard not to let Typhon drag the gym teacher screaming through seventeen lower dimensional manifolds until his sanity curdles like lunchroom beef Stroganoff . Because Typhon really wants to do that.
People without monsters think its weird or something, and sometimes they get really angry or scared and they tell you to take your monster outside and to make it spit out the end table. Sometimes people show up in big vans with antennae and stuff on top, and guys get out with guns and helmets and they yell a lot, and then your monster has to eat some of them before they go away again.
Mostly though, you go to school (and it sucks). And your parents try and tell you what to do all the time (and it sucks). And then some other kid at school shoves you, and so your monster bites him a little, and then his monster bites your monster, and then the school is on fire (again) and the police get called (again) and you get detention (again).
That’s life with a monster. Sometimes it sucks, but it’s never boring.
It's good that Baugh is so candid about the metaphorical content of the game; this is no narcissistic White Wolf power fantasy dressed up as cutting-edge horror, but a serious game about frivolous things. It's also a goofy time playing make-believe, and Baugh's presentation ably captures that feeling of heavy lightness:
Relationships drive the action. Look at the relationships of every player character in the game. It’s the GM’s job to tangle up all those threads of human connection and see what happens. If you have a relationship with your Dad who happens to be town sheriff, and another player has a relationship with her Dad who happens to run the town’s drug gang, and your character totally has a crush on her character...Well, there’s your story, right there. Now I wonder how your monsters are going to handle all that?
The classic elegance of the setup is undeniable: take a painful emotional conflict or situation (powerlessness, boo!); amplify some pleasurable element (monsters, yay!) such that the stakes and unpleasantness of the conflict are also amplified (death, boo!); invite the players to do fun things (fighting, yay!) with scary consequences (getting eaten, boo!), and make sure the scary parts invite more fun (avoiding getting eaten, yay!); make sure the mechanical actions of the game strengthen the drama and keep players interacting. (For a 'fun' exercise, try describing any version of D&D in the same terms.)
However rich the game's thematic material, though, it will live or die on the strength and playability of its actual play mechanics. Fortunately, Monsters and Other Childish Things is a streamlined game with a great central mechanic. Stats/skills are typical: stat value adds dice to a pool, subskills increase pool if applicable. In the ORE, matching dice denote success, so a result of {3, 3, 4, 4, 6, 8, 8, 8} on a roll of 8d10 is called a 3x8, with 'width' (max matches, in this case a trio of 8's) broadly indicating speed/power and 'height' (8, the highest matched number) indicating quality/finesse. As the above-quoted text mentions, the game revolves around character relationships; the stronger a relationship, the more it can help an action roll, i.e. if you punch a guy who just insulted your sister then your roll benefits from your 'sister' relationship rating. True to its name, the ORE also determines damage and even hit location in a single combat roll.
The central conceit of the game is its most elegant mechanical feature: the children's titular monsters are powerful beings to whom the PCs can 'loan' relationships - but if a monster-augmented roll fails, the relationship suffers (and monsters can lower the relationship stats of children they defeat). The monsters want their children to be happy, see, but they can't help feeding on their relationships - friendly and bloodthirsty all at once. And how do relationships get repaired? Quality Time rolls, of course, which get harder as relationship ratings dip further. It's such an evocative mechanic that it leaves me a little embarrassed for e.g. D20 players (which I'm definitely one of!).
Crucially, the game isn't about combat; or rather it treats 'combat' as metaphorical conflict with claws instead of words. (The section on equipment begins What do you do if you find a gun? DON’T TOUCH! LEAVE IT ALONE! TELL AN ADULT!, then grudgingly provides basic weapon rules.) The worked-out combat tutorial is even titled 'A Conflict Example' - a deliberate and smart choice. The mechanical treatment of child/adult/monster relationships is equally evocative:
Monsters form emotional bonds with kids, not with grownups. The bond between a monster and a kid fades as the kid enters adulthood.The reason for this is pretty simple. Kids are emotionally exposed in ways that adults have outgrown. Remember how adults are mostly immune to emotional damage (page 28)? That’s because adults have learned to guard their feelings. They’re not as exposed. An adult has outgrown the vulnerability that made him or her open to a connection with a monster.
If you do run into an adult who still has a monster friend, it’s because that’s one vulnerable, needy grownup — one who still takes damage from emotional attacks from anyone — with one protective, desperate monster. Watch your step.
Sounds like the kind of metaphor that hardcore roleplayers can readily identify with, but whose full reflexive/ironic metaphorical significance might be lost on some readers...or maybe that's just my monster Mr Snidely X. Criticthulhu talking?
As for campaign material, Monsters includes a starter adventure, What Did You Get for Christmas?, which emphasizes the game's TV-series parallels by presenting a 'pilot' episode and three scales/vibes for continuation (one-shot blowout, somewhat broad episodic series, and season-long metaplot-heavy serial). The 'pilot' exhausts several of the NPC/plot resources given in the preceding chapters, and it's somewhat programmatic and linear in approach - in more or less every way this is as far from The Village of Hommlet as you can get - but it does an excellent job setting up a weird comedic horror vibe for the game: a kind of Breakfast (of souls) Club guest-starring the Men in Black. And the game's wide-open premise gives GM and players many, many options for the next chapter of the campaign.
It's not perfect, nothing is, but the Monsters rulebook generally balances mechanical and (for lack of a better word) literary matters with such delicacy that you won't notice the occasional tonal bump, bit of awkward phrasing, or dunderheaded editorial oversight (all five stats are listed on page 10, exactly one line below the words 'There are six stats'!!!!). Luckily, the really funny bits ('GUTS: How tough and dogged you are. Also, the most likely place someone's going to punch you') far outnumber the moments of puerility or awkwardness - like the dumb, unfunny 'Drunken Clown' NPC entry, or the unpleasant racial dynamics in the 'Gang Banger' entry on the next page).
Still, there's something not-quite-endearing about the teen boys' adventure tone after a while; after 100+ pages the dorky faux-masculinity of the text starts to feel a little too lived-in, the 'Girls are icky!' rhetoric stops seeming entirely guileless, and the inevitable comparisons with Buffy the Vampire Slayer get less and less favorable (in psychological and particularly in gender-dynamics terms) for Baugh's book. Indeed, the 'Antagonists' and 'Everybody Else' sections are in some ways the weakest part of the book, even if the starter adventure that follows is a fine piece of work.
But this criticism doesn't drastically diminish the achievement of Monsters and Other Childish Things - and Baugh's followup, the marvelous Gaimanesque campaign setting/expansion game Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor, addresses every one of these concerns while providing a genuinely novel twist on Monsters's gameplay (PCs have no backstories; chargen is part of gameplay itself). Candlewick turns the genre and theme of Monsters around a bit, and reading it I do find myself missing the rambunctious 'come back here ya little punks!' feeling of the original game, but together they constitute a big bold mainstream RPG with indie twists and of-the-moment Goth Babies aesthetics. I gotta tell you, I love reading these books, and I really really want to run a game with my friends.
