 Goto [ Index ] |
The first time I encountered Benjamin Baugh's work was when I read an excerpt for The Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor and was immediately struck by the quality of the writing. The excerpt that I read was good - an Edward Gorey-esque setting populated by NPCs with big, meaty story hooks attached - and I found myself wondering why I hadn't heard of the guy's name before. It did, however, resolve me to buy Monsters and Other Childish Things as a prerequisite for buying Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor.
Before I could do that, however, a friend of mine loaned me a copy of Don't Lose Your Mind, a supplement for the excellent Don't Rest Your Head. Don't Lose Your Mind was a collection of twenty-six really excellent powers/characters that expanded on Don't Rest Your Head's surreal setting into something really inspired, the way that Bearers of Jade turned Legends of the Five Rings into an under-the-radar horror game. And on the front cover, Benjamin Baugh's name. This guy's really good, I thought. Why haven't I heard of him?
And then I Googled his name and realized, Oh, that's Bailywolf. I know that guy. He's been on the forums forever, good citizen, no infractions, probably not a sock of anybody. Moderating a board tends to change how you think of people's attributes.
Monsters and Other Childish Things is, basically, a game where you play a child who has an imaginary friend, but one who got sidetracked through Lovecraft country before establishing a deep and loving connection with your PC. To quote from the book, your unicorn does not bear much relation to My Little Pony:
Dewdrop has too many dimensions and can gouge bleeding wounds in reality with his infinitely fractal horn. His dainty hooves burn the floor, and his breath makes Mrs. Wombatson's prize petunias wilt and shrivel. But he really is your best friend.
And your monster is not entirely under your control:
Monsters 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.
Of course, you're not the only one with a monstrous best friend; other kids have monstrous best friends too, and they don't necessarily get along with your monstrous best friend, and so they fight. And meanwhile, you also have the problems of your everyday life as a kid - homework, parents, teachers, video games, and so forth. And you also have to make sure that you don't wind up sacrificing your relationships with the people in your life to your monster's hunger. I should also note that the entire book is written in that puckish, amusing manner. Even if you're not interested in playing the game, it's an immensely amusing read.
MOCT uses the One Roll Engine system, which you've already seen in Godlike and Wild Talents - essentially, you roll a number of ten-sided dice and look for matches, which in turn determines how successful and how fast your skill/attribute check was, or where you hit and how hard in combat. Your kid gets five attributes corresponding to a body location - Face, Guts, Body, Hands and Feet - which in turn have three fixed skills that pretty well represent the range of what a kid can do, like Shop and P.E. (The game does allow you to take special skills with a GM okay.) To create a monster, you sketch it out on a piece of paper, then assign it hit locations and special qualities that allow it to fight other monsters.
The game also does something that I've read about, but not actually seen up until this point. Instead of being abstracted, relationships are quantified with dice - four dice for a strong relationship with your mom, one dice for a valued membership in the Boy Scouts. If you're in a situation where your relationship has a chance of helping you, you can add those dice to your roll, like using your membership in Boy Scouts to remember how to tie up the school bully, or using your mom's exhortation to do well in order to pass a test. Fail the roll, though, and you Shock the relationship, which needs to be repaired by spending time with the object of that relationship. You can also take emotional damage to your stats by verbal conflict - emotional hurt makes you clumsy, or sick to your stomach.
What's interesting, though, is the way that damage relates to your monster. Thanks to your bond with your monster, if you get emotionally hurt, your monster gets physically hurt and vice-versa. (It doesn't loop back and forth, though; it's one time only.) If you get ragged on by the punk skater kids, then it starts chewing away at your monster, making it that much more likely that the monster will make an appearance and provoking a monster battle. And if you wind up with Shocked dice in your relationship with somebody, you can always call on your monster to help you repair the relationship. But an eight-dimensional tear in the fabric of space-time doesn't necessarily understand how human relationships work, and if you wind up rolling the wrong way, your pet tear in the fabric of space-time can cause more harm than good.
I was actually really impressed by the system's monster creation rules - you draw a picture of your monster first, then assign it hit locations, which in turn give you dice to spend on attacks, defense and useful stuff. Like the Godlike system that it springs from, it's very abstract, which in turn lends it a lot of versatility. I decided to doodle a monster, came up with a pair of rhino beetle horns and came up with this:
In game terms, he's got a pretty good bite (5 Attack dice with four dice of extras and a missing die I should have stuck in there), death ray eyes (6 Attack, 5 Sharing), his tiny arms can untie knots and pick locks (5 Useful, 4 Sharing), and can run at around eight miles an hour thanks to his extra leg. He can also allow his kid to use his death ray vision (5 Sharing) and his knot-tying/lock-picking ability (4 Sharing) if a situation occurs where it's necessary. And this is just one way to go about making a monster - for instance, I could easily crunch his hit locations down to a few and have a lot of dice for attacks and defense, but might pay for it later as it's easier to freeze or stun a location with a lot of dice than it is to knock out multiple locations one at a time.
And here we swim into deeper waters.
For whatever reason - and I've said this before - I get the hinks whenever it comes to role-playing children, for a variety of reasons. One of them is because you already went through this; you already went through the various stages of growing up and you're not a child anymore. I'm at the stage where I should be raising kids, not pretending to be one. Another is because I have an instinctive horror of people who try to emulate the magic of being a kid again - the entire point of life is to grow up, not to frantically cling to one stage of your life where you didn't have any responsibility. It might be my curmudgeonly side talking, but I consider Peter Pan a horror story, not a role model.
On the other hand, there's also the option to play the characters as junior high or high school students, albeit junior high or high school students with access to monsters. There's definitely support for in the book, and the relationship system certainly can be used to represent the various webs of influence - but it's just so thematically jarring that I can't see doing it, at least not without completely rewriting the light and funny tone of the game to something much darker.
On the other hand, as I was writing that, I suddenly imagined a high school where Cthulhu's rising happened early, with the school's social structure reorganizing around the worship of the local Cthulhoid entities that have attached themselves to their new teenaged high priests. Go to school, feed your monster a freshman who's too catatonic with fear to notice what's happening, then take your freshly sated horror to war against the Winona Ryder-looking goth, her monster, and her bodyguard of lobotomized popular girls. Hm.
I was initially going to complain about the game's inconsistent approach to whether or not monsters exist, but it's ultimately left to the GM as to how much society at large knows about the monsters and the kids that they've latched onto. The default setting, "What Did You Get For Christmas?" has the monsters showing up for the first time, and allowing the players to make the decision as to whether or not the monster's existence will be kept secret, and most of the NPCs and monsters play to this setting. In the "Welcome to Pluto" setting, people know that monsters exist, and monster handlers are ostracized - but people come to them anyways when a problem needs solving. In "The XMFL", kids fight their monsters in public arenas for scholarships and prizes, in an insightful and dark parody of Pokemon. "Ugly Secrets" has the monster as a hidden force, and deals maturely with some of the more awful things that can happen to a kid - and how a monster can be both a help and a hindrance.
Speaking of which, "What Did you Get For Christmas" is a excellent introduction to the game, a cross between a school sourcebook and a short campaign involving the disappearance/replacement of their favorite teacher that features mad scientists, robots, aliens, Men in Black and a twenty-something drug dealer who still has a monster of his own - one who looks like "the queen from Aliens if it were a dude and drank too much beer and slept in its own sick last night." (I'm particularly fond of that guy and his monster because it warns about what happens when you make an effort to avoid growing up.) It's packed with funny, strange stuff - wolves made of shrubbery chasing the P.E coach through a meat forest, an eldritch square dance, a guy in an O'Malley the Anti-Drug Dog costume that your monsters simply cannot see, a horrible thing lurking in a toilet, and more than one insane teacher.
Just in case you're not already spoiled rotten with good stuff, there's an extensive chapter in the back of the book by Greg Stolze(!) designed to introduce people to the concepts of role-playing; I could go into detail about how good they are, but you can see them for yourself, here. (At the bottom of the page.)
Let me put it this way: With some revision, with a tighter focus, Monsters and Other Childish Things could be a masterpiece. As it stands, it's an ultra-flexible toolkit that allows you to come up with stats for pretty much anything that you can draw, allows you to run anything from Heathers to Calvin and Hobbes, and gives you tons of options for how you want to play the game.
However, with that flexibility comes a cost: The flexibility of the game means that there's no central idea for it to work around. Yeah, it's Lovecraftian - and much of the game's humor comes from the clearly Cthulhoid entities being filtered through a child's perception - but the Lovecraft is there for the humor value, not really for thematic value. Every game needs an underpinning in a question that it's trying to answer, and Monsters and Other Childish Things doesn't really have that. Vampire is about addiction, Call of Cthulhu about sacrifice, Dungeons and Dragons about heroism, Unknown Armies is about responsibility...Monsters and other Childish Things is about being a kid with a monster. It's not really about anything.
That's not to say that it's a bad game. In many respects, it's a brilliant one. And given that Benjamin Baugh is still around, I'm eagerly looking forward to the next game that he puts out, because I think that he's going to be the next big thing in role-playing.
-Darren MacLennan
