For the last couple of years, I've been tooling around with a hack of Monsterhearts, the game of messy teen romances in a dark urban fantasy setting created by Avery Alder. I've been running and playing Monsterhearts consistently since it came out, from running one-shots as an introduction to indie TTRPGs to campaigns for small groups of friends, and while I love the structure of the game, I'd also had some toxic experiences while playing it. On top of that, I'd been feeling burned out on the whole high school drama thing anyway, with a glut of games, films and TV series over-exposing the genre without really understanding it all that well. Since I'd pretty much run through all the playbooks I was interested in and dabbled with creating my own, I was reaching a point where I was done with Monsterhearts, even though it remained one of my favourite games.
Then Wednesday came out on streaming, the Addams Family inspired series based in a highschool for monsters, which you would think would serve as a natural inspiration for some more Monsterhearts gaming, but it actually inspired me to write a playset for my own game, Troublemakers, which is a softer take on young adventures & mysteries. Readers, this was the beginning of my Gothic Era and I ran several successful sessions of my Wednesday-inspired playset over the next couple of years; the main reason I didn't run it with Monsterhearts is that I was finding the game a little harsh. Monsterhearts deals with the realities of growing up, through the use of metaphors in the form of its monstrous protagonists, all of them struggling to find their place, and I soon came to realise that I've burned out on that grimmer style of play. I wanted something a little softer, more romantic and escapist, more melodramatic if you will, and so I found myself writing a deep hack of Monsterhearts I dubbed 'Monsterhearts Gothic.' I relocated the action from a modern American high-school to an historical European boarding school and asked myself, what differences would that make to the mechanics of play? What I came up with was a remix of Monsterhearts, taking familiar moves and concepts and shuffling them around, but also adding my own distinctive touches, like a new way of depicting physical conflicts and a new(ish) set of playbooks to fit the tone.
This hack soon became a favourite of mine, after a little back & forth with the initial playtesting to refine some of the ideas, and just recently, I offered to run it on Start Playing, the pay & play TTRPG site, just to dip my toes into the waters there. I'm not going to go into all the ins and outs of the hack here, or my experiences so far on Start Playing, which are limited anyway; instead, I want to talk about unexpected choices and why they can make games great.
Let's start with 'The Beloved', my remixed version of 'The Mortal' from Monsterhearts; like the Mortal, their story is intimately entwined with another character's, but in a Gothic, melodramatic way, with the focus on the scandal it can create if the secret passion between the two should become public. The intent, as with the Mortal, is for whoever plays this character to agree with another player that their two characters are romantically entwined, but what if the Beloved's admirer isn't a character at all? When discussing concepts for PCs, the idea came forth that the Beloved could be the fixation of a non-corporeal entity, an ideal or elemental rather than a living being. What if you were loved by the springtime? Or by a river? Or by the night itself? With the Beloved's ability to toy with their admirer's affections, this has the potential to create devastating consequences for everyone else! Imagine if spring itself listens to your confessions and forgives you; what might they do to those who gave you regrets? If you runaway to be with the river, where do you end up? If the night shapes itself to be mre pleasing to you, what does that mean for the moon & stars, and for the hours of day & night themselves? Will an adoring manifestation of night create permanent darkness across the land so that they can spend more time with their beloved? These questions and more have still to be answered.
Next we have 'The Invisible,' inspired by classi literature like The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells, but also taking notes from modern fiction such as the "Out of Sight, Out of Mind" episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the 2020 film version of The Invisble Man from Leigh Whannell. The concept here is simple: what if you could turn invisible whenever you wanted and take advantage of the power it granted you, but turning visible again took some kind of effort or sacrifice? The intent here is for the character to be played as literally invisible, but here we talked about social invisibility and a character who just wants to vanish from the perception of others to escape the burden of popularity, a kind of inversion of the idea in Buffy, where an overlooked student quietly disappears entirely. Normally with The Invisible, the trigger to change back is something like an injection of fresh human blood or sharing a moment of intimacy with another, but we also talked about strings, a social currency in Monsterhearts also used in this hack. One suggestion on the playbook is that another character must spend one of the strings they have with the Invisible to make them visible once more, but we discussed the inversion of this, using an existing string mechanic: what if you spent a string with someone to tempt them to act, with the simple instruction "See me"? This simple plea, backed up with resource mechanics, changes the outlook of the Invisible signifcantly. Towards the end of our first session, the Invisible had slipped out of sight, just hours before they are due to make an appearance at a school group, so we'll see how that gets handled in the next session.
There's also 'The Hybrid', less werewolf and more The Island of Dr. Moreau or the folklore surrounding Spring-Heeled Jack; the playbook is tilted towards action and violence, but does provide space for other interpretations, which is what we got. The Hybrid in our game is more of an instinctive, semi-tame beast, with heightened senses and a need to obey others who give him clear commands, which is actually kind of perfect for a Victorian boarding school, so he should do well. On the downside, it turns out he's one of the heralds for the apocalypse, along with another Hybrid student, and while they want to embrace their destiny, the PC isn't so keen on ending the world. I was not expecting armageddon to be on the menu so soon in this game, but it turns out we're starting there and the clock is already ticking down towards doomsday.
Finally we have 'The Vampire', possibly the nearest to one of the original Monsterhearts playbooks, but remixed to focus on the powerful & mysterious bond between the Vampire and those who choose to give their blood willingly. They are still the most traditional of the character types, without getting into weirdly twisted versions like energy vampires or youth vampires, but the blood-drinking and the sensuality that goes with it is such an intrinsic part of Gothic fiction that I'd hesitate to mess with it. To shake things up a little for this character in the first session, I had them find the body of another student who had the hallmarks of death at the hands of their hated blood sire upon them, which lead to all kinds of misadventures, misunderstandings and suspicions. The body disappeared shortly afterwards, of course, leaving little evidence behind other than the Vampire witnessing it and the Hybrid scenting the lingering blood, so together they sought out the victim's body, asking the question, "Where is Bernard Thomson?" The answer was supplied right behind them as the cliffhanger of the session, when Bernard Thomson greeted them and asked them what was up, shocking both the PCs by his apparent resurrection. More to come in the following weeks, I can't wait to see what other surprising choices get made by the players and me.
