Monsterhearts [System] - Sexy Teen Drama Interest Check [NC-Exotic]

Started by Umbral Sanguinus, May 12, 2013, 08:42:03 PM

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Umbral Sanguinus


I don't normally do group games, but I have a passion for this game and this system and I want to embrace the darkness.

What is it: Monsterhearts lets you create stories about sexy monsters, teenage angst, personal horror, and secret love triangles. When you play, you explore the terror and confusion that comes both with growing up and feeling like a monster. Based on the Apocalypse World engine, this is a game with emergent story, messy relationships, a structured MC role, and a focus on hard choices.

What is isn't: Monsterhearts isn't about monsters having sex, who happen to be teenagers. It is about teenagers who happen to be monsters, with all the sense of isolation, revulsion, doubts and insecurities that entails. It is dark, the world is flawed, and you are truly misunderstood.

Sexuality: This isn’t really a game about monsters. It’s a game about the confusion that arises when your body and your social  world start changing without your permission. Every rule related to sex and sexuality in Monsterhearts is a game manifestation of real-life sexual dynamics, good and bad, healthy and unhealthy. Monsterhearts gleefully encourages people of all identities to explore sexuality in every permutation, often with great self-examination and as uncomfortably as possible. When someone decides to roll to turn you on, you don’t get to block that move by insisting that you’re straight (or any other convenient excuse that you've got up your sleeves.) The dice decide whether this sexy person’s sexy behavior changes things.  What  you  are  in complete control of, however, is your reaction to what they do. Thus, any sense of shame in Monsterhearts is personal, centered on whether you feel you have betrayed yourself or someone else. It should not need to be stated, but all characters will be at the age of consent and legal, even if it means tweaking the narrative to enforce this expectation.

What do I need to know to play? Not a lot! The rules are very simple. You will fill in some blanks and make a few choices and then be ready to go. The central mechanics is roll to find out what happens, which is 2d6 plus a stat. 10+ is a success, 7-9 is a success at a price, and 6- is a failure/twist/complication. The other mechanic are Strings. Strings are the emotional hold that you have over people. They are earned through a number of moves: turn someone  on, shut  someone  down, lash  out  physically,  and  various moves.  When someone gains a String on you, it means that in  some way they’ve gained emotional power over you. You  don’t  need  to  define  what  that  emotional  power  looks  like right away; Strings can remain abstract until they’re  actually spent to influence the narrative or gain bonuses versus someone. You also don’t need to respond to someone gaining a String with any specific response.

Skins: Every player selects a Skin (pdf here).These are the different archetypes or classes, if you will, available to play:

The Chosen
Powerful, vengeful, conflicted, masochistic. The Chosen is a monster slayer who finds themselves drawn to the  darkness.
The world needs you. It needs  someone brave enough to walk blindly into the darkness, and to shine a light for all the lost souls out there. They need a champion. They can’t do it alone.
There’s just that one nagging worry, the one that rears its head at the worst possible moments: what if you’re not good enough?

The Fae
Alluring,  exotic,  fickle,  vengeful.  The  Fae  is  all  about extracting  promises,  and  delivering  faerie  vengeance when those promises are broken.
At the edges of this world, just  beyond the veil, there are colours that few mortals even dream of.  Beauty enough to shatter any  heart. The Fae live and breathe at  the edges of this world. They keep  a dusting of that magic tucked  behind their ears, just in case. And the Fae are willing to share.
They’re nothing if not generous, asking for only one thing in  return. A promise. Keep it, and  the true beauty of the world will  be revealed. Break it, and feel the  wrath of faery vengeance.

The Ghost
Tormented,  insecure,  intuitive,  fickle.  The  ghost  is  all about channeling past trauma, seeing people’s true selves, and having spooky powers.
Ghosty ghost.
You’re dead

The Ghoul
Cold, unwavering, hungry. The ghoul died, and came back  with dulled emotions and a hunger for human flesh. The  ghoul benefits from being disaffected and malicious.
Death changed you. It took away your contemplative joy, it dulled your senses, and it left you impossibly hungry. That hunger is always with you, like a hum in your ears that swells and crescendos until you can’t hear anything else. Unattended, it will come to dominate you - but feeding it may be just as bad.
There is a certain beauty to what you’ve become. Your gaunt body, its unnatural form - it draws people in. Your stark disinterest seems exotic. But underneath that disaffected presentation - the hunger, the hunger.

The Infernal
Powerful, desperate, addicted. The infernal has a demonic  sugar daddy - someone who gets them things they want. At a price.
At first, it seemed innocent. It gave you things, made you feel good about yourself. You came to it with your problems, and it fixed them. When you asked how you could return the favour, it told you to be patient - that all debts would be settled in due time. That was the first time you heard it mention debts.
You’ve got Satan as your cornerman, or a demon in your brain. Or maybe the stars glow just for you. Regardless, you owe a debt to something much bigger and scarier than you’ll ever be.

The Mortal
Vulnerable, codependent, magnetic, beautiful. The mortal is all about benefiting from codependency, and racking up experience.
None of them would understand. What you have here, in this dark and secret place, it’s beautiful. They’d warn you that this sort of beauty is dangerous, like a raging fire. Well some things are worth getting burned for.Love has eclipsed all hope. And the dark has left you feeling beautiful.

The Queen
Commanding,  irresistible,  bitchy,  sexy.  The  queen  is  all about turning cliques and popularity into weapons.
You’re one of the special ones. A sovereign beauty. You deserve more than the rest of this wretched world does. You deserve the will and worship of those around you.
And it’s not only because you’re better than them. It’s because you make them better. Strong, beautiful, complete. They’d be nothing without you.

The Vampire
Icy, manipulative, pretty, hypnotic. The vampire is all about emotional entrenchment and emotional dominance.
You are beauty eternal. You are the darkness that everyone wants to taste, but no one wants to understand. It’s there in your eyes, your carefully-chosen words, and your every gesture: you no longer have a soul.
Some vampire revel in that fact, their afterlife a tapestry of exsanguination and hedonism. Others hate the evil in their skin, solemnly vowing to a chaste and lonely existence. Either way, someone suffers. The choice is yours.

The Werewolf
Passionate, violent, muscular, fickle. The werewolf is all  about using physical violence and transformation to get  what it wants.
Everyone around you seems so willing
to play the roles they are handed, to quietly colour within the lines. They’ve been tamed, domesticated. You’re of a different stock. You’ve broken down the fence built to contain you. You’ve howled at the moon, and heard it howl back.The transformation is complete. This is what you were always meant to be. Wild. Unwavering. Alive.

The Witch
Manipulative,  secretive,  judgemental,  brooding.  The witch is all about casting silent judgement, and powerful hexes, from the safety of her own bedroom.
In every lock of hair, every furtive glance, every secret note that transfers hands during history class – there is an invitation. An invitation to be fucked with. Not that witchcraft is about fucking with others, exactly, but it’s hard not to notice how utterly malleable the world is, once you know a thing or two about magick.
Of course, a good witch like you knows restraint. A good witch turns a blind eye to all those invitations, and doesn’t think about how sweet vengeance and control might be. A good witch is above that sort of thing. At least, most of the time

Choosing and Creating Characters: Skins are unique, and there can only be one represented in the game at a time... so no duplicates! As a result, player selection is NOT first-come/first-serve.
Please show your interest with the following:
[b]Name:[/b] Who are you?

[b]Skin:[/b] What are you?

[b]Relations:[/b] Who is important to you?

[b]Outlook on Life:[/b] What is important to you?
Ideas Roleplays Ons and Offs Apologies and Absences
"As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase." -Aldous Huxley

meikle

Name: Mara, a name that evokes death

Skin: Ghoul, gaunt and hollow

Relations: Mara's just going through the motions.  She has family, she has what might be called friends.  Her relations with them are strained at best since death has dulled her ability to feel.  Maybe one of the other PCs has reminded her what love is, though she thought she had lost it forever.  That might be dangerous for them.  Maybe some of them saw her die; it wasn't pretty.

Outlook on Life: Nothing matters anymore, nothing has meaning -- nothing but sating this hunger that won't rest.  She wasn't always this way, but she is now, stunted and starving all the time.  She's a depressive obsessive solipsist, or anyway, it's how she sees herself anymore.

*whistle*
Kiss your lover with that filthy mouth, you fuckin' monster.

O and O and Discord
A and A

Queluna

Name: Who are you?  Adelaise Delamater, daughter to an odd french couple.

Skin: What are you?  A witch, or at least a girl interested in witchcraft.

Relations: Who is important to you?  Adelaise is a bit of a nerdy girl, usually caught up in her studies so that she can continue to ace each of her tests.  She's more concerned with being accepted into a good college than making friends.  The fact that she's more inclined to check out the girls rather than the boys also leads to her to be somewhat silent on the matter.

Outlook on Life: What is important to you?  Her education.  On top of that, being a good person and doing the right thing.  When she discovers an old book about witchcraft and studies it for herself, discovering the power that is within, she swears to herself that she'd use it only to do good.  Imagine Kira from 'Deathnote', saying that he'd use the deathnote only to punish criminals and so forth, but getting carried away with it in the act.  She would be much the same, but with her book about witchcraft.

Umbral Sanguinus

Yay, interest :)

And if anyone has questions, please don't hesitate to ask here or PM me.
Ideas Roleplays Ons and Offs Apologies and Absences
"As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase." -Aldous Huxley

Meliai

Oh man, I can't take on any new games at the moment but this system looks SO interesting! I hope you guys don't mind a spectator :D
    {{A/As updated 5/8}}           

Umbral Sanguinus

Just a little bump to see if there is any more interest. Friday night I'll sort out what's what. Until then!
Ideas Roleplays Ons and Offs Apologies and Absences
"As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase." -Aldous Huxley

Rook Seidhr

Name: Baron
Skin: Queen
Relations: The "right" kids. The kids who are going places, the ones whose families live up on Snob Hill.
Outlook on Life: Gotta stay on top. Being the first doesn't guarantee I'll remain the foremost. Gotta keep tabs on everything, everybody.

I'm in US Eastern and can post more than once a day. I've played Monsterhearts before, offline, and loved it.


EDIT: I'm sorry, but I'm withdrawing my application to this game.

persephone325

This doesn't have to end in a fight, Buck.
It always ends in a fight.
You pulled me from the river. Why?
I don't know.
"Don't dwell on those who hold you down. Instead, cherish those who helped you up."