So what is Monster World?

The setting for Monstrous Mishaps just kind of developed on its own, and along the way turned out to be in a lot of ways more interesting than the actual Monsters it’s named for. When I first started sketching on the Monster Breeds, they inhabited some sort of vaguely gothic-punk reality, since – not to blow your mind or anything – I was mostly working off of a World of Darkness template, only with everything made as pathetic as possible. There were mentions of knives gleaming in dark alleys and Klutzes fleeing from angry mobs after they accidentally killed someone. It was, all in all, both derivative and kind of pretentious.

But at some point, I started smoothing out the sharp edges. The fights became less deadly. The conflicts became more at the same time more frantic and with lower stakes. Characters stopped moaning in agony and started sighing in aggravation. It all developed more of a cartoony feel, with bright pastels replacing the shades of grey.

At the same time, I was hard at work coming up with potential plot hooks for the setting. After all, my complaint about a lot of games is that they don’t give you a sense of what you should actually be doing with all those interesting setpieces. And what I ended up going back to were the sort of sitcoms and Disney comics that I grew up watching and reading. That fit nicely with the more upbeat feel of the characters, and in the end it sort of crystallized into a simple concept: Monster World is a place where people care about things in reverse proportion to how much they actually matter.

Thus, to create a scenario in Monster World, just put the stakes as absurdly low as you can, and then have every GMC act like the fate of the world depends on them. You have a job delivering pizzas, and your annoying in-law is determined to delay you enough that he gets his pizza for free! Your neighbor borrowed your lawnmower and won’t return it, and has put up traps all over his property to keep you from stealing it back! At the same time, the actual risks and concerns should be treated as irrelevant – nothing really bad is going to happen, and things will more or less go back to normal by the next Story.

This works really surprisingly well for creating silly situations that will make the players feel faintly ridiculous just for having to engage with them. And the rule system – which functions best when trying to do relatively simple things under trying circumstances, and where basic competence is so rare as to be almost a superpower – works really pretty well for it. As one of my play testers put it, take out the Monsters and it’s basically 90s Sitcom: The RPG.

Which does make me wonder if maybe I would have been better off just ignoring the urban fantasy pastiche altogether… but, well, it’s a little late to revamp the whole thing now. Still, it might be an idea for a supplement somewhere down the line. I could call it Suburban Silliness…