Monsterhearts Death Moves
Michael Duxbury has been working on skin-specific Death Moves (you know, to replace the existing ‘lose all strings’ ‘become your Darkest Self’). I really love the idea and the opportunities to offer your players a difference play experience for a while mid-campaign and kickstart new plotlines.
With his permission, I’ve lain them out and attached the doc. I think they’re pretty good as they are, but they could really use some real play experience/beta testing. If anyone does use them then please do let us know how you find them.
You can find the original post (along with Michael’s blog) here:
http://michaelduxbury.com/2014/11/27/i-would-die-for-you-death-moves-in-monsterhearts/
Finally, as this is a beta doc, feel free to link to it to others, but please don’t host separately.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9aDy3dv5nWvM2gwcGVrTG9Lc28/view?usp=sharing
You have been knocking it out of the park with the great content 🙂
I will take a look.
That is an awesome idea. 🙂
Alberto Muti.
Richard characterises this as “Michael wrote it and I laid it out”, but anyone who compares my original draft with the (vastly superior) current version can see how much he contributed to this – 50% of the work, minimum. Thank you very much for that!
Looking forward to seeing how people get on with these 🙂
This is fantastic. Death is only part of the story in so many of the influences to MH (Vampire Diaries especially, it seems) so I like the idea of survival which costs the player character or evolves them.
I’m running a D&D 5E game for now but am selling my group on MH. If I get my way and MC it for them, I’ll try these out.
I like the idea of Death Moves and having them tied to the skins makes sense.
Some of them feel rather wordy though.
The Choosen or the Queen for example. There is much going on with that one. Maybe too much for my tastes, without testing the moves yet.
I am not sure about the ones permanently (or at least for a long time) altering the characters stats. The swapping especially can, if it lasts long, get confusing.
The Ghoul can allready buy a move to wait out death, without all the bad consequences. I like how it is tied to the hunger, but I am not sure I like the cooldown period for that skin. Without it there is more of a choice when picking which deathmove to trigger.
By the cooldown period, do you mean the time they’re waiting to be reborn as the hunger disperses? You might have a point – other skins like the Vampire/Witch/Ghost/Fae have moves to exert limited control whilst they’re waiting to be reborn, it would be nice to do the same for the Ghoul.
I agree that Short Rest For The Wicked is almost always a “better” option, but that seems fair enough if the player sacrificed valuable advancement options to take that move.
Michael Duxbury That is what I meant by cooldown period.
Maybe the ghoul could influence people by causing a slightly more directed hunger? To at least guide people in a direction they want.
If you would not spend so much time out of buisness sometimes the hard choice of a regular death move could be appealing over Short Rest. Sometimes you just don’t have a day.
I was skeptical about this at first (based mainly on the length and complexity of each “move”), but there is some amazing content and material in here. Very interesting!
I’ve been thinking about hacking Monsterhearts harm lately, and something like this lends a pretty intense and edgy component to violence in the game. Fascinating! I’m starting a Monsterhearts game in the near future, and I may try this.
Have there been any updates or play reports in the last two years?
I think Monsterhearts harm is ripe for experimentation!
Tagging in Dirk Detweiler Leichty, we’ve been discussing a bunch of this stuff recently.