Hello, could someone point me to a list of MH reskinnings?

Hello, could someone point me to a list of MH reskinnings?

Hello, could someone point me to a list of MH reskinnings?

That is, a sets of skins allowing to play with the same rules as, for example, a spaceship crew, young mutants, medical drama, etc.

edited

29 thoughts on “Hello, could someone point me to a list of MH reskinnings?”

  5. Well, on one hand: Monsterhearts works for any genre as long as the characters 1) aren’t socially well-established, 2) feel like outsiders, 3) monstrousness works as an allegory, and 4) you’re not expecting the other genre to matter too much.

    I could run a game of space trainees, constantly shat on, struggling to fit in and make friends and fuck, and I could see the playbooks working in their own ways most of the time… But only if I don’t actually expect to make the game a sci fi campaign of space adventure.

    Medical drama would work perfectly, I think, and I love that idea.

    As for specific M<3s hacks though? None in particular come to mind.

  7. Alfred Rudzki

     don’t you think that just grafting on the skins some specific genre moves could make the other genre matter? Piloting moves, surgery moves, super powers, professional moves, and so on.

  8. I think that wouldn’t be such an easy exercise. The good thing about M<3, especially regarding the skin moves, is that moves are not just genre-appropriate, but strongly thematic. Changing that is messing with the system's engine quite heavily. Also, while some aspects of the game work well to represent people pushed in living with each other despite their character flaws and their often-conflictual relationships (which suits something like a medical drama well), there is more than that, and many of the basic and Skin moves go straight towards dysfunctional behaviors typical of teenagers and young people. I can see it being adapted to university students, or generally 20-somethings in moment of personal and social change, even in different contexts (a high-pressure graduate programme in a big company? medical training in a hospital? why not), but I am not sure these  would really work for grown-ups. 

  9. +Paride Papadia oh sure, absolutely, if they’re done well. At that point though, the game drifts from being about emotional angst and the “otherness of being” or what-have-you that makes Monsterhearts what it is. Its about social interactions, smutty teenage sex, and being kind of horrible. It becomes about that other story.

    Which is totally fine! But if its really important to me that we know all the medical ramifications of our Monstrous Interns campaign, I’d want to change a lot more than just adding moves.

    That’s all I mean! Use M<3 as it is as you can play lots of drama types! But if the laser shooting, Cylon blasting, surgery doing, race car driving, etc genre bits are super important to you? A deeper hack is better than custom moves.

  10. Something like Young Mutants could work well, I believe, but currently the game doesn’t really give you many tools to focus on superheroic action, and adding those would require a non-insignificant level of attention and, again, putting your hands in the game’s engine. 

  11. As far as the age of the characters goes, I think as long as you have people acting like teenagers, you’ll be OK. So you could have those medical dramas, as long as the people involved act like petty squabbling kids.

    But I agree with Alberto Muti. It seems like making a new game out of Monsterhearts would take more work than simply bolting on “piloting moves”, for a sci-fi game for example.

  12. Don’t get me wrong, I love hacking games! 

    It’s just that I see it as usually much more difficult than it first looks like, to actually do something meaningful and solid, and so I tend to be rather prudent. 

  13. For an example, I’ve read on a forum about the Mutants hack, but never managed to find more info.

    Many of the tv shows are about people with deep personal issues forced to go trough hardship together for some external reasons, and behave badly with each other for  lack of understanding.

    Alphas, Once upon a time, Haven, Continuum, are examples.

    I foresee that a real hacking problem is that sex is less  a factor in those shows than personal feelings, and I would like to see if someon tackled this issue and how.

  16. I know we’ve actually had this conversation, Paride, but have you actually tried playing the original game as-is? It’s something I would always advise doing before hacking a system, because how things look on paper is always different from how things develop in play, and by playing the game you can truly understand what its different moving parts actually do, and what you want to keep vs. what you want to change. 

  17. Here’s one that I’d only loosely categorize as a hack: there’s a badass war drama pilots game being worked on, called Souls of Steel. You can look up previews of it on G+. It uses a Respect mechanic that is evocative of strings, and is meant to play (in between missions) like Monsterhearts with lots of drama and shouting and sex and petty squabbles and all of that juicy stuff.

    But since its been built as a war game, it has a full suite of basic moves that interact with its Respect mechanic and its particular variation of the harm system, and specifically evokes how this stuff is done in fiction with a military flavor.

    It’s not finished yet, but it will exist at some point in the future.

  19. Alberto Muti To put it bluntly, I am interested in the social dynamics exposed by the game, but teenager vampires are on my to stake list, so I ask what people having already experience with the engine made available for something exposing social struggles and bad impulse control in other contexts.

  20. Alberto Muti hence why I said I’d only “loosely categorize it” as a hack. It’s very much not M<3s, but for someone asking about M<3s-style dynamics, it comes to my mind. Common ground and all that.

  22. Paride Papadia Souls is currently in some kind of clean-up-and-tighten phase of editing before it goes to beta, from my understanding. At the moment, it’s not really meant for public testing or consumption – but from what I understand beta testing is on the horizon.

  24. As Alberto Muti mentioned, I’ve been working on a space horror hack of Monsterhearts called The Long Orbit. The basic premise is that this crew gets stuck in orbit around a planet they’ve come to deliver terraforming supplies to because there’s a huge storm on the planet’s surface. And then things get worse. It has a lot of the same themes – alienation, isolation, not understanding enough, etc. as MH so it works surprisingly well. A lot of the design concerns mentioned in this thread have been considerations, though. For example…

    1. Not all of the Skins translate to metaphors that work for adults on a space ship. I’m using the Hollow (Android/Environmental Systems Engineer), the Werewolf (Warrant Officer/Astrogator), the Infernal (Starship Engineer who’s Dark Power is the ship A.I.), the Ghost (zoologist), the Queen (Terraform Engineer), and the Mortal (Journalist). The Choosen didn’t work out so well. And some of the other Skins are a bit too much of a stretch.

    2. It’s designed as a one shot, putting the crew in a very specific environment. If characters survived and players wanted to continue playing, they might find the moves less supportive of adult life. 

    3. It is assumed that characters can do their professional jobs without question under normal circumstances. So they don’t have to roll for this. The moves focus on what is happening socially between them and what they do under intensely stressful situations (Hold Steady is great for this).

    4. Despite drawing heavily from space horror movies, it is using Monsterhearts mechanics, so it ends up telling its own unique story that feels very space horror-y, but also sexy and dark in weird, unsettling ways. I love the stories that come out of it. 

    5. I didn’t want to go to all of this trouble only to get bored of it, so there are several different Threats that can be brought into play that make the game feel more like a disaster horror, a psychological horror, or a body/creature horror story.

    There are other considerations too, but now this is getting long. 🙂 Anyway, this has been playtested a ton, it has Avery’s blessing, and it will hopefully be kickstarted around the end of spring.

  25. I’m not sure how close Paride Papadia​ wants to the MH rules, but I think there is quite a lot of options for different themed hacks out there. I mean Monsterhearts itself is a hack of a little game (not really) by Vincent Baker called Apocalypse world. The rules between the two are very close, the biggest changes being strings and the darkest self. I know there was a kickstarter last year for a super hero hack but I can’t remember it’s name.

  26. AW Hacks are plentiful, but the differences between one and the other, especially when it comes to well-done ones, run quite deep, despite the common framework…. 

  28. Nting the “If you want to hack, go back to *AW” framework. If you want to replace a horse and buggy, build off a horse cart, not a shopping cart. A shopping cart may be very good for a specific task, but it won’t get you any closer to setting a land-speed record.

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