This may have been asked before, but has anyone had experience with setting Monsterhearts in a college setting? I’m going to run a one-shot this weekend, and a few of our players are Junior High and High School teachers, and they’d just prefer that we play 18 year olds. Wondering how much alteration is needed if the characters are all college Freshmen, or if it goes fine right out of the box?
This may have been asked before, but has anyone had experience with setting Monsterhearts in a college setting?
This may have been asked before, but has anyone had experience with setting Monsterhearts in a college setting?
If you make it a small private college, I would expect the dynamics could be very similar, except you won’t have the parents so involved, nor the power dynamics of the teachers.
I think a lot of it can be played as is. The challenge would be motivational. Why do the characters interact? When things become fraught, why don’t they leave the interaction? HS students are trapped with each other in a way that adults are not.
So long as the kids are monsters, it should be fine.
Joe Beason I find sometimes college could be worse. NOt near home, sometimes without your car and in a place you possibly are just meeting people.
Good point, Tommy Rayburn. Maybe I can make it a small remote college and keep them together. I keep thinking of The Magicians. They can never get away from each other.
Adam West You could keep a larger college in a smaller remote town. If you can tie them together somehow, then even better.
Edit, holy fuck …. chrome just autocorrected my statement to a racist saying. I already fixed. That was not me and I am both embarrassed and mad that it did so.
Tommy Rayburn did you have a very unpleasant autocorrect or something in that comment at first? Because my eyes went wide when I saw the preview of it in my notifications! Either that or Google is randomly inserting awful words into my notifications.
Did you read my statement, because yes I did ….. and not happy about it at all? I can not believe Chrome even has that word as a possibility as it autocorrected “LARGER” to “that”.
Tommy Rayburn oh! Haha, I see the addendum now. Yeah, that shouldn’t really be a legit autocorrect option. Yikes! Glad you caught it so quickly. I nearly did a spit take when I saw the notification, but it was corrected by the time I clicked through.
As others have said, as long as the PCs are forced to interact, things should work fine as is.
Yeah, I would highly recommend making it some combination of ‘everyone lives in the same dorm’ and ‘everyone is in the same very small, specific program’. It is important that there is no social escape, no way out of dysfunctional relationships.
Here’s some bonus advice straight from the book-to-be:
‘While the immediate social context can shift, it still needs to echo the emotional realities of high school. The main characters need to be in the midst of an uncomfortable life transition, experiencing alienation both within their skin and from the world at large. They need to get sucked into petty social politics, and have it be difficult to simply walk away from dysfunctional relationships. They need to be talked down to by most of the adults in their lives, despite the fact that they are capable and powerful in their own right.’
Daniel Wood That helps guide it. Thanks! Is that from the second edition?
Yep. (Barring emergency revision.)
I remember that the first edition did make some comments about using older kids/young adults, the idea being that it was OK to do so. I’d say it works fine, but the dynamics and feel will be somewhat different. I have to say that if I ran MH I’d probably run it in some kind of small college with dorm rooms, etc, since although I love the game as written I’m really not at all into the whole teenager drama thing. Think Dario Argento’s Suspiria for an example of the kind of thing you can do with older characters.
To update, the game was good. I set it in a small exclusive college in an isolated town in New England. I insisted they were all Freshmen and lived in the same co-ed dorm. Also, put them all in Orientation class together to get a similar effect to having Home Room.
I feel like it’s a better game in high school, but it worked. Thanks for all the tips and advice.
What did you find didn’t work as well?
Hard to say really. It could’ve just been that Monsterhearts isn’t a great fit for this particular group, or I just didn’t get it quite right. It didn’t feel as intense as I expect it to usually be. Not necessarily the result of the age/setting change.