Hey guys! Looking forward to getting my copy of Monsterhearts (won’t be able to get it until Christmas, unfortunately) but that’s not why I’m posting. I had an idea while I was looking through the skins: what if they were superheroes, specifically X-Men? Instead of the Vampire, what if it were the Cyclops, or the Beast, or the Iceman?
Has anyone tried to do anything like this before? And if nobody has, would anyone like to help me make it so?
P.S. it should totally be called Mutanthearts.
Guess what? Brendan Conway is working on a thing just like this!
No way, really? Awesome! Is it open to the public or is it not at that stage yet?
It definetly was talked about but it kinda takes away from the horror trope. Super-Heroes is also much more “us vs. them” while Monsterhearts is “me vs. everyone else” or “free for all”.
Yes! It’s such a perfect combination, isn’t it?! John Stavropoulos, James Stuart, and I working on an X-Men inspired hack of Monsterhearts, and it is indeed called Mutanthearts! 🙂 It’ll be a stand alone hack, and we are looking to publish it. We’re still early in the process, so we haven’t talked about it much publicly yet, but we’ve got some exciting ideas worked out it’s going to happen!
Wow, this is impressive. I don’t know what I was expecting, but definitely not two different hacks. That’s awesome.
Tim Franzke I see what you’re saying, but I think when you throw in the various teenage personalities that it would shift to more of a “free for all” type of thing.
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And…there is room for more than one hack depending on what you choose to focus on. If I recall correctly, Brendan had some cool ideas that were different from ours, so: awesome!
So it won’t just be a setting hack. It will bear resemblance to Monsterhearts, but have some differences to reflect and bring out what’s awesome about X-Men, but specifically young mutants at a training school. You won’t start out a seasoned team. But teams are a big thing in the comics, so mechanics will reflect the dual awesomeness and stress that comes with working as a team and being an individual.
Tim’s right in that it will be less about standard horror, but the horror will still be present in a different way: exploring who you are and your amazing new abilities while much of the rest of the world now has you targeted as different and dangerous. Lots of serious, unsettling issues to explore there.
I am excited to see these hacks taking place.
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Simone Micucci
The idea is cool, but Tim Franzke is right. Monsterhearts focuses on the horror and difficulty of being a teenager, represented by being an actual monster. It’s not a game about being a team and going off to proactively deal with external problems.
So, if your teenage supers game is about dealing with the changes your powers give you and how they mess up your life, I can see the game working. In fact, the development of a superpower and how the teenager deals with it (think Rogue), would be a great metaphor for puberty.
But if your game is more about being an awesome super team and going off to fight bad guys while still finding time to study for that history test, Monsterhearts doesn’t seem like the best system. Monster of the Week might be a better starting point in that case.
Honestly, with its ability to mitigate favor based on internal willpower, I’d say something like FATE is more Super than AW or a D20 system. (No matter how far Mutants and Masterminds got, it was still a flat probability curve.)
Check out Superhuman:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uTpTnD_S49nYnBv86RQ8irFqfK_IzJ5LgQDOQWQtmPw/edit
and Worlds in Peril and Just Heroes are linked at the bottom of this page:
http://nerdwerds.blogspot.com/2012/12/all-of-playbooks.html