So, I made my first skin, The Monkey. Please be kind with your criticism, it’s my first try. Also, I’m not a native speaker, so you might stumble over some weird English.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-_FoRk-rr-cWklrcU5CcWxQdFU/view?usp=sharing
Who is the Monkey? Of course, the Monkey is inspired by everybody’s (well, my) favorite character from Chinese mythology: Sun Wukong. If you think about it, Sun Wukong can be pretty juvenile. He is a rebel without a cause, who defies the rule because he can, and who firmly believes in his own immortality. Okay, so the mythical monkey is pretty much immortal, but his behavior still reminds me a lot of a common condition in teenagers: Horrible stuff only happens to other people. Yeah, Greg ended up in hospital after eating some shrooms… but those are totally safe, guys!
The Monkey is the guy who calls you a chicken because you think that jumping from the balcony into the pool sounds somewhat dangerous. He is the guy who drunkenly pees on a Hell’s Angels bike and then keeps insulting the owner while you try to drag him away.
So yeah, it’s not exactly a “goth” skin, but I think it can be a pretty dynamic addition – and it’s still a very self-destructive skin, because sooner or later the Monkey will do something that costs him dearly. And he will learn he’s not immortal at all. Or even better: his friends aren’t. And it’s all his fault.
I’m taking The Monkey for a test drive right now and it’s working pretty well. We had a nice scene last session where the Monkey entered her darkest self, beat up a guy (he kept getting up, the stupid f***), hit successfully on the Vampire (typical Monsterhearts quote: “She is covered in blood… that is pretty hot.”), slept with her, took the Move “Feeding” from the Vampire, really, really wanted blood, crept stark naked on the floor on the blood trail of the guy she beat up, instead ran into the Witch, jumped his throat, hit her escape clause, because even if the Witch is a total idiot, she does kind of care about him (don’t tell him), lost her Feeding Move, because she just used it and suddenly noticed she had a) a mouth full of blood, and b) was clinging to a screaming, bleeding Witch. Of course, she vomited blood all over him while students and teachers streamed out of classrooms and dormitories to check out the noise.
Fun time. She might even have learnt something. For about two minutes.