Category: Monsterhearts

I don’t know if anyone has gone outside the typical Buffyesque/Harry Dresden/Being Human/World of Darkness setting, where there are monsters everywhere and tried to do something a little more, ah, focussed, but inspired by the recent TV series In The Flesh, and also last year’s French series The Returned, both of which explore how small communities deal with people who come back from the dead, I’m going to be giving it a go myself next week. I’m hoping it’ll go beyond a one-shot, but wanted to pick people’s brains (heh) to see if anyone had tried to tackle anything like it before…

I’m giving the players a degree of free reign in how we create the community, what Skins they pick and when the story picks up, either after some world-shattering events that exposes the Unnatural to humanity, (ala In The Flesh, where the community reacts to those who are trying to return to their own lives after medicine has granted them a semblance of life) or right back on that first night, when the PCs are newly awakened to their unnatural natures, and humanity first becomes aware of those who walk amongst them (more like The Returned, where the dead return more or less unaware that they were even dead), but once the setting has been established I’m hoping to concentrate on the few select Skins, having just one of them representing a race that ‘goes public’. I’m happy to have multiple players play the same Skin, to roll with idea, whilst those other Skins that come into play may well the the only known examples of such creatures. The session will thus focus on a world where the dead begin to rise, for example, or where people begin to succumb to a disease that awakens a feral rage in them in the light of the moon.

I use the term “unnatural” rather than “supernatural” here as I want to have people responding to the monsters in real terms, recognising them as victims of a disease, trying to understand things through the prism of science and logic rather than through superstition, reacting to them as if they were not nightmarish creatures but second class citizens, foreigners, or somehow unhealthy, untouchable (“you can catch it through shaking hands, you know…”). Similarly I’ll be having Gaze Into The Abyss a lot less mystical (unless a player has a particularly mystical Skin) – answers are uncovered through flashbacks, or memories of when a character was their Darkest Self.

In short I’ll be trying to emulate some of the cool things I’ve seen in the two shows I’ve mentioned, deviating from standard Monsterhearts individual alienation from each other by having the teenage protagonists be part of a subculture that seems perfectly normal, even reassuring, to them but which scares the older generations and more conservative residents of the town. You know, the way teenagers actually do.

Can anyone else (particularly people who’ve watched those two shows) think of other things I should be considering?