AP: Two One on One Monsterhearts

I had the uniquely twisted pleasure of playing not one, but two games of Monsterhearts recently with a friend of mine. We traded off on running and playing, and it was extremely fun, packed full of drama, angst, and dysfunctional relationships.

The first game, which I MC'd, featured the doing-what's-necessary Chosen, Carleen Lin. She was shipped off to the City of London Freemen's Boarding School, a high profile prep school with a habit of letting the students run wild. It was quickly discovered that Carleen was living in the shadow of her older brother Ian, an accomplished demon hunter and straight A student who had pretty much ruled the school before Carleen got there. This provided some interesting background, which ended up coming to the forefront when Carleen was out on patrol and stumbled upon her brother, broken by a superior foe and begging for her help. Yikes.

My favorite moments from this game included Carleen threatening a super-popular, bad boy vampire named Gabriel to stop drinking from a poor, mousy young girl named Steph. She ended up granting him Mercy, which he almost immediately seized as a chance to spread the rumor throughout school that she was a creepy stalker who had been peeping on him and Steph getting hot and heavy. Thus was born the trite yet impossible to be rid of nickname, Freak Girl.

A few things that came up:
-At one point, Carleen showed up at a a party wearing a very stylish outfit, and we weren't sure how to handle her attempt to turn almost everyone there on. In the end, she picked out a good five people and rolled individually, which worked out great, and also meant an instant advance for her.
-At the start, the player of Carleen asked if he could use the other playbooks as inspiration for NPCs; I thought this was a great idea and ended up inspiring a great deal for the second game we played together.

The second game was, in my opinion, an even greater success. Together we thought up a game about a group of high school misfits ("The Misfits" ended up become something of a group title) who banded together to try to use dark magics to take over the school. I played as Jaime Scott, an attractive and talented artist, who nonetheless remained a nobody due to his lack of confidence. Looking through the skins, Witch seemed like the obvious choice, but in the end I went with a Mortal with "Downward Spiral." We decided together that "Gazing into the Abyss" was a rare talent itself, and that the Misfits needed Jaime to do it for them for their plans to work, even though it resulted in Jaime getting hurt and drained.

We decided to take things a step further with the "basing NPCs on unused playbooks." We started off with just a few, detailing their back-stories and the like, but found this so much fun that we ended up using all of them. We didn't really bother keeping track of NPC's strings on other NPCs (that seemed a bit silly), but we did use them as inspiration for how the students interacted with one another. This created a unique web of relationships. For example, Jaime had a huge crush on one of the most popular cheerleaders, Kiyomi, the Fae. However, Renee, the cheerleading captain and Queen, found Kiyomi threatening and had a lot of pull over her and conspired to use Kiyomi's connection to Jaime to bring down her popularity.

Some of my favorite characters from this game included:
-Kara, Jaime's ghostly best friend, who is always there for him and really wants him to notice her, but he's always too concerned with Kiyomi to care. I had a lot of fun "accidentally" turning her on at various points.
-The Twins, Scarlet and Clarity, who were once one person until they were brutally murdered by Kara's killer, and their parents--a sorcerer and scientist--resurrected them as two separate entities. They were both uniquely self-destructive, with Scarlet constantly picking fights and Clarity being a cutter. They both ended up with a crush on Jaime, who was one of the only people who accepted them and treated them as individuals. I suspect when we play again that this will lead to some major sibling rivalry. Scarlet was based on the Ghoul, and Clarity on the Hollow.

Overall, a great and somewhat disturbing time was had by all.

Sounds awesome! I like the idea of trading off MCing a 2-person game. "The Misfits" sounds like a great game.

(Incidentally, have you ever seen the TV show "Misfits"? It's amazing Monsterhearts material).

With the "dressed up sexy and walking into a party" scenario, I try to limit it to a single turn on roll made against a specific person. When you walk into the room dressed all sexy, you've got everyone's attention... but then you make eye contact with one person. Who is it? That's who you are rolling to turn on. Everyone else is just impressed.

Or, maybe you don't make eye contact with just one person. Maybe you're making eye contact with lots of people, one by one. In that case, who's the one person you're making a point of ignoring, whose attention you're teasing? That's who you roll to turn on.

That's what The Singleton Rule is about, in part. Not to say you "did it wrong," though! It sounds like your solution worked out just great for you guys! I'm just relaying how I would have handled it.