I love this game.
I played Tunnels & Trolls since the late 1980s when we picked up a boxed set of the 5.5 rules, and this has been one of our beer & pretzels favorite RPGs ever since. Recently, Tunnels and Trolls was bought by a company, and one of the creators (Ken St. Andre) resurrected one of his T&T variant games, Monsters! Monsters! and published a new game using similar rules.
I still can't wait to see which direction T&T goes in with its new owner, so all the best to them. I am still a fan.
The Monsters! Monsters! rules are T&T adjacent, with a few changes. Missile combat is highly simplified from the confusion in the newer versions. There is a Chaos Factor involved on every turn for every player. Adventure points are totaled from every roll made, successful or not, saving roll or attack, and you total them all up as your experience for the session. The spells go to level 5, and they promise more are coming in the 3rd edition. Since the numbers are compatible, you could also use T&T spells, classes, and equipment. Stunting has been added to the game.
But you play as monsters.
Any monster you can imagine, and the game has some hilarious options. You can play as a centaur, goblin, minotaur, troll, or serpent-man/woman. You can play as a vampire, zombie, mummy, or skeleton. You can even play a human (classes will be added in the 3rd edition). Or you can play a dragon. Or you can pick something close in size to a monster on the chart, create a unique ability, and play that. Stunting covers the "everything else" you can do, so this was an intelligent addition to the game.
The expansion, Monsterary of Zimrala, adds 100 more monster types to play, including demons. This also adds a science-fantasy campaign world.
But what do you do?
You start in a dungeon, and you do whatever you want. Perhaps a band of adventurers is prying about, looking to take your treasure? Perhaps a band of drunken dwarves is trying to dig through your lair? Perhaps the servants of a mad wizard are coming down to use your body parts as spell components? Perhaps one of the monsters in the dungeon has been captured and hauled off to the local town to be auctioned away, and you need to rescue the fellow creature?
Your choice of what type of monster to play will define how you complete these tasks. My giant slug is strong, can take significant damage, and has pitiful scores everywhere else, even down to 10% in DEX and CHR. His speed is 15% of a standard 3d6 roll. He could possibly frighten people away and has poison slime. What do you do with a big, slow, unintelligent character like that?
The fun is figuring it out.
There may be a part of the adventure where you must sneak in and impersonate human guards or villagers. Which one of you could do that and how? Does one of you have mind-control or charm powers, and you could get a hapless fool to do it? Do you have to dress your skeleton up as a guard and put cow eyeballs in his head and skin on his face so people think he is human? What happens when one falls out or he loses his face?
Maybe the giant slug sits in a cart, and you dress his upper part as a guard puppet and cover the rest of his body with hay, hoping no one asks him to get off the cart. And the goblin hides in the back to speak for him.
This is roleplaying and creative problem-solving at its finest.
And you aren't these 'perfect people' either - you are monsters trying to make up for your weaknesses using humor and ingenuity. There is always a brute force in the end, but we wouldn't want to be attracting higher-level heroes to the town because we sacked it accidentally, would we?
The more stupid and devious you solve your problems, the better. If you can blame the idiot villagers for all your chaos, all the better. If you game-master this game, try to make problems the monsters need to solve using dumb plans and craft situations that they may find difficult to just beat their way through. This would have been easier had someone picked something that could pass for a human, but we will still try, regardless. And given your saving rolls are your adventure experience, the more rolls you make devising a crazy plan, the better.
And those know-it-all perfect, high-level, wealthy jerk adventurers will get what's coming to them someday.
And with the character improvement system, there is no limit to how far I can improve my slug, and even raise his IQ and LK to levels where he could cast spells or SPD to a level where he could outrun a horse. As a house rule, I could say new abilities could be bought like ability scores, so if I wanted wall-crawling to use and make saving throws off of, buy it up like a new score (and attack powers do 1d6 per 10 points of score, plus combat adds). Or give a unique ability a flat cost, like 100 AP per "level" of power, and count simple ones (like human speech) as a level one only.
Are the rules balanced? No. Some backgrounds are far more potent than others, and your "level" is determined by your highest attribute divided by ten. So you will have monsters of different power levels in the same group, but due to the costs of raising attributes, things will balance out eventually. Does it matter? No. This is a fun game about monsters trying to solve problems. The smallest fae could do things the giant dragon could not. If you are playing a game to kill things and celebrate the acquisition of player power over everything else, play D&D.
Monsters! Monsters! is a game played for chaos, laughs, silly adventure, and fun. The monsters are wildly different in terms of power and ability. So you play a weak skeleton? So what? The advancement system is there to improve your character to incredible heights of power. It will take work, but you can make that skeleton as powerful as the dragon.
But you don't have to be to have fun.
This game isn't about power. It isn't about faux-pretend self-insert dungeon fashion. This game isn't about the false dreams of opiate heroism that traditional mainstream fantasy sells you.
It is about fun and creativity.
It parodies the genre and skewers it in the most self-reflective and hilarious way possible.
Those smug, round-cheeked, happy, perfect, well-to-do, self-centered, idealistic fantasy iconic character archetypes games shove in your face as crass identity marketing aren't the heroes. They are the villains.
The fewer of those narcissistic jerks there are in this world, the better.
They may be attractive and influential people, but all they want to do is lock you in their dungeons, vivisect you, use your body parts for potions, enslave you for their schemes, train the dragon as a prestige mount, use you for pet battles to entertain their children, kill you for gold and XP, slay your tribe because "you are all worth XP," think battling you is exciting dungeon combat encounters to entertain them, make you fight in their gladiatorial arenas, expect hero worship, and use you to kill other adventurers (and loot their stuff for their wealth) in their pyramid scheme dungeon builds.
Beautiful on the outside.
But not on the inside.
Lessons this generation needs to learn. The crap companies sell you to part you from your wealth is worthless. Those perfect influencers just want to enrich themselves. We live in a world of lies where your health and wealth need to be constantly guarded against predatory Wall Street companies, toxic chemical foods, and the jerk influencers online who lie for their own fame, wealth, and power.
The heroes marketing companies sell you reflect those predatory ideals.
You want to be them but are being taken for a ride.
Better to be the monster.
And true to yourself.
Now, what could you do with this giant slug? I could imagine and do a lot; the adventures would be silly and fun. Adventure ideas are just taking any fantasy adventure module and flipping it around. Maybe you are the monsters, and the 'school of magic's' snooty adventurer baristas are making your monster lives difficult again this semester. There may be a perfect society in the planes where everyone is happy, and nobody needs to defend their wealth from greedy monsters.
Maybe there is a meeting at the Caves of Chaos to discuss how to defend the place against the next group of entitled first-level idiots coming there to clear the cave out like no other residents would care each time it happens, and it is your job to start the monster's neighborhood watch. Perhaps you are the denizens of the Tomb of Horrors trying to make the insane place a little more deadly to the next group that uses spoilers to get through it. Someone could play the demi-lich and bark orders at his minions. Someone could play the roller elephant, show up in stupid places, and make elephant sounds as he crushes people in the first hall.
The adventures and scenarios write themselves.
Take any D&D module, choose a monster in any dungeon to play, flip it around, and tell yourself, "We aren't stupid."
Then, go from there.
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