GroundhoggothAug 3, 2024
Last night I tested out #MonsterheartsGothic , a little pet project of mine to relocate the theme of MH from a modern American high school to a 19th century European boarding school. I cooked up a bunch of different playbooks to reflect literary horror tropes of that era and shuffled the basic moves to create an emphasis on scandal, horror and power imbalances. #ttrpg #pbta 🧵
Show threadGroundhoggothAug 3, 2024

I got four players to test the first draft and they chose to be the Hybrid (part-human, part-beast), the Invisible (can turn invisible at will but needs help to change back), the Devout (sheltered member of a strict sect) and the Risen (a corpse given a semblance of life.)

I was pretty happy with the first session and as is usually the case, most of the changes required came from altering specific play book moves which were too weak, too strong or which overly diluted the playbook's theme.

Show threadGroundhoggothAug 3, 2024
One thing that popped up, probably because most of the players were new to Monsterhearts as a game, is that they wanted to have more things to do with strings. I actually kept strings pretty much unchanged from MH, but maybe the other changes have made strings seem too weak or limited in comparison? It was suggested that every playbook should have a move that enables them to spend strings in a unique way, which I'm taking a look at as a possibility.
Show threadGroundhoggoth
We're going to have a second session in a couple of weeks time, in order to assess the long arc of play, including experience & advancement, darkest self-type moves and so on. This will also give more detailed feedback on the basic moves, which worked fine in a one-shot, but maybe won't be as effective over multiple sessions, so I'll be gathering data on that.
Aug 3, 2024 at 7:52amWeb