Saturday 12 March 2011

Monsters! Monsters! - an overview


I've been posting infrequently lately due to my laptop being in the shop for repair. I hope to have it back today or tomorrow, so I'll be posting more from this weekend.

Saving scantily clad floozies from towers and thwarting the schemes of a sociopathic lich is all in a day's work for the hero. But nobody cares about the monsters whose lives are made hell by these gallant folk, who stride into a cave, tear the guts out of half a family of kobolds while their whimpering sprogs watch in horror as mummy and daddy are kicked around by a twat in a funny cloak; and then stripped of their life savings.

In Ken St Andre's Monsters! Monsters! the roles are reversed and the player gets to take on the role of a Ghoul or Yeti or even a Balrog, each of whom have the sole aim of getting revenge on hero-kind and the evil civilised world by demolishing their towns and cities and eating their most beautiful people. The game uses familiar Tunnels and Trolls rules with some tweaks and a random character generation system using an ordinary deck of cards. For instance, drawing the ace of spades lands you with a Dragon to play with, or the six of diamonds nets you a Shoggoth. Some monsters are ridiculously powerful and others, such as the bland 'Human Scum' gets the average stats of an average human from averageville, averagestonia. Nobody wants to be Human Scum.

Adventures in Monsters! Monsters! usually revolve around going to a town and causing mayhem. Types of wandering enemies range from a cow to a warband of 10 fighters, each having a certain reaction to your monster depending on its charisma score. They could be friendly towards you - offering you chocolate and giving you a massage, they could be indifferent to you, or they could just flat out attack you.

I've yet to play a game of Monsters! Monsters! but I'm looking forward to reviewing it. It has all the humour of Tunnels and Trolls plus the chance to play as a Hydra.

1 comment:

  1. "They could be friendly towards you - offering you chocolate and giving you a massage"
    Dragons have high charisma scores could you imagine massaging those hard scales!!

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