So, The Sexy Teenage Monster Show
wrapped up its first season this week. Since it was the last session of the season
and one of our players (the Chosen) was going to be unable to game
for several months, we had a lot of things happening at once, trying
to wrap up as much as we could. It got a bit jumbled here and there.
More than a couple times, my players broke into a bit of meta gaming.
“I need to get into a fight or some other Volatile conflict so I
can mark my last XP and get my final advance!” That kind of thing.
Normally I'd poo-poo that kind of thinking, but again, it was the
season finale, and I tried to be accommodating without breaking
things too much.
Here are the highlights of the last session...
Lillith the Fae switches skins to
Mortal, chosing Caleb (the werewolf that wants her dead) as her lover.
The player decided that when she betrayed her father, the Faery King,
he stripped her of her fae nature. When Lilly's mother (still a fae)
discovers this, she FREAKS OUT and disowns her, driving her out.
(Accept people, but only conditionally)
Lacuna the Angel-turned-Hollow has
“explosive amnesia” (a phrase we always say in our best Calculon
voice.)
Caleb the werewolf blows up Lillth's
home. Building maintenance is his part-time job, so we decided that,
sure, he knows how to sabotage a gas line. (Be a fan of the PCs)
A big werewolf/fae/chosen/angel rumble
in Gabriel's living room triggers a fatal heart attack in Gabriel's
father. (Make them pay a price)
The Fectori tell Gabriel that they can
bring his father back to life (“You'll never know the difference,
Gaaaabrielll...”) if only he'd just join them. (Tell them possible
consequences and ask)
Gabriel's sister discovers the body of
the dead police detective in his bedroom. (Expose a dangerous secret
to the wrong person)
Lacuna comforts Lilly while the former
fae has a nervous breakdown. Their clumsy teenage sapphic sex allows
Lilly (now Mortal) to change her Lover to Lacuna.
To my surprise (although I should know
better at this point), Lilly orchestrates a big four-way sex scene
between all the PCs. It triggers all their sex moves at once. I tell
the two male PCs “I don't care if you never touch each other, it
counts as having sex with each other.”
Lilly and Caleb come to a tenuous
peace. After the sex-party, Lilly, Lacuna, and Caleb form a strange
three-way relationship.
Caleb spills all the beans to his
father, a powerful werewolf himself. Dad has something planned that
involves the nazi-era crates hidden in his study (setting up for next
season by announcing future baddness)
Gabriel takes the fight to the Fectori,
leading them deep into the haunted mines and brining the mountain
down on top of him, trusting that his God-touched powers will seal
them away, like the angel once did.
So here's what I've learned from my
first season of Monsterhearts...
Things live and die by strings,
something that was quite obvious by session 2.
My female players are more filthy and
depraved than my male players could ever hope to be.
There's a fine balance between
continuing to escalate problems for the PCs and stepping back to let
things shake out, especially when there's a built in time-limit on
the campaign. I have to fight my instinct to keep piling on trouble.
If and when I run a new game of
Monsterhearts, I will not use
the chosen. It draws away from the internal conflicts by defining an
outside “bad guy.” That said, I'm glad I used it in this
first-run. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
was a better point-of-reference for most of my players rather than
Twilight or Vampire
Diaries.
When
we eventually get around to Season 2, I think I'm going to skip ahead
several months, perhaps all the way to the first day of the next
school year. That'll give the town a chance to recover from the weird
murder spree. It also gives me a chance to get my players to write
“What I Did on My Summer Vacation” essays.
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