What do you think?
Rate this book
Monsters and Other Childish Things
Monsters are real.You know because you have one. He's more fun and way tougher than all the other kids' monsters.Try not to let him eat your friends.Monsters and Other Childish Things is a distressingly fun and funny roleplaying game about kids and the relationship-devouring horrors from beyond time and space who love them. Players take the roles of kids and the vicious monsters who are their best friends in all the world -- and the source of all kinds of otherworldly trouble.Monsters and Other Childish Things is perfect for new gamers young and old, and for all gamers who like a little humor with their horror and a few scares with their laughs.Players take the roles of ordinary kids whose best friends are slavering monstrosities from beyond time and space — and that’s already enough to get them in all kinds of trouble with parents, school principals, friends, the Monster Investigation Bureau, mad science teachers, wannabe wizards, you name it. Can you make it through a school day without having to explain why your monster ate the substitute teacher? We’ll soon find out.“Monsters and Other Childish Things” was nominated for three Ennie Awards in 2008: Best Writing, Best Game, and Product of the Year. The “Monsters” sourcebook “The Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor” was nominated for the Ennie Award for Best Setting in 2009.“Monsters and Other Childish Things” features...* Complete rules based on the One-Roll Engine, tailored for fast, frenzied monster action and all the trouble that kids with monster friends must face.* Two chapters for new gamers by Greg Stolze, “How to Play Roleplaying Games” and “How to Run Roleplaying Games.”* Tons of pre-generated monsters and kids, plus quick character creation, more detailed rules for creating custom monsters, and “Instant Monsters” where you can make up a new monster with a roll of the dice.* A complete adventure to kick things off.
Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
Read
November 19, 2022A Bundle of Holding purchase — after I’d already bought some of the physical books on sale! What made me buy a bunch of these sight unseen was that they were published by Arc Dream, creators of Delta Green and other games — but mostly Delta Green.
Here’s what I’ve got and what I think about it:
1. The Core Rules (original and pocket-sized version)
Before I get into the premise, a quick note on bias: this uses the one-roll engine developed first for Godlike, in which you roll a bunch of dice and try to get matches of high numbers, where the height of your dice tells you how good you do something and the width tells you how fast — or at least that’s how it goes in combat. I find this mechanism to be… hard to intuit, let’s say. Like, if I’m rolling a d20 and I have a target number that I want to roll over, I have a sense of what my chances are. Whereas if I roll Xd10, what’re my chances of getting enough matches at a high enough number to beat someone else rolling Yd10? Should I try to push that roll in order to get more dice? I don’t know!
So, with that bias against the mechanism out of the way: I feel like this core book is too big for what it is, but I like the premise — or, rather, the game offers a lot of different but related premises, and I like some of what they’re playing with here:
You are a kid and you have an imaginary monster who is also very real. Adults and other kids may or may not know about monsters; and you may be everything from elementary to high school kids; but the unchanging core of this game is: you have a monster, you have relationships with other people — and those two things are in some tension. So maybe you have a connection with a lost relative and someone spray paints their grave, and now the monster wants to help you get revenge, but maybe it won’t do exactly what you want it do, putting some pressure on your relationship with that lost relative.
And also: if someone hurts you emotionally, your monster takes physical damage. Because you’re a kid and there’s a thin line between things hurting your feeling and things hurting you. (I mean, is that just kids?)
The book has some fun random tables for generating conflicts and monsters; several pages of sample kids, monsters, enemies (wannabe wizard, mad scientist, pain-eating monster who masquerades as a teacher, creepy guy), and a few sample settings: the Veronica Mars high school where everyone knows about monsters, which marks you as an outcast, but also as a kid who can get things done; a Pokemon-eseque middle school setup; and elementary school where monsters are secret and everyone has secrets and secrets hurt. That last one is what I consider to be the real core idea of this game — all of the art in the book, all the sample kids and monsters, etc., are basically all pointed towards this setting.
Speaking of art: I like it! There’s a lot of doodles, a lot of stuff that’s either Mignola-esque or Jhonen Vasquez-esque. I’m not crazy about the paper being textured to look like lined notebook paper, especially since the text doesn’t respect those lines, but it works when there’s hand-written notes or doodles.
In short: I think I like the premise, but there’s a lot of rules here that feel like they’d take getting used to. Would I play this? Maybe, but honestly, I still don’t quite get what a game of this would be. Maybe reading a sample campaign or adventure would help?
***
2. The Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor
Well, damn, I love this but it doesn’t exactly help: rather than give me an example campaign or adventure for Monsters, Candlewick takes many of the ideas of Monsters and gives it an Gorey twist: you are not kids with families and monsters, you are Creepy Orphans who can’t remember your past, just moved into a dreadful and eerie manor/orphanage, in a dreadful and eerie valley, where everyone has dreadful and eerie secrets and connections.
To unpack that a bit: in the core game, you have monsters. Here, you have creepy skills, which are weird and monstrous and mark you as outcasts. In the core game, you have relationships. Here, you have “echoes”, brief memories or glimpses of your past that get filled in during play. Have an echo of “the smell of cigar ash”? Well, maybe when you meet the mayor, someone mentions that he has a cigar. Hmmm, could he be your dad? As you fill out those echoes, they become relationships with complications — because maybe the mayor is your dad, but maybe he… doesn’t know that? Or gave you away for some reason that means he won’t be happy to have you back.
Now, as the book states, this is really a sandbox for you to make your own story in, and it provides plenty of toys for you to do so: more than 25% of the book is given over to NPCs with issues, and then there’s another solid chapter on places. (It’s a ~160 page book, so >40p are people and ~30 are places.) And then, there’s a few pages on monsters? Because even though you play creepy kids, you may bond with monster too, which feels unnecessary to me, and honestly would be something I would leave out entirely.
The book also ends with a really strong chapter on creating random mysteries, again using the standard one-roll engine to get random numbers to check on a table. What makes this chapter strong to me is that it explicitly notes that you can roll up a mystery before the adventure, or do it at the table, with the players taking an active role in fleshing out the mystery themselves. It’s a strong chapter that seems to predate a more recent trend in improv mysteries and player-led solutions.
This bundle also included two small pdfs:
* Doctor Jester’s Phantasmagorical Automatic Freak Machine — for coming up with new creepy skills
* If you love it so much — the west wing is haunted by a mad architect, can the orphans stop it?
Like I said, I really like the solid central premise here (orphans with creepy skills in a Gorey-esque world) — I like that so much that I’m totally ignoring the part of the book that introduces monsters back into the game. But even as I like this, it feels almost like a different game, not an example of the monsters & relationships game the core book promised.
***
Curriculum of Conspiracy
To get back to the core book, you might want to look at this smallish book that offers another campaign frame: you are middle school students with monsters in a community where some of the adults — admins, teachers, parents — know about monsters and want to stop them using their own arcane powers.
One of my main questions with the core book was “what do the PCs do?” Like, I know that monsters and relationships are in tension, but tension over what? What are the PCs getting roped into? In the core book, a lot of the examples were essentially kid-on-kid violence, which felt… not like a full picture of the world. This campaign frame satisfies that simple urge in me to have kids fight back against adults and their nonsense. There’s some fun ideas here — the kid who escaped and came back and might be a mentor; the kid who didn’t escape and got turned into a monster in thrall to the school — and some fun, different ideas about what an adventure might be here — maybe it’s a dark quest to stop a mad wizard, maybe it’s a prank war with a ghost. Overall, I like it. It’s not mind-expanding like Candlewick, but it’s a solid setting for the core book.
***
Road Trip
For another solid example, you could check Road Trip, which is a ~200pp campaign. Much like the massive Unknown Armies campaign, To Go, this campaign is a road trip, where the PCs are trying to stop a big evil through a bunch of separate adventures, which is a solid template: every adventure can be different, and since the Monsters game pulls a lot of its examples from children’s literature and culture, this gives the authors room to pull in just about anything they want.
But like many of the other books in this product line, this is “very much a toolbox game” — that is, throughout these books I get the impression that these are not for new gamers. This is for players who can occupy both their characters’ position and the role of a co-writer of the story (as in Candlewick’s Instant Mysteries) and for GMs who can take a loose frame and help guide the players into it to make something coherent.
So here, we get a chapter that is Watership Down-inspired — there’s a lot of smart animals locked in war and whoever the PCs end up helping might come back to help them in the final fight against the Great Old One that’s coming back. Or the Oz-inspired chapter includes several options for what sort of witch they might face. There’s also a prison break from a dark Disneyland and a Where the Wild Things Are adventure in the Florida swamps.
I will say, though, that at 200 pages, my interest lagged and I probably missed some of the specifics of these adventures.
***
Bigger Bads
A slim volume that adds some rules or tweaks (or sometimes pulls them from Candlewick for those who missed that book). The center of this book — according to the title of the book and the back cover text — is the Bigness rule: if your monster (or fighting suit) is just on a different scale than what you’re trying to wallop, then maybe the smaller thing is harder to hit but takes more damage, etc.
But the funny thing about calling this book “Bigger Bads”, is that the Bigness chapter is only 6 pages long, less than the chapter on Farness (i.e., range of attacks). But maybe this was sold as “Bigger Bads" because half of the book is sample characters, and many of them are large; and the included campaign frame is a Mighty Morphin Power Rangers/Voltron riff.
But there’s something about this hodge-podge of material that feels odd to me. I mean, it’s a mix, so there’s not that much coherence; and bringing Candlewick’s Creepy Powers into a regular Monsters game feels like it’s diluting the core idea here.
***
This bundle also included some other pdfs:
* SkyMaul: your class trip is on a psychic vampire airplane — can you survive and defeat it without getting charged with terrorism?
* 12 Monsters of Christmas: 12 monsters, very Mignola-esque art by Robert Mansperger Jr, which I like a lot. Honestly, I really like so many of the sample and example characters and monsters through all these books, I’d kind of love a Children of the Night-esque book that features NPCs along with adventure seeds for them.
All in all, I like a lot of the aesthetics here, but I’m not sure one-roll is the mechanism I want to play with, or maybe I just need to get used to it by playing. The core book is a little too open-ended in terms of premise, but Curriculum of Conspiracy and Road Trip show what can be done really well with this game; and Candlewick has a great idea of how you can slightly twist the core game into a related but still unique game.
Here’s what I’ve got and what I think about it:
1. The Core Rules (original and pocket-sized version)
Before I get into the premise, a quick note on bias: this uses the one-roll engine developed first for Godlike, in which you roll a bunch of dice and try to get matches of high numbers, where the height of your dice tells you how good you do something and the width tells you how fast — or at least that’s how it goes in combat. I find this mechanism to be… hard to intuit, let’s say. Like, if I’m rolling a d20 and I have a target number that I want to roll over, I have a sense of what my chances are. Whereas if I roll Xd10, what’re my chances of getting enough matches at a high enough number to beat someone else rolling Yd10? Should I try to push that roll in order to get more dice? I don’t know!
So, with that bias against the mechanism out of the way: I feel like this core book is too big for what it is, but I like the premise — or, rather, the game offers a lot of different but related premises, and I like some of what they’re playing with here:
You are a kid and you have an imaginary monster who is also very real. Adults and other kids may or may not know about monsters; and you may be everything from elementary to high school kids; but the unchanging core of this game is: you have a monster, you have relationships with other people — and those two things are in some tension. So maybe you have a connection with a lost relative and someone spray paints their grave, and now the monster wants to help you get revenge, but maybe it won’t do exactly what you want it do, putting some pressure on your relationship with that lost relative.
And also: if someone hurts you emotionally, your monster takes physical damage. Because you’re a kid and there’s a thin line between things hurting your feeling and things hurting you. (I mean, is that just kids?)
The book has some fun random tables for generating conflicts and monsters; several pages of sample kids, monsters, enemies (wannabe wizard, mad scientist, pain-eating monster who masquerades as a teacher, creepy guy), and a few sample settings: the Veronica Mars high school where everyone knows about monsters, which marks you as an outcast, but also as a kid who can get things done; a Pokemon-eseque middle school setup; and elementary school where monsters are secret and everyone has secrets and secrets hurt. That last one is what I consider to be the real core idea of this game — all of the art in the book, all the sample kids and monsters, etc., are basically all pointed towards this setting.
Speaking of art: I like it! There’s a lot of doodles, a lot of stuff that’s either Mignola-esque or Jhonen Vasquez-esque. I’m not crazy about the paper being textured to look like lined notebook paper, especially since the text doesn’t respect those lines, but it works when there’s hand-written notes or doodles.
In short: I think I like the premise, but there’s a lot of rules here that feel like they’d take getting used to. Would I play this? Maybe, but honestly, I still don’t quite get what a game of this would be. Maybe reading a sample campaign or adventure would help?
***
2. The Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor
Well, damn, I love this but it doesn’t exactly help: rather than give me an example campaign or adventure for Monsters, Candlewick takes many of the ideas of Monsters and gives it an Gorey twist: you are not kids with families and monsters, you are Creepy Orphans who can’t remember your past, just moved into a dreadful and eerie manor/orphanage, in a dreadful and eerie valley, where everyone has dreadful and eerie secrets and connections.
To unpack that a bit: in the core game, you have monsters. Here, you have creepy skills, which are weird and monstrous and mark you as outcasts. In the core game, you have relationships. Here, you have “echoes”, brief memories or glimpses of your past that get filled in during play. Have an echo of “the smell of cigar ash”? Well, maybe when you meet the mayor, someone mentions that he has a cigar. Hmmm, could he be your dad? As you fill out those echoes, they become relationships with complications — because maybe the mayor is your dad, but maybe he… doesn’t know that? Or gave you away for some reason that means he won’t be happy to have you back.
Now, as the book states, this is really a sandbox for you to make your own story in, and it provides plenty of toys for you to do so: more than 25% of the book is given over to NPCs with issues, and then there’s another solid chapter on places. (It’s a ~160 page book, so >40p are people and ~30 are places.) And then, there’s a few pages on monsters? Because even though you play creepy kids, you may bond with monster too, which feels unnecessary to me, and honestly would be something I would leave out entirely.
The book also ends with a really strong chapter on creating random mysteries, again using the standard one-roll engine to get random numbers to check on a table. What makes this chapter strong to me is that it explicitly notes that you can roll up a mystery before the adventure, or do it at the table, with the players taking an active role in fleshing out the mystery themselves. It’s a strong chapter that seems to predate a more recent trend in improv mysteries and player-led solutions.
This bundle also included two small pdfs:
* Doctor Jester’s Phantasmagorical Automatic Freak Machine — for coming up with new creepy skills
* If you love it so much — the west wing is haunted by a mad architect, can the orphans stop it?
Like I said, I really like the solid central premise here (orphans with creepy skills in a Gorey-esque world) — I like that so much that I’m totally ignoring the part of the book that introduces monsters back into the game. But even as I like this, it feels almost like a different game, not an example of the monsters & relationships game the core book promised.
***
Curriculum of Conspiracy
To get back to the core book, you might want to look at this smallish book that offers another campaign frame: you are middle school students with monsters in a community where some of the adults — admins, teachers, parents — know about monsters and want to stop them using their own arcane powers.
One of my main questions with the core book was “what do the PCs do?” Like, I know that monsters and relationships are in tension, but tension over what? What are the PCs getting roped into? In the core book, a lot of the examples were essentially kid-on-kid violence, which felt… not like a full picture of the world. This campaign frame satisfies that simple urge in me to have kids fight back against adults and their nonsense. There’s some fun ideas here — the kid who escaped and came back and might be a mentor; the kid who didn’t escape and got turned into a monster in thrall to the school — and some fun, different ideas about what an adventure might be here — maybe it’s a dark quest to stop a mad wizard, maybe it’s a prank war with a ghost. Overall, I like it. It’s not mind-expanding like Candlewick, but it’s a solid setting for the core book.
***
Road Trip
For another solid example, you could check Road Trip, which is a ~200pp campaign. Much like the massive Unknown Armies campaign, To Go, this campaign is a road trip, where the PCs are trying to stop a big evil through a bunch of separate adventures, which is a solid template: every adventure can be different, and since the Monsters game pulls a lot of its examples from children’s literature and culture, this gives the authors room to pull in just about anything they want.
But like many of the other books in this product line, this is “very much a toolbox game” — that is, throughout these books I get the impression that these are not for new gamers. This is for players who can occupy both their characters’ position and the role of a co-writer of the story (as in Candlewick’s Instant Mysteries) and for GMs who can take a loose frame and help guide the players into it to make something coherent.
So here, we get a chapter that is Watership Down-inspired — there’s a lot of smart animals locked in war and whoever the PCs end up helping might come back to help them in the final fight against the Great Old One that’s coming back. Or the Oz-inspired chapter includes several options for what sort of witch they might face. There’s also a prison break from a dark Disneyland and a Where the Wild Things Are adventure in the Florida swamps.
I will say, though, that at 200 pages, my interest lagged and I probably missed some of the specifics of these adventures.
***
Bigger Bads
A slim volume that adds some rules or tweaks (or sometimes pulls them from Candlewick for those who missed that book). The center of this book — according to the title of the book and the back cover text — is the Bigness rule: if your monster (or fighting suit) is just on a different scale than what you’re trying to wallop, then maybe the smaller thing is harder to hit but takes more damage, etc.
But the funny thing about calling this book “Bigger Bads”, is that the Bigness chapter is only 6 pages long, less than the chapter on Farness (i.e., range of attacks). But maybe this was sold as “Bigger Bads" because half of the book is sample characters, and many of them are large; and the included campaign frame is a Mighty Morphin Power Rangers/Voltron riff.
But there’s something about this hodge-podge of material that feels odd to me. I mean, it’s a mix, so there’s not that much coherence; and bringing Candlewick’s Creepy Powers into a regular Monsters game feels like it’s diluting the core idea here.
***
This bundle also included some other pdfs:
* SkyMaul: your class trip is on a psychic vampire airplane — can you survive and defeat it without getting charged with terrorism?
* 12 Monsters of Christmas: 12 monsters, very Mignola-esque art by Robert Mansperger Jr, which I like a lot. Honestly, I really like so many of the sample and example characters and monsters through all these books, I’d kind of love a Children of the Night-esque book that features NPCs along with adventure seeds for them.
All in all, I like a lot of the aesthetics here, but I’m not sure one-roll is the mechanism I want to play with, or maybe I just need to get used to it by playing. The core book is a little too open-ended in terms of premise, but Curriculum of Conspiracy and Road Trip show what can be done really well with this game; and Candlewick has a great idea of how you can slightly twist the core game into a related but still unique game.
October 13, 2021
I have played entirely too many MaoCT campaigns. There's just something special about roleplaying as a kid and/or the kid's imaginary-ultra-deadly-friend-who-is-actually-not-imaginary-at-all. It's a delightful twist on the "monster in my closest" story, where the monster is actually your best friend, and the true difficulty is preventing your best friend from eating your math teacher.
I can basically recall every rule in this book. Although I've since grown away from MaoCT, it will always have a special place in my heart. The only real downside of this game is the dice engine, called the One Roll Engine, which is fun and chaotic at its best but extremely frustrating at its worst. In ORE, you roll up to ten d10s. Matching sets (i.e. rolling a pair of 7's) are what establish success or failure in any given situation. The problem is that establishing difficulty in ORE is painfully arbitrary. If the task requires getting a set, any set, then you're almost guaranteed success with seven or more dice.
Height (a particular set or higher--i.e. Height 7 = get 2x7 or higher) is where things become arbitrary. You are no more or less likely to get a 2x1 set as you are a 2x10 set. More dice increases your chance of getting multiple varied sets, but there's no natural way to hedge your bets or increase the likelihood of getting your desired height. The best way to do it is an extra that you can give to monsters (or what are called Weird Kids, who are kids with monster parts) that lets you set a die to any desired number either before or after rolling, which you will always be incentivized to set to 10. If multiple 10s are the best possible result, there is no point in shooting for a pair of 7's.
This is fine for a short 10-15 session campaign. But if you and your group happen to do a 50 or 60 session campaign, the flaws of ORE become extremely tedious.
I can basically recall every rule in this book. Although I've since grown away from MaoCT, it will always have a special place in my heart. The only real downside of this game is the dice engine, called the One Roll Engine, which is fun and chaotic at its best but extremely frustrating at its worst. In ORE, you roll up to ten d10s. Matching sets (i.e. rolling a pair of 7's) are what establish success or failure in any given situation. The problem is that establishing difficulty in ORE is painfully arbitrary. If the task requires getting a set, any set, then you're almost guaranteed success with seven or more dice.
Height (a particular set or higher--i.e. Height 7 = get 2x7 or higher) is where things become arbitrary. You are no more or less likely to get a 2x1 set as you are a 2x10 set. More dice increases your chance of getting multiple varied sets, but there's no natural way to hedge your bets or increase the likelihood of getting your desired height. The best way to do it is an extra that you can give to monsters (or what are called Weird Kids, who are kids with monster parts) that lets you set a die to any desired number either before or after rolling, which you will always be incentivized to set to 10. If multiple 10s are the best possible result, there is no point in shooting for a pair of 7's.
This is fine for a short 10-15 session campaign. But if you and your group happen to do a 50 or 60 session campaign, the flaws of ORE become extremely tedious.
September 22, 2016
One of my favorite roleplaying systems and settings. I've run the starter campaign and also the companion book Roadtrip. There is a point where you hit a power level where everything becomes too easy but I think most roleplaying books have that problem. I'd love to see a fiction book or tv series based upon the setting. It's so wonderful.
October 7, 2009
For some reason, I've been on a kick looking for a role playing game in which the main characters are children. In this game, you get to play a child - anywhere from elementary school age to high school age - who just happens to have a monster as her best friend.
The game's mechanic of Relationships makes for some superb story-telling. In addition to the usual stats and skills you get on your character sheet, you have stats for your important relationships. When you really need to succeed at some task, and can contrive a way to get motivation from one of your relationships, you can add your relationship dice to the pool for the roll, giving you a better chance at it. However, if you still fail, your relationship takes damage from it, and you need to spend Quality Time to fix it.
Your monster is as great at helping you out of bad situations as he is at accidentally getting you into them in the first place (seriously, if you didn't want me to eat your math teacher, why did you go on and on about how mean she was to you?)
The game's mechanic of Relationships makes for some superb story-telling. In addition to the usual stats and skills you get on your character sheet, you have stats for your important relationships. When you really need to succeed at some task, and can contrive a way to get motivation from one of your relationships, you can add your relationship dice to the pool for the roll, giving you a better chance at it. However, if you still fail, your relationship takes damage from it, and you need to spend Quality Time to fix it.
Your monster is as great at helping you out of bad situations as he is at accidentally getting you into them in the first place (seriously, if you didn't want me to eat your math teacher, why did you go on and on about how mean she was to you?)
May 26, 2016
This game has an exciting premise, a wonderfully flexible monster creating system, and some truly inspired layout designs. It also has some crippling flaws. The are some powers that combine in ambiguous ways that aren't explained in the rules. There are some very unbalanced powers available. There are chapters of the book that seem like afterthoughts, tacked on in an illogical order that feel like they're just filling space to meet a page count. Worst of all, the One Roll system that the entire game is based feels cumbersome, breaking the flow of the game every time a roll needs to be made. I was very excited about this game till I actually read the rulebook. Now I think I'll mostly use it as inspiration for game in other systems.
July 4, 2013
I loved the sense of humor in this book. Very few RPG rulesbooks are as fun to read as Monsters and Other Childish Things. I found the descriptions of the dice system to be a little confusing until I tried them out with players. The general consensus from my playtesting group was that its difficult to keep any form of group plotline going on when both the kids and their monsters are pulling in many different directions at the same time. We still had fun playing, just didn't stick much with the plotline or prepared materials. If you are thinking of GMing and want to keep things close to your module of prepared materials, this is probably not a game you'd want to GM.
October 16, 2009
One of the few gaming books that is a blast to read, where ideas for games scream out of every corner. The system is a bit clunky and could use more detail, but the book inspired me to start GMing again for the first time in over a decade.
Currently Reading
July 3, 2008Gah! I cannot wait to play this game. Calvin and Hobbes meets HP Lovecraft? Evil genius.
January 4, 2011
Fairly simple game mechanics in a fun and original setting.
April 1, 2011
Прекрасный сеттинг. Мой отзыв и описание игры можно посмотреть здесь:
http://imaginaria.ru/se/tamarrion/blo...
http://imaginaria.ru/se/tamarrion/blo...
April 4, 2011
My DnD crew should probably be alarmed when I read stuff like this.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews