My Here, There, Be Monsters 5 shot experience

 You can find the system here. This game started on February 28, 2025 and ended on April 21, 2025.

I treat this system a lot looser than I think it's meant to be, which is saying something because it's an incredibly loose system to start. I keep forgetting how the magic system works and decide in the moment how to do it every single time it came up. Other rolls were basically nonexistant or to decide if something was funny enough to happen when I didn't want to make a call in either direction. We left a lot up to fate and I let my players run with it.

The big things my players took away from the system were a fairly freeform magic system, especially the way that I interpret the magic. I allow my players to cast magic as they see fit - and sacrifice whatever they want to to accomplish it - and weigh their sacrifice against how much they want something to succeed. I honor the dice rolls as well, but I keep in mind how strong a sacrifice is versus how badly they want it to happen. A weak sacrifice on a good roll will keep a modest success - they get what they want as they described it - but a strong sacrifice on a good roll will grant them something much bigger and better. I like doing it that way because it encourages my players to consider how much they want to get what they want, and how much they're willing to sacrifice for it. My players really enjoyed that I took the magic system and made it into something else; even the players that didn't cast magic enjoyed seeing the consequences of the magic in the system.

Another thing they enjoyed about the system is it's spontaneity. The system really allows you to make a character the same day you're playing and fall in love with them by the time the session is over. The session also allows you to make really snap decisions, especially if you're kind of flying by the seat of your pants in character creation. All systems have a level of improv, but Here, There, Be Monsters encourages and excels at it.

The plotline is as follows:

You've lived in your sleepy little town for a long time; nothing much has happened here in the years you've lived here. The monster community lives in relative harmony with the non-monsters, though you know you outnumber them. Recently, a new megamart has been built on the outskirts of town, bringing in jobs and driving the locals insane. People have started going missing, and they've primarily been from the monster community. Local law enforcement is mostly human and totally useless, so the leader of the local werewolf pack has reached out to you, hoping that you can put a stop to what's going on.

Admittedly, I spent a lot of this game flying by the seat of my pants. I knew I wanted the "big bad" to be the Watchers or the Brotherhood but decided on the watchers last minute. Due to scheduling conflicts that came up last minute, we decided that one of the player characters (Soup) would get kidnapped at the end of session 3. This ramped up the timeline my players were on and allowed me to railroad them into finding the Watcher's base and to eventually go back and burn it down. Originally I had wanted the megamart to play a bigger role in the story, but there wasn't time across the five sessions to really put it together.

I had the most fun watching my players interact with the setting and slowly piece things together. Because the villain was so cut and dry (they're just fascists looking to eradicate monsters after all) I didn't have to be clever with my villain or my plan leading up to them, which was freeing. Without any strong need to rationalize out why my villains were acting the way they were, I could dedicate time to building out the small facets of the world-building I had put together - the people of the town, a few of the friends and family of the one's who'd been kidnapped, stuff like that.

My players enjoyed the freeform magic system and one of my players in particular really enjoyed that the villains were just that:  villains. There was no ambiguity, no crisis of faith, just bad guys doing bad shit. They found it really cathartic.

Something I did right at the beginning of the game was making the players come up with the name, monster type, and details about the people who went missing as part of drawing in my players to the world. And it worked. They were more invested - by their own admission - in the story and the fate of the NPCs because they had helped in their creation. I recommend letting players come up with their own characters like this, even if they're characters that they won't see for a large chunk of the game, because it helps draw in that feeling of "my little blorbo".

If you want a more "liveblog" experience, you can follow me over on Bluesky where I will be posting more often about my TTRPG experiences while on hiatus from actually streaming.

Thank you for reading!