One of the best RPGs I’ve ever read was written in a single blog post by the amazing and inimitable Pearce Shea: Monster Parts. In one post, Pearce wrote the single most evocative and fascinating RPG I’ve ever read and I wanted to run it immediately. Thankfully, Pearce wrote the excellent In The Woods and gave us not only the rules in a friendly format, but he also wrote the best-most-scariest adventure for Monster Parts that could exist. Then, sadly, Pearce kind of disappeared from the RPG scene, which is a crippling loss. Pearce, homie, come back, we need you now more than ever.
Pearce’s vision of a super-simple, rules-light game filling the Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark, John Bellairs and Junji Ito space really resonated with me. I ran Monster Parts time and again at conventions and as spooky season one shot and I always had a blast. Players said they did, but they can only be trusted so far, right?
Somewhere along the way, I realized that Monster Parts basically works like Lasers & Feelings, but with hit points (okay, endurance points, but whatever) and with a less-explicit lean on that framework. There were some things you rolled OVER your hit points for, some things you rolled UNDER. After a brief thought experiment – namely “What would happen if I removed hit points from Monster Parts and split the over/under thing into two explicit actions?” – I came up with Hide & Seek, a suburban folk horror RPG set in the playgrounds and treehouses of a nameless neighborhood, just like the one I grew up in. I wrote it, sent it out to friends and thought we were done.
But no.
Tomorrow, you’ll get to play, just in time for your spooky season one-shots.
It’s time to play Hide & Seek.
Comments
Post a Comment