MH Skin Ideas

[EricaOdd]

Here are some ideas for MH skins that I thought up. I don't feel well-versed enough in the system to flesh them out fully, but I waned to share to see what others think. They are the Alien, the Skinwalker, and the Clown.

THE ALIEN: The more I thought about this one, the more I realized it would just be a re-working of the Ghoul. An alien is a visitor from another planet in human guise. As such, they want to experience everything the Earth has to offer. EV. RY. THING. As a re-do of the Ghoul, Hungers become Curiosities. Some of the Ghoul powers would have to be altered or dropped in favor of something more fitting. The Darkest Self can remain as the Alien becomes obsessed with a particular experience and seeks it out. I also don't feel that this one fits well, since it's a bit too sci-fi for the supernatural setting.

THE SKINWALKER: This skin speaks to the teenage experience of being an outsider and wanting to 'fit in' so badly that you become a social chameleon. You change your personality based on who you are with. You sports it up with the jocks, talk fantasy and sci-fi with the nerds, and mature yourself when around adults, etc. This skin would focus mostly on borrowing powers from other skins. One power it would have is Social Chameleon, in which for the duration of a scene you can change one of your stats to match the same stat of one of the other main characters if they are nearby. The Skinwalker's Darkest Self would be Becoming the Mask, in which you latch on to one person to emulate and go all "Single White Female" on them, trying to literally BE them like an obsessive stalker. The Skinwalker can escape their darkest self if someone helps them see their value as an individual.

THE CLOWN: Everything is funny to this guy. They use jokes and sarcasm as a defense against the pain they feel inside. Their powers would be all about provoking, shutting down, and giving conditions. Their Darkest Self is Behind the Laughter, in which they see the world as a huge cosmic joke and everyone BUT them is the punchline. Nothing is off-limits to the Clown in those times, and this is when their insults turn personal and really dig deep. They can escape their Darkest Self if they realize how much they've hurt someone or if someone genuinely makes them laugh.

[EricaOdd]

THE SPIDER: The Spider is a reworking of the Queen, without a clique. They are all about getting Strings on others and blunt manipulation. "Welcome to my parlour..." The Spider draws people into their social web and then eats them alive (perhaps even literally... this IS Monsterhearts after all...) The Darkest Self would be Black Widow. Tear down the web and start over. Burn all Strings to lash out at everyone around you until you have nothing left. You recover when someone else gets a String on you.

[EricaOdd]

If anyone else has custom skin ideas, either fully written out or just bare ideas like mine, post 'em if ya got 'em!

[tomes]

Jun 14, 2018 5:59:02 GMT -8 EricaOdd said:

If anyone else has custom skin ideas, either fully written out or just bare ideas like mine, post 'em if ya got 'em!

I don't got any, but I know that HyveMynd's got a few based on Japanese monsters.

Ah, here is the thread on G+: plus.google.com/+ChrisHyveMyndStoneBush/posts/CPTsefsmHMd (https://hyvemynd.itch.io/) and are making their way to DriveThruRPG apparently!

(Also, congrats on making the 5 star club, EricaOdd!!)

[EricaOdd]

Wow I just noticed that... what did I do to get into the 5 star club?

[ayslyn]

Huhn… It's clearly not post count. Perhaps there's a point system based on post count and size?

[EricaOdd]

Or number of likes my posts have gotten?

[ayslyn]

Hurm…. It's possible?

[tomes]

Jun 14, 2018 14:19:08 GMT -8 EricaOdd said:

Wow I just noticed that... what did I do to get into the 5 star club?

500 posts, me thinks.

[tappy]

Jun 16, 2018 20:30:25 GMT -8 tomes said:

Jun 14, 2018 14:19:08 GMT -8 EricaOdd said:

Wow I just noticed that... what did I do to get into the 5 star club?

500 posts, me thinks.

But Tomes, you have 1300 and are two stars...

[tomes]

Jun 16, 2018 20:43:36 GMT -8 tappy said:

Jun 16, 2018 20:30:25 GMT -8 tomes said:

500 posts, me thinks.

But Tomes, you have 1300 and are two stars...

Yes, but my stars are SILVER :-)

Once you become a Patreon backer you get silver stars (number is based on pledge level I think), regardless of how many posts. Prior to the patreon thing I remember getting to 5 yellow stars when I hit some number of posts (I'm guessing it was also 500).

[tomes]

Fuck, that's a lot of posts. Says something I guess. It was HJ that was my first regular RPG podcast when I returned to gaming around 2010/2011. I think I joined around season 3 or 4? Even them I remember listening to new episodes AND the backlog, and it STILL took me a long time to get through the backlog. I can't even imagine for someone new...

[tappy]

Whenever I think about making new skins or PbtA playbooks I ask myself the following things.

1. Does this new skin do something completely new, or is it just a version of a skin that is already in the game?

If it is just a version of a skin that is already in the game, why do you need it? Most likely the new skin will just stomp on the tropes of the original skin, but be more specialized. Often times this will lead the specialized skin tromping all over the spotlight of the original skin in those areas. You don't want to have a feeling of "Skin+" for the new skins and this can just kind of get frustrating for other players. You don't want a new "Witch" type skin just being a better Witch than The Witch. Taking the mechanics of the original skins and applying them to new situations and tropes is fine. Actually it is brilliant because it keeps the design principles of the original game at heart while exploring new areas. But the original skin are amazingly well written and can be played in a vast number of ways.

2. Will this skin change the tenor of the game?

I personally dislike The Chosen, as it means the game will be more fight-y and less drama-y. Will the skin that you are making fundamentally change how the game will play with the other skins, and is that a desirable outcome? If you WANT a more Buffy-esque game, including The Chosen in a good thing, as opposed to a negative thing. Consider what the skin is adding to the game and if those consequences are desirable or not.

3. Consider how the moves on your new playbook will synergize with moves from other skins

It is really easy to accidentally make things very different by how two moves work together. Lets say you wanted to make a skin called "The Maniac", and one of the maniac's moves is "battleship diplomacy: When you use the threat of physical force to shut someone down, make an extra choice from the list". On paper it looks just like a weaker version of the Vampire's move "cold as ice", which should be fine. But now that both moves exist the Vampire could take that move as an advance and take over the game. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but having one player being able to mechanically push around all the other players isn't necessarily the best/most fun thing.

[HyveMynd]

Jun 18, 2018 13:08:59 GMT -8 tappy said:

Whenever I think about making new skins or PbtA playbooks I ask myself the following things.

1. Does this new skin do something completely new, or is it just a version of a skin that is already in the game?

If it is just a version of a skin that is already in the game, why do you need it? Most likely the new skin will just stomp on the tropes of the original skin, but be more specialized. Often times this will lead the specialized skin tromping all over the spotlight of the original skin in those areas. You don't want to have a feeling of "Skin+" for the new skins and this can just kind of get frustrating for other players. You don't want a new "Witch" type skin just being a better Witch than The Witch. Taking the mechanics of the original skins and applying them to new situations and tropes is fine. Actually it is brilliant because it keeps the design principles of the original game at heart while exploring new areas. But the original skin are amazingly well written and can be played in a vast number of ways.

2. Will this skin change the tenor of the game?

I personally dislike The Chosen, as it means the game will be more fight-y and less drama-y. Will the skin that you are making fundamentally change how the game will play with the other skins, and is that a desirable outcome? If you WANT a more Buffy-esque game, including The Chosen in a good thing, as opposed to a negative thing. Consider what the skin is adding to the game and if those consequences are desirable or not.

3. Consider how the moves on your new playbook will synergize with moves from other skins

It is really easy to accidentally make things very different by how two moves work together. Lets say you wanted to make a skin called "The Maniac", and one of the maniac's moves is "battleship diplomacy: When you use the threat of physical force to shut someone down, make an extra choice from the list". On paper it looks just like a weaker version of the Vampire's move "cold as ice", which should be fine. But now that both moves exist the Vampire could take that move as an advance and take over the game. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but having one player being able to mechanically push around all the other players isn't necessarily the best/most fun thing.

What tappy described above is pretty much exactly what I do. (Though I honestly don't worry about how the new playbook's moves synergise with existing playbooks, apart from obviously overpowered, game breaking stuff.)

I really feel that the best Monsterhearts Skins are ones that use monster/mythical creature as a metaphor/allegory for some aspect of teenage life. Usually negative. I feel that Skins that focus too much on the actual monster part have kind of missed the point.

That doesn't mean you can't start with the monster, which is precisely what I do.

I've made two Skins which I've released commercially: The Oni and The Kitsune. As I live in Japan, I thought it would be rad to do Monsterhears Skins based on classic Japanese yokai. The Oni came together easily, while the Kitsune sat in development for a long time because I didn't have a metaphor for it.

For the Oni, after doing research I saw that it, and the namahage (a similar monster) have both come to be symbols of conformity. While they did start out as human-eating ogres who could turn invisible and control thunder and lightning, they are now used to scare little kids into behaving and following the rules. Boom! That implied something about bullying and picking on people how stood out, a classic aspect of teenage life, which as far as I know, has not been explored as a Skin yet. So I pretty much stumbled onto the Oni's hook by luck.

The Kitsune was a lot harder. The shape-changing, trickster fox spirit is a classic Japanese mythology monster, and I knew I wanted to do one. But I couldn't come up with a metaphor for it. Shape-changing didn't seem like a strong enough hook for me. I thought for a long time about how to make it more "teenage", and considered the broad types of kids you'd see in a classroom. Eventually I hit upon the kid who's always lying. And isn't that what the kitsune does when it changes shape? Lie? Once I finally got that hook I started working on its "mandatory move". As Skins are about something, the moves need to reinforce that something. But when that something is negative? Making it a "must take" move (like the Ghoul's Hunger) is a good way to do that. I'm pretty happy with what I came up with for the Kitsune.

I still have some ideas for Skins that I'd like to make, many of them from Japanese mythology:
The Tanuki is another shape-changing spirit, often in raccoon form, and I'm thinking about a class clown type skin.
The Tengu is a crow-like humanoid who, according to tradition, is alternatively the protector of a certain location, a teacher (often in the martial arts), or a general harassing trouble maker.
The Jorogumo is a spider spirit, who often takes the form of a beautiful woman, and can enter people's dreams.
The Futakuchi Onna (literally Two Mouthed Woman) is a spirit that takes the form of a woman with a mouth on the back of her head. The mouth has a tremendous appetite and often spits out all kinds of profanities. There's a metaphor for gossiping and being two-faced here, but I haven't' nailed it down.
The Kappa is another classic Japanese yokai who is defeated through politeness (get it to bow and the water falls out of its head, paralysing it), but that's not a very strong hook.

For non-Japanese stuff:
The Chimera, as a combination of bits and pieces of other monsters, I think this is a great metaphor for being multi-racial (as I am). You're kind of caught between two groups, but neither really fully accepts you.
The Gryphon, is a protector in European mythology, and that sounds great for an overprotective friend who attempt to control other people "for their own good". (Spoilers, this absolutely came about because I saw Bad Dragon has a "Gryphon Cock" for sale.)
The Cyclops, are noted as being fantastic craftspeople and artisans. I think there's space to explore the creative types who get exploited by their friends. "Oh, you're an artist? Can you draw me? Why are you charging me, we're friends, right?"

All of those listed above are very much in the "just an idea" stage. Many of them don't have a solid hook as to how they're a metaphor for an aspect of teenage life, and I con't really progress with them until I nail that down.

[EricaOdd]

Jun 18, 2018 22:04:12 GMT -8 HyveMynd said:

I really feel that the best Monsterhearts Skins are ones that use monster/mythical creature as a metaphor/allegory for some aspect of teenage life. Usually negative. I feel that Skins that focus too much on the actual monster part have kind of missed the point.

That's what I was going for as well.

The Alien: A hedonist, for lack of a better word, who wants to do it all. Even I agree it's too similar to the Ghoul to be worth fleshing out.

The Clown: The class clown who makes a joke of everything because laughing is the only thing keeping them from crying. The monstrous part is, of course, based on the "creepy clown" phenomenon or general coulrophobia.

The Skinwalker: The low self-esteem type who wants to fit in and has become adept at faking being like whomever they are with in a bid to be accepted, to the detriment of their own individuality. The monstrous aspect is from Native American mythology.

The Spider: A borderline sociopathic manipulator who only ever uses other people to get what they want, using "Strings" from the game as their literal and figurative web. Perhaps too similar to the Queen to make a difference, I suppose.