Monsterhearts: ‘Ask Questions’ Reference Card
- April 4th, 2012
- Posted in Advice & Tools
- By Mockingbard
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I just MC’d my first session of Monsterhearts yesterday and it was awesome! We all had lots of fun and I highly recommend the game. It was also the most fun group prep work / character building stage we’ve ever had. Making the home room was lots of fun and set up lots of triangles and messy relationships between PCs and NPCs.
One of the Principles of MCing Monsterhearts is to ‘Ask provocative questions and build on the answers’. Joe Mcdaldno, the author, has given some great examples in the text of reasons for asking provocative questions. As soon as I read them I thought it’d be handy if they were pulled out onto a reference card to prompt me during play.
I made this quick reference card, and seeing as it now exists, I thought I may as well upload it for fellow MCs. I’ve included three versions: one sparse, clean one with just the question prompts, a second one with the example questions from the text, and a third that’s just a copy of both in the same document because why not. Enjoy.
Awesome idea!
What happened in your session? What were the big highlights?
@Joe Mcdaldno Thanks Joe! Glad you like.
Your questions inspired me to write an actual play post, if you wanna check it out: http://www.pyresofvam.com/odds-ends/actual-play/monsterhearts-actual-play-edgegate-part-1/
Briefly, the highlights were:
- Cole, the chaos ghoul, made another student’s lab experiment explode, probably killing the poor NPC. Cole jammed the door as gas filled the room, to create more chaos, yet when he finally stopped pretending the door was stuck and dragged the unconscious NPC into the hallway he was hailed as a hero!
- Jane, our part-machine Hollow dealt 3-harm to an NPC with a Terminator-strength bitch slap in a cat-fight, hospitalising her.
- It was subtle, but I really liked that Aurora and Cole shook hands on a promise and both lingered slight, both rolling 10+ on to turn each other on. In the backstory, Cole has had love rekindled in his dead heart after seeing Aurora frolic naked in the woods. Before we even started play Aurora had 4 Strings on Cole, now it’s 5.
- More than anything I loved how the game played, how we all suggested how things could go and how as the MC I didn’t have to strain to come up with where things would go next. Snowballing and chain reactions are awesome.
Thanks again for making such a great game, Joe. Congrats!