The Dream Library

As per usual, PolyCon informed me of things I didn’t know about the world of gaming today.

One of the unique bits was Monsters and Other Childish Things. It’s a game where the goal is to tell a story about small children and their friends from beyond the stars, under the stairs or bed, or inside the closet. It’s a story about how kids grow up with imaginary friends, and learn that letting their imaginary friend eat the schoolteacher they hate is sometimes okay, if the schoolteacher’s actually a space alien. It’s the Addams Family meets Sideways Stories from Wayside School.

As a venue for Storytelling, I put it somewhere on the shelf between World of Darkness: Innocents and Dogs in the Vineyard. It steps closer to the Narrativist model of game – where system’s just a way of keeping score or otherwise maintaining the structure and feel of the story – than the Storytelling system does. It has a relationship system like Dogs – so as you start relying on your Shoggoth to eat anyone who says he didn’t eat your homework (like you asked him to), your relationships with normal people can start to become a little strained. It has enough system to allow general tests of skill, unlike Dogs, and like Innocents is focused on children as the protagonists (Your character sheet’s your ‘Permanent Record’, and your monster’s is lined paper with a lot of room for crayon drawings of him hanging your teacher out a window).

It’s interesting, to say the least.

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