My other big passion right now is the AW hack,
Monster Hearts.
Monster Hearts I talk about with the same breathless reverence as I do about AW; it's a
genius system which captures and understands the beating heart of an entire genre. Even just looking over the playbooks is captivating. It's the perfect expression of it's conflict and I want to play it so badly.
Now the catch is that I'd only play it with people I really, totally
trust.
This is because Monster Hearts is an expression of the
Teen Romance genre and it's all about abusive, unhealthy relationships. It's about people who aren't in control of their lives or bodies and are undergoing profound and scary changes. It expresses these truths with extremely simple yet profoundly meaningful moves. Where an Apocalypse World character has the ability to SEIZE BY FORCE, which lets them violently take control of a situation and dominate and terrify the opposition... a Monsterhearts character has the ability to '
Lash Out With Violence' - which is a far less controlled brutal act of passion. Likewise, rather than having the ability to 'Seduce or Manipulate', which involves a directed, experienced understanding of physical attraction, a Monsterhearts character has the ability to '
Turn Someone On'. That's it, that's all it does, and you have no idea what that's going to mean or do.
Moreover, in addition to all these limited, scary, uncoordinated moves, your playbooks are designed to promote unhealthy relationships; they're all about that. The Mortal, which is basically Bella from Twilight, gets to pick someone arbitrarily as her True Love (they don't have to love
her), and she gets to do things like mark experience for every time she excuses or justifies her love's bad behaviour. The Vampire is all about stringing people along, playing hot and cold with them and never granting them real satisfaction. The primary game resource is 'Strings', which represent how much emotional leverage each other person has over you. The Werewolf gains Strings on anyone he physically injures.
Finally, there's the concept of the Darkest Self. When your Darkest Self triggers you become a bad guy for a while. When the Hunter triggers she goes off, finds the biggest baddest thing she can, and fights it alone. This lasts until her friends physically restrain her or she wakes up in hospital. When the Witch's Darkest Self goes off she goes on a rampage of petty vengeance against every slight against her, real or imagined. Those things are scary.
So it's a very, very scary game about very, very complex relationships and it's sublime in how it pulls all that off. But what really stands out to me is the profundity of the Growing Up moves which offer hope through the darkness; you can take these after the game's passed a certain point. The upgrade to 'Turn Someone On' in this set is 'Make Someone Feel Beautiful'. The upgrade to 'Shut Someone Down' is 'Call Them On Their ****'. The upgrade to 'Gaze Into The Abyss' is '
Share Your Pain'. Good grief! That's sublime! No other game even comes close to grappling with those concepts or asking those questions!
But, at the end of the day, those are very scary questions. No other media, anywhere ever, will ask those questions of you half as directly. So, the end result is that I'd only play that game with a group of people I totally trust. One of my great ambitions in life is to assemble that group.