Benjamin Baugh has taken a roleplaying system (Greg Stolze's One Roll Engine) first used to simulate gritty, low-powered super heroes in World War II (Godlike) and turned it into a smooth-playing, easy-reading game of kids, their relationships, and the monsters who love them.
In Monsters and Other Childish Things, you play a pretty normal kid facing the everyday problems of friends, family, and school. The twist is that your best friend in the whole world is a nigh-unstoppable, madness-fueled creature from beyond time and space. Your monster loves you and absolutely no one else. He likes to do things that would cause most people (especially grown-ups) to run screaming in terror. Needless to say, he can get you into trouble sometimes.
Creating your kid is easy, with only five stats and a handful of skills. The interesting part here is defining your relationships, things you care about that serve as little mechanical hooks on which to hang stories. If you can convince the GM that performing your action will benefit from the emotions invested in a relationship, you get to add the relationship's dice to your roll.
The really fun part comes when you cook up your monster buddy. Every monster is unique, built as a series of body parts, important physical bits that let the monster do impossible things. Maybe your monster has multi-facted bug eyes that let him see past, present, and future all at once. Or perhaps his wide, stretchy throat can swallow just about anything, while his hungry, hungry belly can melt it down into an acid soup that he can regurgitate on his enemies. You get the idea.
Monsters boils the normally chunky One Roll Engine down into a tasty slurry that handles both physical and emotional conflict seamlessly. Plus, it includes One Roll generators for conflicts (drawing on characters' relationships) and even monsters. Just check 10 dice, consult the tables, and you have yourself a fully statted monster in just a few minutes.
If you're looking for a fast, fun game that is easy to get into and easy to run, that rewards you mechanically for forming relationships with your characters, and that features reality-warping monsters as prominent NPCs, you can't get any better than Monsters and Other Childish Things.
Arc Dream Publishing. 192 pages. Print+PDF, $29.99.
