In October 2022 we launched the year’s October Horrors sequence with Monsters and Other Childish Things, the distressingly funny RPG from Arc Dream Publishing of kids and the otherworldly horrors who love them. Monsters and Other Childish Things is “Calvin and Hobbes meets Call of Cthulhu.” Childhood is full of extraordinary conflicts, changes, awakenings, and realizations – a time when finding a weird green egg in your basement seems like a real possibility, and the thing that hatches is too cute to abandon.
The monsters in MOCT are big, scaly, scary bundles of superpowers, but they also represent unconditional friendship. In this confusing time, you know no matter how mad, bad, or smelly you get, your monster still loves you. Your monster has a habit of sowing chaos, delight, wonder, and horror. But when you consider what your life was like before he showed up – yeah, you’re gonna keep him.
Still, your monster often gets you into trouble. Some kid at school shoves you, and so your monster bites him a little, and then his monster bites your monster, and then the school is on fire (again) and the police get called (again) and you get detention (again). Sometimes people show up in big vans with antennae and stuff on top, and guys get out with guns and helmets and they yell a lot, and then your monster has to eat some of them.
That’s life with a monster. Sometimes it sucks, but it’s never boring.
Of 63,514 entries in the authoritative RPG.net Game Index, Monsters and Other Childish Things (2007) ranks #16. MOTC, the first and still the best-known game by Benjamin Baugh, simplifies the One-Roll Engine rules (Wild Talents, GODLIKE, Reign) and adds Relationships and a hit location system where damage targets an attribute rather than a specific body part. MOTC suits gamers who like a little humor with their horror and a few scares with their laughs.
We presented the entire Monsters and Other Childish Things line for a bargain price, including the complete Monsters and Other Childish Things: Completely Monstrous Edition (plus its Pocket Edition); the campaign supplement The Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor; and the supplements Bigger Bads, Road Trip, and Curriculum of Conspiracy.
(The Monsters rulebook and Candlewick Manor previously appeared in the October 2014 Bundle of Nerves 2. The other titles were new to the Bundle of Holding.)
