By the time they hit adolescence, most people have gotten over their fear of the dark. They spend their midnight hour on gushy phone calls, diary ramblings, and wet dreams. They fall asleep peacefully, assured that the shadows hold no monsters.

But the shadows do hold monsters. You know because you’re one of them. Wickedness dwells within your heart, hunger courses through your veins. High school weighs on you and teen drama puts you on edge, but you have power. What will you do next?

Monsterhearts 2 is a game about the messy lives of teenagers who are secretly monsters. Each player takes the role of a classic horror monster — a vampire, a werewolf, a zombie, a witch, and more. Instead of a horror flick, these characters are placed in a high school. Your vampire may be a brooding loner, or your werewolf could be the shining star of the football team. It encourages messy teenage drama, very much in the style of Twilight and similar stories.

It’s very good at telling those stories! To understand why, we will need to dig into the mechanics.

The Game

Monsterhearts 2 is a Powered By The Apocalypse (PBTA) game. This means it is built from the bones of Vincent Baker’s Apocalypse World. Check out my article for more details, but essentially: PBTA games are very story-focused. Choosing a character to play usually means selecting a character archetype or trope, and the meat of play involves using Moves to influence the story for better or worse.

Right now, I want to laser in on one of my favorite components of the system: the Agenda. This is a four-part pact that every player agrees to when they sit down to the table. They are four ideas that reinforce each other and the stories the game is trying to tell. This Agenda is as follows:

Make each character’s life not boring.
Keep the story feral.
Say what the rules demand.
Say what honesty demands.

They are short, simple, and effective. By making your character’s life not boring, you invite fun story moments; by keeping the story feral, you stay surprised at the twists and turns; by saying what the rules demand, you keep the game chugging along; and by saying what honesty demands, you ensure everyone has fun.

In particular, I enjoy the way the game frames keeping the story feral. Improvisational group storytelling — the kind found in TTRPGs — is different from individual writing or even collaborative writing because the story can be feral. In other words, the story can be a wild thing, unbound by any one person’s view of it. As the book says, it can be a story that “couldn’t have existed in your head alone,” too big to have come from one person. Ultimately, that is my favorite part of this game.

The Rest

While I have discussed my favorite part of this game, there is a lot more I can talk about! Expect this article to be updated in the future!