“fin”
The Hiver (image courtesy of Curiomira)
Mara is dead, Chloe is gone, Chassie’s gang and Gabe’s team are in tatters, and the Hiver is still out there… somewhere. What’s a Chosen to do? Oh, right, go kill the monster.
Except that won’t be quite as easy as anyone expects, even if they can figure out how to counteract its power and use its secret weakness against it. You see, the Hiver has a new friend…
At the end of this episode, for the sake of time, we go into “full cinematic” mode and stop rolling dice. Fortunately, it works because we’ve all got a really good notion of the shared fiction. However, we realize that we’re not playing the game as intended, so apologies to anyone who wanted to see the final interaction played out that way.
We’re pretty sure you’ll find the end product entertaining, though!
Overall, I’ve really enjoyed listening to this AP. Thanks so much for posting it.
I’m disappointed with the ending. Not in the fiction, which was fine. But that in the end, you walked away from the mechanics. I was dismayed that after so many episodes of great AP of Monsterhearts, the way it ended was “Story Time”.
I would have much preferred a break at the point when the MC stated he was tired. Then a shorter session later. Or just, end it there, no big fight at all.
Thanks. You’re not alone – several of us had very mixed feelings about the ending, including myself.
In retrospect, I don’t think we were confident as a group in our ability to do a physical fight justice within the mechanics, in a way that also respected the established fiction. It might have been partly due to the previous Mara vs. Chassie fight (at the haunted house) which also ended up “going to cutscene”. It might have been that we were trying to make the game into something it wasn’t ultimately designed to do – something with elements of, say, Monster of the Week (Making the “big bad” an external, inhuman threat probably further complicated things). And it might just have been our group’s collective need to have tied-up storylines at the end of a season, which sort of goes against the *W games’ “play to see what happens” mantra, but that’s just the way we like to play.
Anyway, I’m glad you enjoyed the AP, and I’m sorry it didn’t end the way you would have liked. Fortunately, most of our games are played very much by the rules; for better or worse, this is really the only time we’ve deviated.