It’s Frankenstein’s world, we’re just living in it. (Or is it Frankenstein’s monster’s world?) Guillermo del Toro recently gave us his own take on the story, and right now The Bride is tearing up the theaters with its confused take on, well, Frankenstein stuff. It’s only right that indie tabletop games get in on the action of what it would be like to be romantically attached to a creature built from the flesh and bones of the recently dead, and that’s why Seb Pines’ We Shall Be Monsters is the next solo RPG that you should be playing. After all, who doesn’t need the perfect companion in this day and age?
We Shall Be Monsters goes hard for the thing that it is: a monster companion constructor. It also takes the assumptions of the Frankensteineque story and leans into them with seriousness, asking to narrate not just the story of a creator and their creation, but the origins of the body parts that are being used to make that creation.
Working through the booklet is much like other solo RPGs in that you are addressing a series of prompts to tell a story to yourself about the experience that you had; in this case you’re building a creature from individual pieces and narrating their qualities. The legs might be Scientific and Nurturing while the brain is Analytical, Melancholic, and Realist. These qualities enter into conversation with each other and are narrated by the player, creating a composite story of how a being comes into the world and engages with its creator.
These qualities are not arbitrarily chosen, and unlike many solo RPGs, We Shall Be Monsters uses pure player choice rather than randomization through dice. Instead of rolling on a table, you follow a path through a chart that Pines calls a “circuit,” generating a series of qualities for your creation that follows along connected pathways. The chart that you use to create arms, for example, is structured in such a way that Innocent travels through Needy before reaching Adept, meaning that making a body part is always a choice about what qualities you’re willing to tolerate or settle with in order to reach the ones you really do want.
In this way, building the companion in Monsters is about developing a storytelling series through the things you want and the things you have to deal with. It means that to create a companion, which is to say to make a creation, you need to be willing to think about the entirety of that creation instead of just the parts you’re interested in.
The actual play of the game is a kind of dance of tracing circuits and then answering questions about the choices that you made within a storytelling framework of everything you have done before. After working through the creation of the head (which I gave the qualities Generous, Irrational, and Eager), I had to choose from a list of questions to answer about that body part. I chose, “What mistreatment will you suffer upon each other?” and I answered it with a bit of writing about their overkindness and largesse, with each of us unable to see that we smothered the other with too much care and attention, the mad scientist with an analytical doting and the creation with volatile acts of selfless attachment: stopping cars in the street with its body, tearing doors from frames in a sprint to open them, and so on.
Like Frankenstein, the storytelling mechanism in We Shall Be Monsters is electric. Pines has a talent for writing qualities and questions that force a player into defining the spirit of their creator in opposition or alignment with the creation, making it possible to write two kinds of monster in the same story. Every prompt feels like revealing more defining features, not just pointless details, of a character who had barely existed just a few minutes before.
It’s no spoiler to say that the game ends in the same way that all of the stories about creators and creations do: time runs out. When the player is creating circuits, the only resource they have is their own life—you have a number of connecting points equal to the amount of years in your own life. The life you give is your life, and so it’s possible to play the game and simply run out before you reach the brain and the heart, leaving your creation without the fullness of personhood. This casts the entirety of your story in a different light. An Eager and Irrational creation without light in their eyes feels much different than one with the spark of joy when they stand in front of a Model T and wrap it around their uncanny, superhuman frame.
As with all the great solo RPGs, you’re forced to write how it ends. While the circuit system for creation is really powerful for generating interesting characterization, it fails in the same way dice do to create compelling endings, and so it is up to the player to knit it all up with a bow (or, depending on their interest, not doing that). This is functionally an unsolved problem with solo RPGs, and while Pines does offer some strategies here in the end depending on how “far” a player makes it in the game, a little more structure to determine how it all ends would be welcome.
If one of the lessons of Frankenstein, and all the derivatives afterward, is that creations are unpredictable to creators, then We Shall Be Monsters is an appropriate inheritor to the legacy. Ironically, the game is fully predictable; players know exactly what qualities they are putting into their creations. How those qualities interact, and how players will use them and the ones they chose beforehand to answer the framing questions of the game, is what makes it feel like the creation is always running away from your control. This is what I’m chasing in solo RPGs, and We Shall Be Monsters hits the high notes with the best of them. Controlled chaos, two monsters caught in a melancholic death spiral, bound together for eternity: Now that’s gaming.
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