Monsterhearts
Monsterhearts 2 is Avery Alder's Powered by the Apocalypse TTRPG of teenage monsters, queer desire, social cruelty, and personal horror, where Strings and emotional fallout matter more than winning fights.
Teen supernatural personal horror • Powered by the Apocalypse • Strings, Conditions, and Skin moves • Low prep, high social improv • Best for short campaigns with high-intensity content
Monsterhearts is one of the sharpest TTRPG choices available if your table wants teenage supernatural drama where attraction, shame, jealousy, and social leverage matter more than winning fights. The live line is the current Monsterhearts 2, Avery Alder's Powered by the Apocalypse game of teen monsters whose hungers and archetypes turn high-school melodrama into personal horror. It is excellent for short campaigns and emotionally exposed play; it is a poor fit if your group actually wants procedural mystery, tactical monster hunting, or low-intensity supernatural adventure.
What makes Monsterhearts different is that the monsters are not just genre dressing. Vampires, witches, fae, ghosts, and werewolves function as metaphors for unstable desire, status games, shame, fear, and the frightening parts of growing up. The rules are elegant, but the play experience is demanding: it rewards tables that set boundaries clearly, lean into consequences, and want relationships to be the main engine of momentum.
What the game is
Monsterhearts 2 is a Powered by the Apocalypse TTRPG by Avery Alder and Buried Without Ceremony about "the messy lives of teenage monsters." Play usually centers on a school, small town, or similarly claustrophobic modern environment where every rumor, crush, slight, and supernatural appetite becomes combustible. Instead of asking the table to solve missions, the game asks what happens when teenagers with too much hunger and too little self-knowledge start pulling on each other hard enough to leave marks.
The game is famous for using monsters as emotional metaphors rather than as tactical roles. A skin is both a creature type and a pressure point: the Queen turns social hierarchy into mechanics, the Infernal dramatizes temptation and debt, the Mortal centers devotion and vulnerability, and the Werewolf makes aggression and desire inseparable. That metaphor-first design is the core of the game's identity.
Publication history and editions
Monsterhearts first appeared in 2012. The current line is Monsterhearts 2, a later second edition that Avery Alder describes as a refinement built from five years of play. On the official What's Different in Monsterhearts 2? page, Alder highlights cleaner rules text, a streamlined Pulling Strings move, revised basic moves, added guidance around asexuality, texting, and violence, and expanded material on race and racism.
The second edition also changed the support package around the core book. The Hollow moved into the core set, while The Chosen became a free extra skin because it pushes the game toward a different tone. The practical result is that the current line is not a lore-heavy evergreen with constant splatbook churn; it is a tighter core game whose extras are meant to widen the emotional palette rather than replace the main experience.
What you need to play
You need the core book, two six-sided dice, pencils, and one person willing to run the game as MC. The current official store pages show a print edition and a standalone PDF; the main official game page also notes that print purchases come with a PDF copy. For table use, the free Reference Sheets and Core Skins pack is genuinely useful, because it contains the shared moves, MC sheet, and the ten core skins in foldable handout form.
If you want the fastest possible launch, the official Small Towns download is the most practical extra. It offers eight one-page settings that help a group stop circling the blank-page problem and get into trouble quickly.
Product line and additional support
The official Monsterhearts line is compact on purpose. Beyond the core book and the free reference material, the main site offers additional skins such as The Chosen, The Cerberus, and The Disciple, plus legacy first-edition support like The Serpentine. There is also Safe Hearts, a short guide first released in 2014 for navigating vulnerability and boundaries in Monsterhearts play.
That means the practical starting path is simple: buy the current edition, grab the free sheets, and only add extra skins or Small Towns once the table understands what kind of emotional pressure it actually wants. There is third-party and community material around the game, but the official line already contains the pieces most tables need.
Core rules and play structure
Monsterhearts uses the Apocalypse World engine: when a character does something risky or emotionally loaded, the MC points to a move and the player rolls 2d6 plus one of four stats, aiming for a strong hit on 10+, a messy partial on 7-9, or an MC move on a miss. The stats are Hot, Cold, Volatile, and Dark, and they describe social and emotional posture as much as competence. This matters, because Monsterhearts is not built to separate social scenes from "the real game." Social pressure is the real game.
The MC structure is similarly fiction-first. Rather than pre-solving plots, the MC follows agendas and reactions, tracks who wants what, and keeps turning desire into pressure. The rules work best when everyone is comfortable letting bad rolls make things worse in emotionally specific ways instead of treating failure as a pause button.
Characters, skins, and advancement
Player characters are built from skins, and the skin choice is the most important creative decision on the sheet. Each skin provides stat lines, signature moves, backstory prompts, a sex move, and a Darkest Self state that tells the table what losing control looks like for that archetype. The ten core skins in the official reference pack are The Fae, The Ghost, The Ghoul, The Hollow, The Infernal, The Mortal, The Queen, The Vampire, The Werewolf, and The Witch.
Advancement is not there to create careful combat builds. It exists to intensify identity and leverage over time: characters can add moves, raise stats, reach into other skins, and accumulate more ways to pressure each other. That keeps progression tied to the social engine instead of turning the game into gear management.
Signature mechanics
The signature Monsterhearts mechanic is Strings: a currency of emotional leverage that characters earn on each other and spend to tempt, pressure, expose, or otherwise steer scenes. Strings are why the game feels more like social brinkmanship than like generic PbtA conversation. They make attraction and resentment actionable.
The other pillar is Conditions, which are social and reputational labels rather than hit-point proxies. Monsterhearts 2's revision made them even more explicitly social, which sharpens the game's focus on shame, rumor, status, and self-image. Add in Darkest Self states and the sex moves, and you get a rules chassis that keeps characters dangerous precisely when they are closest to one another.
What play feels like
At the table, Monsterhearts feels less like a supernatural action show and more like a pressure cooker full of looks, bad decisions, impulsive violence, unreliable affection, and scenes that get away from people quickly. Characters turn each other on, lash out, spiral, and make promises they cannot keep. A session can move from hallway humiliation to occult weirdness to destructive intimacy without ever feeling like it changed games, because the emotional logic stays consistent.
That also means the game is often funniest and cruelest in the same breath. Monsterhearts can absolutely produce catharsis, tenderness, and queer joy, but it rarely does so by making the world gentle. It gets there by letting characters hurt each other, learn something, and then decide what kind of monster they want to become.
Running the game
Prep is usually low; improvisational and emotional load are not. The MC does not need elaborate tactical set pieces, but they do need a feel for who wants whom, who is avoiding what, and where the next bit of social pressure should land. The added convention and between-sessions advice called out in the second-edition changes page is a good clue about the real workload: this is a game about channeling energy between scenes, not about stocking dungeons.
For that reason, Monsterhearts is not especially forgiving of passive facilitation. The MC has to push on desire, consequences, and unspoken tensions while also protecting the table's boundaries. Groups that want low-prep fiction-first play often love it; groups that want low-responsibility facilitation usually do not.
Campaign fit
Monsterhearts can be run as a one-shot, and the official support acknowledges convention play, but its strongest form is a short-to-medium campaign. Strings, Conditions, breakups, betrayals, and social reversals become far more interesting when the table has time to live with them. A campaign of several sessions lets reputations curdle, apologies fail, and character growth feel earned.
Very long campaigns are possible, but the group usually needs to embrace status shifts, cast churn, or tonal evolution to keep the school-pressure premise sharp. If your table wants a years-long heroic arc with stable party cohesion, Monsterhearts is usually the wrong tool.
Reception and awards
Monsterhearts' reputation has stayed strong because its premise and mechanics line up unusually cleanly. The official page includes praise from John Harper for the clarity and usefulness of the text, and long-running criticism of the game often centers on the same point whether the tone is approving or cautious: Monsterhearts knows exactly what it wants to be. Even old critical coverage like Shut Up & Sit Down's review reads it as a strikingly mature design rather than a generic supernatural mashup.
The broader hobby reception reflects that profile. The first edition drew multiple award nominations and runner-up placements in indie and industry spaces, and the second edition later appeared in Origins Award nominee lists as well. That is not the same as universal table fit; the common caveat is that the game's greatest strength is also its sharpest edge.
Where it is strongest
- It turns attraction, shame, status, and jealousy into mechanics that actually matter in play instead of leaving them as pure improv garnish.
- The skin design is excellent: each archetype changes both tone and pressure, not just powers.
- It supports queer, messy, emotionally exposed stories better than almost any mainstream-adjacent supernatural teen game.
- Its official support package is practical rather than bloated: the core book, reference sheets, Small Towns, and a few extra skins go a long way.
Where it can frustrate groups
- It is a bad fit for players who want the rules to disappear and simply validate any supernatural teen story they bring; the game pushes toward a specific kind of volatility.
- Combat is not the main meal. If your table wants monster hunting, tactical set pieces, or procedural investigation, other games will serve it better.
- Because the game is sexuality-forward and emotionally sharp, weak safety practice can make sessions collapse into discomfort instead of drama.
- Its best play usually happens in unstable relationships, which can frustrate groups that prize party solidarity over interpersonal fallout.
Content and safety notes
The official content note is unusually direct, and it should be taken seriously. Monsterhearts explicitly engages dysfunctional relationships, teen sexuality, coercive power, trauma, abuse, violence, and queer marginalization. The game includes guidance on handling difficult themes with care and limits, and the older Safe Hearts support remains worth reading.
In practice, that means session-zero calibration is not optional. Even experienced roleplayers can misjudge how quickly Monsterhearts moves from flirtation or humiliation into scenes that require explicit consent and off-ramps. If your table does not want that responsibility, skip this game rather than sanding off its premise.
Best starting path
Start with the official Monsterhearts 2 page, then decide whether you want the print book or the PDF. Download the free Reference Sheets and Core Skins immediately, and grab Small Towns if you want easier first-session setup. If you prefer to buy through DriveThruRPG or want to scan user sentiment first, the current reviews link still points to Monsterhearts 2 on DriveThruRPG.
Research notes
Last checked: July 10, 2026.