We are adventurers. We've been to every place anywhere in the world.

We are venturing. We are adventurers.

Hello heroes and welcome to another romantic episode of One Shot. I'm James Damato, your game master.

But not this week. To celebrate this season of love we for some reason have in the bitter wintery hell that is February,

I decided we should play a game steeped in this day's romance.

And by romance I of course mean raw sexual energy, which is why we'll be playing monster hearts this week

for those of you who aren't familiar monster hearts is a powered by apocalypse game like

dungeon world and other games that use the

Apocalypse engine, Monster Hearts breaks down its subject matter into

storytelling elements and it lends a great deal of focus to relationships between party members.

Monster Hearts is designed to recreate stories from supernatural romance dramas.

With it you'll be able to play all the Buffy, Teen Wolf, and Supernatural you could ever want.

There is so much about this system that is utterly brilliant.

Most games tend to shy away from party conflict.

This system thrives on it. It does a great job of breaking down and gamifying aspects of dramatic stories.

And it does it in a way that feels like popcorn or cotton candy.

It's not anything that's too heady or intense for anyone who wants to play.

But perhaps the greatest strength of Monster Hearts is the way that it depicts sexuality.

The default ideal setting for Monster Hearts is a teen drama where everybody's growing up and full of hormones and sexuality isn't really defined for anyone.

You can't decide before the game if your character is gay or

straight or by they're probably going to feel a lot of different emotions during the

game about a lot of different people. As a teen you don't get to choose how you feel about things or what happens to you.

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