MC Notes: Recount 05 Wednesday

Hello again,

MY FAVOURITE EPISODE! I hope you liked it. It’s my favourite because it really captures the spirit of Monsterhearts well with its emotional highs and lows. It also has relentless momentum. The plot barrels forward and shifts in tone quite significantly.

If you read my episode 04 notes I talked about setting up dominoes. That’s because here in episode 05 we start knocking them down. Let’s be real, Mina knocked over a lot of those dominoes. That is her plot function. If the Fae playbook is about keeping promises, you need someone to break them, and if the Selkie playbook is about who has the pelt, then someone has to steal it/lose it. Jesse and Jorie set themselves up to be able to use moves relating to this and to have conflict to react to and the plot rewarded it.

In my episode 2 notes I touched briefly on how Harmony’s plot function is to make Anna work hard for the band vote. As you can see that’s going well. I was really curious to see just what Eli would push Anna to do to invest in this vote. I did get some tonal whiplash going from the Gwen + Mina + Coffee scene into Sax/Sex practice, but uhhh that’s Monsterhearts y’all! One minute you’re lashing out, and the next you’re cuddling up.

One MC thing I tried to do through the campaign was encourage the players to focus on one particular mechanic per session. One session I said, “Spend your strings!” In this episode I encouraged people to use their playbook-specific moves. I find those shake up the plot in really interesting ways. For example, Jorie used one of her homesick Selkie moves during the dream sequence to summon Gwen to Declan's cave. The magical forces pulling these two characters together when they wanted to pull apart made for some really memorable storytelling.

Ok I could write essays about this episode so I’ll stop there. More spicy drama in two weeks.

xo Jillian