A monster-training tabletop roleplaying game!
Game Geeks News is proud to bring you another great gaming project currently running on Kickstarter. Monster Wrangler is a monster training tabletop roleplaying game from Blackout Games focusing on human monster trainers, known as Wranglers, and their pet monsters, which they tame, raise and command in battles against other monsters. Wranglers are accompanied on their adventures by a small number of loyal monsters, which range from sleek hunting beasts to strange, mobile plants to deadly mechanical constructs that were built for war.
Players can easily create Wranglers who are either adults or juveniles, allowing the GM to run games with all juveniles, all adults, or a mixture of the two. Similarly, monsters can be either juveniles or adults, though they age much more quickly than their human companions!
One player takes on the role of Gamemaster, an impartial referee and narrator who sets up challenges and who controls the people and monsters the players will encounter during their adventures.
The other players take on the roles of Wranglers, people who train wild monsters for companionship and battle. Monster Wrangler supports both juvenile and adult Wranglers, and both have access to a robust list of advantages, disadvantages, and class abilities to make each character unique.
To resolve conflicts, Monster Wrangler uses a system based on ten-sided dice. Characters roll a certain number of dice for various tasks, as determined by their skills and attributes. If the number of successes generated by the character is equal to or greater than the Difficulty of whatever they’re trying to do, they accomplish their goal! Each result of 10 lets the character roll another ten-sided die, and each result of 7 or higher is a success.
Each success beyond what is required becomes a Raise, which the character can spend on various additional bonuses, such as increasing the damage of an attack or learning additional information from a clue.
There are thirty-seven unique monsters that Wranglers can fight, tame, and befriend in Monster Wrangler, ranging from ancient robots to ravenous vermin to noble woodland beasts. Their stretch goals will allow them to expand this number even further, and the game contains instructions for creating new monsters, allowing Gamemasters to fill their worlds with monsters of their own design. Additionally, Wranglers can breed their monsters together, creating hybrid offspring with the combined strengths – and appearances – of their parents!
All of this takes place in the Chosu Region, a richly detailed campaign world comprised of seven unique nations. Each nation is fleshed out with a quick history, a glance at the nation today, and a number of plot hooks describing thematic ideas for adventures set in that area. The most prominent organizations in the Chosu Region are also detailed, ranging from monster-training associations that help connect new Wranglers to young monsters to villainous crime syndicates to morally ambiguous tech companies with more money than common sense.
The core book is a full-colour hardcover book featuring art by awesome artists like Alyssa Menold, Victor Puentes, Blaise Rhein, Elaine Crawford, and others! At the moment, they’re at 200 pages, but that will increase with each backer reward and Stretch Goal that is unlocked over the course of this campaign.
The book includes a detailed description and map of the Chosu Region, the mechanics of the game, a character creation chapter with nine Classes and dozens of Perks and Flaws to make your Wrangler unique, 36 unique monster species (technically 37, with the example Loxobox monster), sixteen unique Types denoting how monsters fight (each with fifteen Techniques for monsters to learn), an entire chapter full of equipment and support items, and character sheets for Wranglers and monsters alike.
Blackout Games have also included two starter adventures (one traditional, and one tournament-based) and six pre-generated characters to help new groups hit the ground running.
It’s a wide world of adventure that’s just waiting for you to arrive! Back this campaign today on Kickstarter and help Blackout Games dream come alive. Rewards for backing this project include a full colour – high-resolution copy of the game in PDF format once the game is available for distribution, Monster Wrangler hardcover with your name included in the book as a backer of this campaign, create your very own monster plus all Unlocked stretched goals. For a full breakdown of the rewards available, check out their crowdfunding page on Kickstarter.
