By Benjamin Baugh, (c) 2009.
“Wow.”
“Yeah.”
“That thing is pretty big.”
“You said it. BIG.”
“I’d even say huge.”
“You know what’s the worst thing about something that big?”
“I can think of a few things. . . ”
“It’s like being really close to a high-school kid, and seeing all the pores gaping open and oozing grease or clogged up with black ick and bulging with gunk. Even from all the way over here, I can totally see how gross that thing’s skin is.”
“That’s a pretty weird thing to be grossed out by, for a shiny, green, iridescent mantis the size of my dad’s car.”
“Yeah, but SHINY. I do not ooze gunk, except from my warp-glands, and that’s totally rad gunk.”
“Well, I don’t leak gunk either.”
“Not yet. When you get to high school, they do something to your face. I’ve been studying humanity, so I figured out how it works. They drill out your pores so they leak, they poke your larynx so your voice comes out all broken and weird, and they make you grow a completely tragic, wispy little mustache, possibly through the use of exotic radiation. Also, they make you smell like yak butt, but this is possibly some kind of scam to get you to buy body spray, or so the television leads me to believe.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear any of that.”
“Why?”
“I just discovered something even more horrible about a creature that big than how easy it is to see its goopy pores.”
“What?”
“The size of its dumps.”
“Oh dude, I really did not want to go there.”
“Well we’re going to have to. It just dropped a duke on our neighborhood, and everybody is visiting from out of town.”
“This is the worst Thanksgiving ever.”
Bigger Bads is a new, 112-page sourcebook for the roleplaying game Monsters and Other Childish Things, written byMonsters creator Benjamin Baugh—multiple Ennie Award nominee for Monsters and Other Childish Things and theMonsters sourcebook The Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor—and illustrated by Monsters artist Robert Mansperger.
Bigger Bads is a book about monsters. Big monsters. Giant monsters. Ginormous monsters. Ginormous monsters and the kids who love them (or who get eaten by them).
We play loose with scale in the Monsters and Other Childish Things core rules, leaving questions of size vaguely vague. My monster is the size of a Jeep, yours is as big as three rusty old refrigerators, Dave’s is the size of a Pez dispenser—but dude, it is a seriously gnarly Pez dispenser, and when its head snaps back it isn’t chalky candy lozenges that pop out, it’s 500 pounds of broken bones and teeth and dried-up hairballs. It’s noisy, messy, and smells like a mummy threw up.
What matters most in Monsters is the scale of action that the monsters operated on and paid attention to—stuff that was kid-scale and affected kid life. It doesn’t really matter if one monster is the size of a parrot and the other the size of a Peugeot.
Well, folks, it’s time we changed all that.
Bigger Bads gives you a system to take the action from kid scale all the way up to giga-kid scale. With Bigger Bads you can build, play, fight, flee, and befriend monsters big enough to eat mountains and poo significantly-smellier mountains. Sometimes, a monster gets so big that it’s less a character or antagonist and more a location to stage some crazy action. Implausible, you say—but you’ll eat that word in a crow sandwich when you have your first crazy monster-fight on the back of Mi-Go’Jirra against the monkey aliens from Planet K controlling the great beast’s prehuman brain with psychic mega-lice.
And that’s just the start. A new mini-setting, new rules for range, threats, and weird kid powers, and a whole slew of new antagonists round it out.
What’s In Bigger Bads?
Glad you asked!
Chapter 1: Fiddly Bits
- Pushing and Shoving
- Helping Hands
- New Extras
- Big
- Bounce
- Immunity
- Range
- Sweet
- Splash
- Tweaked Extras
- Awesome
- Spray
Chapter 2: Threats—Bad Things Happening to Good People
- Threat Dice Pools
- Threat Actions
- Threat Qualities and Extras
- To Me, My Minions!
- ‘Hurting’ a Threat
- A Menagerie of Menaces
- Escaped Ebola Monkeys
- Snakes—Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?
- The Collapsing Building Is Now On Fire
- MIB Grab-Squad
- Excruciator Hatchings
- Robo-Bees
- The Mean Kids
- Traversing the Treacherous Nighttime Rooftops of Our Fair City
- Possessed Toy Factory
- The Seven Stars Secret Kung Fu Brotherhood
- The Goo That Ate the Cafeteria
- The Luchacabra Fighters
Chapter 3: Farness—I Can Melt Your Face From Way Over Here
- Come Over Here and Say That
- Hey! Can You Hear Me, Jerkwad?
- Default Farness
- How Far Can His Pus Glands Squirt?
- Getting Closer (or Farther)
- Playing Chase
- Children Fly for Free!
Chapter 4: Bigness—My Pal Leviathan
- The Scales of Bigness
- Bigness 1: Normal Size
- Bigness 2: Big (elephant)
- Bigness 3: Bigger (whale)
- Bigness 4: Biggest (skyscraper)
- Bigness 5: Biggerest (Mi-Go’Jirrah)
- And I’ll Form the Left Arm!
- Using Bigness
- Bigness and Hauling Butt
- We Could Have Prom In One of His Nostrils
- A Huge Example
Chapter 5: Why Are You So Weird?
- Who Are These Weird Kids?
- Wait, Weird Skills? That’s Not In the Core Book!
- Where Do Weird Skills Come From?
- Weird Skills Are Creepy
- Making Your Own Weird Skills
- The Down Side
- Caught Between Two Worlds
- Dude, Seriously? The More I Screw Up My Family, The More Awesome I Am?
- Don’t Take My Character Away!
- No Monster
- How It Works
Chapter 6: Agonizing Antagonists
- Agent C. Occupant (Bigness 1)
- Clueless S.O. (Bigness 1)
- Col. Brodie Block, Commander of Project Black Book (Bigness 1)
- The Grumps (Bigness 1)
- Monkey Aliens From Planet K (Bigness 1)
- Weird Monkey Tech
- Mecha Mi-Go’Jirra, Attack!
- Sidekick the Eager Hostage (Bigness 1)
- Your Hot New Stepmom From California (Bigness 1)
- Bugnutz Reloaded (Bigness 2)
- Killdozer, the Dozer That . . . Killlllllls (Bigness 2)
- Thunderbolt 10 A.P.E. (aka Thundermonkey) (Bigness 2)
- Agents of I.N.C. (International Neoscience Council, aka Inflatable Ninja Corp.) (Bigness 3)
- Weird Kid Power Source: Neoscience!
- So, You Have Decided to Purchase a New I.N.C. Neo-Energizer
- Combine-R (Bigness 3)
- Sal Nath (Bigness 1)
- The Doom That Came to Sal Nath’s (Bigness 3)
- Gargantua-Mago, the Ginormous Man (Bigness 4)
- Weird Kid Power Source: The Dirty Dank Dark Arts
- Levia A. Than, CEO of Maximega Co. LLC (Bigness 4)
- Leviathan, Squamous Fish-God of the Dread Subhumanoids (Bigness 4)
- Maximega Co. Security Associates (Bigness 1)
- Subhumanoid H.R. Rep. (Bigness 1)
- There’s Something Fishy About That New Kid . . .
- Weird Kid Power Source: Subhumanoid Hybridization
- Mi-Go’Jirra, the Fungus Lizard, King of the Monsters (Bigness 5)
- Weird Kid Power Source: Mi-Cells
- Project Codename Doma Omega (Bigness 5)
- Ultra Gorgon Level 3 Gold—Born to Love, Evolved to Destroy (Bigness 5)
Chapter 7: Campaign Jumpstart—Go Go Monster Force Zeta!
