{"id":273,"date":"2011-04-29T22:26:35","date_gmt":"2011-04-30T05:26:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/arcdream.com\/home\/?p=273"},"modified":"2011-05-01T13:02:50","modified_gmt":"2011-05-01T20:02:50","slug":"bigger-bads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcdream.com\/home\/2011\/04\/bigger-bads\/","title":{"rendered":"Bigger Bads!"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Benjamin Baugh, (c) 2009.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cWow.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat thing is pretty big.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou said it. BIG.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d even say huge.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know what\u2019s the worst thing about something that big?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI can think of a few things. . . \u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s 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\u2019s skin is.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s a pretty weird thing to be grossed out by, for a shiny, green, iridescent mantis the size of my dad\u2019s car.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah, but SHINY. I do not ooze gunk, except from my warp-glands, and that\u2019s totally rad gunk.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, I don\u2019t leak gunk either.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNot yet. When you get to high school, they do something to your face. I\u2019ve 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m sorry, I didn\u2019t hear any of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI just discovered something even more horrible about a creature that big than how easy it is to see its goopy pores.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe size of its dumps.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh dude, I really did not want to go there.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWell we\u2019re going to have to. It just dropped a duke on our neighborhood, and everybody is visiting from out of town.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the worst Thanksgiving ever.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Bigger Bads <\/em>is a new, 112-page sourcebook for the roleplaying game\u00a0Monsters and Other Childish Things,<\/em> written byMonsters <\/em>creator Benjamin Baugh\u2014multiple Ennie Award nominee for\u00a0Monsters and Other Childish Things <\/em>and theMonsters <\/em>sourcebook\u00a0The Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor<\/em>\u2014and illustrated by\u00a0Monsters <\/em>artist Robert Mansperger.<\/p>\n

Bigger Bads <\/em>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).<\/p>\n

We play loose with scale in the\u00a0Monsters and Other Childish Things <\/em>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\u2019s is the size of a Pez dispenser\u2014but dude, it is a seriously gnarly Pez dispenser, and when its head snaps back it isn\u2019t chalky candy lozenges that pop out, it\u2019s 500 pounds of broken bones and teeth and dried-up hairballs. It\u2019s noisy, messy, and smells like a mummy threw up.<\/p>\n

What matters most in\u00a0Monsters<\/em> is the scale of action that the monsters operated on and paid attention to\u2014stuff that was kid-scale and affected kid life. It doesn\u2019t really matter if one monster is the size of a parrot and the other the size of a Peugeot.<\/p>\n

Well, folks, it\u2019s time we changed all that.<\/p>\n

Bigger Bads <\/em>gives you a system to take the action from kid scale all the way up to giga-kid scale. With\u00a0Bigger Bads<\/em> 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\u2019s less a character or antagonist and more a location to stage some crazy action. Implausible, you say\u2014but you\u2019ll 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\u2019s prehuman brain with psychic mega-lice.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s In\u00a0Bigger Bads?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Glad you asked!<\/p>\n

Chapter 1: Fiddly Bits<\/strong><\/p>\n