BE BIGGER. BE WORSE. BREAK THE LIMITS.

You are not a misunderstood immortal yearning for acceptance.

You are not a beautiful predator staring mournfully through rain-streaked windows while somebody plays the piano.

You are not struggling nobly to preserve the fragile candle of your humanity.

You are an Actual Fucking Monster.

Humanity is prey, the Hunters are closing in and your brief, bloody existence should be spectacular enough to justify the mess left behind.

Actual Fucking Monsters: Breaking the Limits is the 120-page companion to Actual Fucking Monsters, expanding the original game with new character options, Monster Powers, dark magic, Hunters, victims, artefacts, setting material and advice for getting the most out of being something utterly reprehensible.

It is bigger than the original book.

It is nastier than the original book.

It contains everything you need to make your monsters more varied, your Hunters more dangerous and the inevitable trail of mutilated bodies considerably more interesting.

CREATE YOUR MONSTER THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY

Some players arrive with a carefully considered concept.

Others want to roll dice and discover what appalling thing has clawed its way into existence.

Breaking the Limits includes random character generation for creating monsters through a mixture of chance, inspiration and the apparent determination of the universe to produce something disgusting.

Use it to:

• Generate characters quickly

• Break out of familiar creative habits

• Produce unexpected combinations of powers and traits

• Create supporting monsters and rivals

• Populate entire nests, packs, cults or outbreaks

• Discover what you are playing at the same moment everybody else does

You may begin with no clear idea what sort of monster you want.

A few rolls later, you will have something capable of upsetting both the authorities and several major organs.

NEW MONSTER POWERS

The original game provided the means to create all manner of unnatural predators.

This companion gives them even more ways to ruin somebody’s evening.

A substantial collection of new Monster Powers expands what your creature can do. Dissolve your enemies with vomit. Intrude upon their emotions. Develop fresh abilities for hunting, surviving, escaping and committing atrocities with unnecessary flair.

New powers allow you to make monsters that are:

• More physically grotesque

• More psychologically invasive

• Better suited to a particular hunting style

• Capable of surviving new kinds of punishment

• Distinct from the creatures already in your game

• Even less welcome in polite society

Select powers to refine a particular concept or combine them into something no respectable taxonomy would accept.

The important thing is not whether your monster makes biological sense.

The important thing is whether anyone survives long enough to complain.

PLAY A DARK, EVIL MAGICIAN

Not every monster is born with claws, fangs or an additional mouth somewhere anatomically discouraging.

Some people work at it.

Breaking the Limits introduces rules for playing dark and evil magicians: people who have pursued forbidden power, made unconscionable bargains or simply examined the boundaries of acceptable occult practice and decided they were intended as a challenge.

Dark magicians provide another route into monstrous play.

They may begin human, or something approximately human, but their knowledge and ambitions place them firmly among the predators.

Use them as:

• Player characters

• Occult rivals

• Creators of other monsters

• Leaders of cults

• Dealers in forbidden artefacts

• Human antagonists almost as dangerous as the creatures

• People who believe they remain in control of what they have summoned

Monstrosity does not always require a transformation.

Sometimes it merely requires commitment.

HUMANITY, FOR SOME REASON

Perhaps you want your monster to worry about morality.

Perhaps you want temptation, degeneration and the possibility that some small fragment of decency remains buried beneath all the murder.

Perhaps you insist upon making everything complicated.

Fine.

Breaking the Limits includes optional material for introducing Humanity into the game.

This allows groups to place greater emphasis upon the monster’s remaining connection to ordinary people, the erosion of whatever conscience it possesses and the choices that might push it farther from—or unpleasantly closer to—its former self.

Use Humanity when you want:

• Moral decline to become part of play

• Monsters to struggle with what they have become

• Human relationships to create complications

• A contrast between restraint and appetite

• The loss of self to accompany physical corruption

• Players to make choices beyond selecting the most entertaining victim

Alternatively, ignore it and eat somebody.

The game is called Actual Fucking Monsters, not Moderately Conflicted Supernatural Roommates.

BECOME THE HUNTER

Monsters leave evidence.

They leave bodies, witnesses, patterns, wreckage and bereaved relatives with surprisingly transferable skills.

Eventually, somebody comes looking.

Breaking the Limits expands the human side of the conflict, allowing players to take on the role of Hunters fighting back against the monsters.

The companion provides:

• More detail on Hunter organisations from the original game

• Additional Hunter organisations

• Revised Hunter Powers

• More material for running campaigns from the human perspective

• Better-developed opposition for monster-centred games

Hunters may be professionals, survivors, fanatics, government agents, occult specialists or ordinary people who have discovered that monsters are real and reacted with something more useful than disbelief.

They are outmatched physically.

They do not regenerate.

They cannot necessarily tear through steel doors or digest a family of four.

What they possess is preparation, organisation, equipment and an intense personal interest in seeing the monsters dead.

A monster campaign can therefore be played from either side.

Become the thing in the darkness.

Or become the bastard carrying a flamethrower into its lair.

HUNTER ORGANISATIONS

Individual Hunters are dangerous.

Organised Hunters are a long-term problem.

The expanded organisations provide factions with their own methods, resources and reasons for pursuing the unnatural. They can become recurring enemies, uneasy allies or the central structure supporting an entire Hunter campaign.

An organisation may provide:

• Intelligence and research

• Weapons and specialist equipment

• Safe houses and medical assistance

• Training and revised Hunter Powers

• Access to previous case files

• Rivals within the organisation

• Superiors with concealed agendas

• A steady supply of missions from which nobody sensible would expect to return

From the monster’s perspective, these groups are relentless predators.

From the Hunter’s perspective, they may be the only barrier between humanity and things that regard maternity wards as buffets.

Neither side needs to be particularly pleasant.

THE M-CARD

Actual Fucking Monsters is deliberately a game about playing horrible creatures doing horrible things.

Subtlety has never been part of the title.

Even so, different players have different boundaries, and horror works better when everyone understands what sort of experience they have agreed to create.

The companion includes the M-Card, a simple game-insurance policy for managing content and keeping play within the limits established by the group.

It allows players to communicate when material has crossed a boundary without requiring the game to lose its teeth, abandon its premise or pretend that the word Monsters was being used metaphorically.

Agree upon the game you are playing.

Establish where the boundaries lie.

Then be as appalling as possible within them.

VICTIMS

A monster needs victims.

Preferably interesting ones.

Breaking the Limits includes a random victim generator and 100 pre-generated victims, giving Games Masters a substantial supply of people to threaten, hunt, manipulate, mutilate or occasionally underestimate.

Victims need not be interchangeable bags of blood waiting in an alley.

They may possess:

• Families and friends

• Jobs and responsibilities

• Secrets

• Useful knowledge

• Unexpected skills

• Connections to powerful people

• Reasons to be somewhere dangerous

• The capacity to survive

• The means to attract Hunters

• Consequences that continue long after the attack

A well-chosen victim can begin an entire chain of events.

Perhaps somebody witnesses the feeding.

Perhaps the victim survives.

Perhaps their disappearance is noticed immediately.

Perhaps they were already involved in something worse.

Perhaps the apparently helpless stranger has spent the last twelve years preparing for precisely this encounter.

Monsters create stories by choosing whom to hurt.

Choose badly.

It is more entertaining.

ARTEFACTS AND OTHER TERRIBLE IDEAS

The companion includes ideas and examples for artefacts: unusual objects capable of granting power, creating problems or doing both simultaneously.

Artefacts can serve as:

• Sources of monstrous abilities

• Objects of occult obsession

• Weapons against monsters

• Reasons for rival creatures to fight

• The centre of an adventure

• Temptations for humans and monsters alike

• Evidence of a larger supernatural world

• Things everyone would be safer leaving buried

An artefact should never be merely another item on an equipment list.

It should have implications.

Someone created it.

Someone lost it.

Someone wants it back.

Someone has misunderstood what it does.

The characters are probably that final someone.

WHERE MONSTERS FIT

The original game leaves much of its world implicit, allowing each group to decide how visible, common or organised the supernatural should be.

Breaking the Limits provides additional setting ideas and a broader sense of where monsters fit into the world.

Are they isolated predators?

Members of hidden communities?

Products of occult disasters?

The subjects of government investigation?

Ancient species surviving beside humanity?

Abominations without any common origin beyond the fact that reality occasionally produces something unspeakable?

The setting material provides enough structure to inspire games without chaining every campaign to an exhaustive official history.

Take what helps.

Ignore what does not.

Invent contradictory explanations and allow the players to discover that every supposed expert has been confidently wrong.

Monsters do not need a unified cosmology.

They need somewhere to hunt.

PLAYER ADVICE

Playing an Actual Fucking Monster requires a slightly different approach from playing a conventional hero.

You are not trying to save the kingdom, protect the innocent or accumulate sufficient experience to open a chain of magical-item shops.

You are playing for the bloody journey and the memorable destruction at its end.

The companion includes player advice on how to enjoy that experience, create entertaining monsters and contribute to a game in which the protagonists may be predators, killers and walking violations of natural law.

The aim is not to win.

The aim is to:

• Create memorable horror

• Pursue monstrous appetites

• Make terrible decisions

• Leave consequences behind you

• Give the Hunters something worth pursuing

• Build towards an ending worthy of the trail of carnage

Your monster will probably die.

Make certain everyone remembers why.

AN EXTENDED EXAMPLE OF PLAY

Rules can explain how a game functions.

An example demonstrates how it feels.

Breaking the Limits concludes with an extended example of play, showing the game in motion and helping players and Games Masters understand how its rules, tone and monstrous behaviour work together at the table.

It provides a practical guide to:

• Presenting scenes

• Making monstrous choices

• Using the rules during play

• Handling consequences

• Maintaining the tone

• Running the game as intended

• Understanding how all the blood-spattered pieces fit together

Read it before your first game.

Use it to introduce new players.

Then discard every lesson except the one explaining how to make matters worse.

BIGGER THAN THE ORIGINAL

Actual Fucking Monsters: Breaking the Limits contains 120 pages of additional material—more than the original corebook.

It expands almost every part of the game:

• Random character generation

• New Monster Powers

• Dark magicians

• Optional Humanity rules

• Expanded Hunter organisations

• New Hunter organisations

• Revised Hunter Powers

• The M-Card

• A random victim generator

• 100 ready-made victims

• Player advice

• Artefacts

• Setting material

• An extended example of play

This is not a standalone game. You will need Actual Fucking Monsters to make full use of the companion.

This PDF is a Post-Mort.com exclusive and is not available through DriveThruRPG.

A printed edition of the companion is available from Lulu.

You wanted more powers.

You wanted darker magic.

You wanted Hunters, victims, artefacts and new ways to make monsters even worse.

You have them.

Now break the limits.