YOU ARE NOT THE MISUNDERSTOOD MONSTER

Fuck your humanity.

Seriously.

If your idea of playing a vampire involves staring moodily across the rain-slicked city while wondering whether drinking blood makes you a bad person, there are already shelves full of games eager to accommodate you.

Actual Fucking Monsters is about the other sort.

The thing outside the bedroom window.

The shape in the underpass.

The bastard that ate three people last night and will need to eat again.

This is a standalone modern horror role-playing game in which the players are the monsters. Not secretly noble outsiders. Not superheroes with fangs. Not beautiful immortals desperately clinging to their souls.

Monsters.

You feed on people, frighten people, corrupt people, kill people and generally leave sufficient evidence behind that humanity eventually stops arguing about whether monsters exist and starts working out what calibre to use.

That last part is important.

Actual Fucking Monsters is not about winning.

It is about how long you can keep going, how much damage you can do, what sort of creature you become and how spectacularly everything finally catches up with you.

Think Nightbreed. Think vicious 1980s horror films. Think splatterpunk, creature features, grimy direct-to-video nastiness and the point in the film where the thing everyone assumed was only a legend comes through the wall.

Then play the thing.

BUILD YOUR OWN HORROR

Actual Fucking Monsters does not make you choose between a small number of approved supernatural species.

There is no requirement to pick Vampire, Werewolf, Ghost and Demon from a menu and then spend three books learning which faction of vampires dislikes another faction of vampires for reasons dating back to Constantinople.

You define what your monster actually is.

The rules give you a framework for building the creature around a central idea: what drives it, what it can do, what it needs, what hurts it and what happens when the human disguise begins to fail.

A character is put together from elements including Nature, Creation, Mind, Body and Spirit, a Mask and skills, Monster Powers, Banes, Health and Satiation.

The mechanics use stepped dice—d4, d6, d8, d10 and d12—so abilities are easy to read at the table.

That gives you enough structure for different monsters to feel mechanically different without needing a separate subsystem every time somebody decides they want to play a flesh-eating sewer thing instead of a vampire.

Want claws?

Take claws.

Want camouflage?

Fine.

Want unnatural strength, hypnosis, strange senses, shapeshifting, psychic abilities or some unpleasant means of draining sustenance from people?

Build the monster that fits the idea.

The rules are deliberately open enough that the creature comes first and the terminology second.

WHAT ARE YOU?

Some monsters were born wrong.

Some were made.

Some were never properly human in the first place.

That distinction gives you the origin, but the real heart of the character is its Nature.

What sort of monster are you?

A predator?

A stalker?

A corrupter?

Something driven by hunger?

Something that feeds upon fear?

Something that enjoys pain?

Something stranger?

Nature is not a personality quiz telling you which supernatural Hogwarts house you belong to. It is the central truth around which the monster is built.

Then there is the Mask.

For many monsters this is the old human life, or the identity they maintain to move through ordinary society.

Soldier.

Doctor.

Cleaner.

Estate agent.

Priest.

Taxi driver.

Whatever gives the creature a plausible place in the human world.

Other monsters may never have been human at all, in which case the Mask can represent another aspect of what they are.

The important thing is that the monster has something the world sees before it notices the teeth.

SATIATION: THE REASON YOU CANNOT JUST BE NICE

Monsters need things.

Blood.

Flesh.

Pain.

Fear.

Sex.

Death.

Corruption.

Destruction.

Whatever fits the particular horror you have created.

That appetite is represented by Satiation.

It is not a morality meter.

It is fuel.

Your Satiation runs down.

You replenish it by doing whatever your monster must do.

This gives the game its engine.

You cannot simply hide in a cheap flat, order takeaway and promise never to hurt anybody again.

Eventually the hunger starts asking questions.

Some powers may consume Satiation. Monsters can use it to recover from injury. Staying functional means feeding the thing inside you.

And feeding it creates evidence.

Evidence creates witnesses.

Witnesses create police reports.

Police reports create investigations.

Investigations eventually create people arriving at four in the morning with shotguns, incendiaries and surprisingly detailed information about your weaknesses.

The adventure is generated by your own appetites.

SLIPPAGE

The human face does not necessarily stay convincing.

As Satiation drops, Slippage begins to reveal what you really are.

The precise manifestations depend upon your powers and your creature.

Fangs.

Wrong-coloured skin.

A smell no amount of deodorant fixes.

Rippling flesh.

Mist.

Eyes reflecting light that is not there.

Whatever suits the monster.

At first you can pass.

Then somebody notices something odd.

Then the disguise becomes difficult.

Eventually you may reach the point where walking into Tesco without causing a panic is no longer on the table.

Slippage turns hunger into more than a number.

It changes how the monster exists in the world.

The hungrier you become, the harder it is to pretend.

BANES

Being a monster comes with weaknesses.

Real ones.

Silver.

Fire.

Sunlight.

Running water.

Religious objects.

Stone.

Cold iron.

Or something peculiar and specific to the creature you invented.

These are Banes, and they give the people hunting you an opportunity to turn knowledge into violence.

That matters because AFM is not intended to become an effortless supernatural power fantasy.

You may be stronger than ordinary people.

You may be faster.

You may heal.

You may be able to rip somebody's throat out before they understand what they are looking at.

Humans compensate by being numerous, vindictive and very good at weaponising information.

Once they know what hurts you, the balance changes quickly.

COMBAT IS QUICK AND UGLY

The mechanics are light enough to stay out of the way of the horror.

Actions are resolved with the game's stepped dice and opposed rolls. In combat, how well you beat the opposition matters; weapons and monstrous attacks add to the harm, Body helps soak it, and serious damage knocks Health down through its die ratings.

People can die very quickly.

This is intentional.

A pistol is still a pistol just because you happen to have supernatural powers.

A monster can tear through frightened civilians or isolated opponents, but a prepared group with guns can turn confidence into pathology-room photography remarkably quickly.

That gives fights the right rhythm for horror.

The monster is terrifying until suddenly it is in trouble.

Then it is desperate.

Desperate monsters do much worse things.

THE WORLD REACTS

The setting is deliberately loose.

There is no giant compulsory mythology explaining where every supernatural creature came from.

Lore can be unreliable.

Contradictory.

Local.

Wrong.

The characters and Games Master discover what is true through play.

What is reliable is cause and effect.

If you slaughter people, somebody notices.

If a witness records your real face, the footage can spread.

If local police cannot deal with you, somebody more capable may become involved.

If enough bodies accumulate, hunters begin connecting them.

You are creating your own opposition every time you feed carelessly, leave evidence or decide that witnesses are somebody else's problem.

This is one reason AFM needs comparatively little conventional adventure preparation.

The players are walking plot generators.

Give them hunger and opportunity.

Wait.

Something appalling will happen soon enough.

FIVE RULES FOR THE END OF YOUR LIFE

The philosophy of Actual Fucking Monsters rests on five simple ideas:

• Push the Envelope – This is transgressive horror. The monsters are supposed to do horrible things and the game is supposed to go places ordinary heroic fantasy does not.

• There Are Consequences – What you do produces enemies, witnesses, investigations and retaliation.

• There Is No Redemption – The default game is not about curing yourself, recovering your humanity or proving there was a good person inside all along.

• Everyone Is Awful – The human world is hardly presented as morally pristine simply because the player characters are monsters.

• Everyone Dies – Eventually the consequences win. The question is what sort of bloody story happens before they do.

That final point changes the game considerably.

Your monster does not need to be protected because you want to play them for the next four years.

You can take risks.

Make mistakes.

Escalate.

Burn bridges.

Become infamous.

If the monster finally goes down beneath searchlights and automatic fire after turning half a motel into human confetti, that is not a failed campaign.

That may be the ending you were heading towards all along.

NO HUMANITY SCORE

There is no default morality gauge ticking down every time you do something wicked.

You are already a monster.

The game is not waiting to see whether you become one.

There is no mechanical pat on the head for drinking ethically sourced blood or only eating criminals whose IMDb biographies establish that they deserved it.

Your practical restraint comes from survival.

You may choose not to murder the witness because killing them is wrong.

You may choose not to murder the witness because another corpse will attract attention.

The game does not particularly care which explanation lets you sleep during the day.

That distinction is central to the tone.

AFM does not ask, “Can I remain human?”

It asks, “How much can I get away with?”

MONSTER HUNTERS

Eventually someone comes looking.

Actual Fucking Monsters includes human opposition and hunter material suitable for escalating a campaign from local suspicion to organised supernatural retaliation.

These need not be the usual ancient Vatican conspiracy with silver swords and a Latin department.

Some hunters are official.

Some are amateur.

Some are ideological.

Some are every bit as unpleasant as the creatures they pursue.

They have one enormous advantage over monsters:

They can learn.

A frightened survivor becomes a witness.

A witness becomes information.

Information becomes preparation.

Sooner or later somebody turns up carrying exactly the thing your character hoped nobody would discover.

That is why feeding messily is fun.

It is also why feeding messily is stupid.

Fortunately, player characters have never allowed that distinction to trouble them much.

MADE FOR SHORT, VICIOUS CAMPAIGNS

AFM works particularly well when you want horror that burns hot rather than settling into supernatural domestic routine.

One-shots.

Convention games.

Short campaigns.

A handful of sessions following a group of monsters as their crimes spread, their Satiation falls, their appearances slip and the circle around them tightens.

Longer play is possible, but the core game is perfectly comfortable with characters dying.

Make another monster.

There is no shortage of terrible ideas.

This also makes it useful as a general modern horror engine. The system has subsequently been used for other Postmortem horror material, precisely because the underlying rules are light, violent and adaptable.

WHAT YOU GET

Actual Fucking Monsters is a complete horror RPG in PDF form.

Inside is the material needed to create monsters from scratch, define their human Masks and monstrous Natures, assign Mind, Body and Spirit, choose skills, powers and weaknesses, manage Satiation and Slippage, fight, heal, feed, flee and deal with the increasingly armed consequences of your behaviour.

The print edition is a 106-page, black-and-white A5 book, giving a fair idea of the amount of material in the core game.

This PDF is the digital edition.

No other rulebook is required.

For more options, including additional Monster Powers, random generation, expanded hunters, rules for dark magicians, optional Humanity, victims, artefacts, campaign material and more, there is also Actual Fucking Monsters: Breaking the Limits – The AFM Companion.

A print edition is also available separately.

THIS IS A HORROR GAME CALLED ACTUAL FUCKING MONSTERS

There seems little value in pretending otherwise.

The game contains violence, murder, cannibalism, predation, cruelty, sexual material and assorted other transgressive horror according to what the group brings to it.

That is the premise.

The title is doing its level best to communicate this.

The object is not to demonstrate that the monster was secretly the hero all along.

The object is to create an appalling creature, loose it upon the modern world and see what happens before humanity finally works out how to kill it.

Maybe you last three nights.

Maybe three months.

Maybe you become an urban legend.

Maybe your final moments are captured on six mobile phones and immediately uploaded with captions insisting it was CGI.

Either way, you got to be the monster.

An actual fucking monster.