MONSTER GUTS is an action-focused roleplaying game inspired by our favorite monster hunting videogames. You play as scavengers, hunting down and butchering bioengineered monstrosities to upgrade your arsenal and sustain your community.
MONSTER GUTS is an action-focused tabletop roleplaying game inspired by our favorite monster-hunting video games. You play as scavengers in an ecologically ravaged Pacific Northwest, hunting down big bio-engineered behemoths and harvesting their guts to power up your arsenal and build up your Village.
Cover design by Evangeline Gallagher
MONSTER GUTS is all about the high-octane power fantasy of fighting monsters the size of buildings, Every hunt is cinematic and dynamic, where you race to break as many monster parts as possible before finally slaying your quarry.
The Bowgun, Fire Lance, Longsword, Modular Scythe, Vespine Spear, and War Bugle. Art by Evangeline Gallagher.
Speaking of weapons, in MONSTER GUTS, your weapon is your character class. Each player chooses one of the 12 weapons that each offering a distinctive playstyle and unique abilities. Do you study the blade? Or perhaps the aerial playstyle of the Vespine Spear is more to your liking. For those interested in technical combos, the Modular Scythe is a trick weapon, that swaps between Scythe and Shield mode.
LUMEN is an RPG system designed by Spencer Campbell. MONSTER GUTS is in no way affiliated with Spencer Campbell or Gila RPGs.
MONSTER GUTS is proudly illuminated by Lumen and uses the system's lightweight mechanics to keep the game focused on the action. Combat in MONSTER GUTS is fast-paced and dynamic, with the battlefield changing every round as monsters use their Tempo Change abilities to alter the terrain and summon complications.
This crowdfunding campaign funds print copies of MONSTER GUTS 2e and expands the scope of the game.
Perfect both for one-shots and campaigns
Fast-paced combat rules designed specifically for fighting large monsters in dynamic environments
14 different monsters
3 unique Hunting Zones
Invest Monster Guts into your weapons, Village, or monster-specific armor
Character and Village creation that creates memorable characters and entwined relationships
Companions, sapient creatures evolved from household pets, who aid your scavenger
Support for both solo play and playing without a Game Facilitator
Guidance on creating your own hunts and monsters
And more!
Additionally, campaign supporters will get exclusive access to 6 monsters co-created by myself and several other phenomenal TTRPG designers!
Once, we flew the skies and traveled the deeps. Once, we delved into the miniscule and corralled the massive. Once, we created life to support and sustain our progress.
And then our monsters turned on us. They consumed our forests, our water, our livestock, our homes, and our lives. And then they multiplied.
Our Village was isolated enough to escape the brunt of the attacks. But there are no more trees to burn, no metal to smelt, no food to eat, no water to drink. To live, we needed to hunt the very monsters who had deprived us of our livelihoods and liberties.
And so we trained the scavengers in massive weaponry cobbled together from whatever we could spare. Weapons suited to killing the monsters who stalk our land. From those early monsters, we fed our community, fortified our homes, and built better, bigger weapons. We forged armor to tap into their brutal abilities.
And now you are here to take on the scavenger’s mantle. Our survival depends on you.
MONSTER GUTS takes place in an ecologically ravaged version of the Pacific Northwest. The monsters you hunt were bio-engineered to extract natural resources, and now you and your fellow scavengers must extract those natural resources from them.
The game includes three Hunting Zones to explore, each with their own unique threats and complications.
Once-Emerald Forests illustration by Jaen Butler
The Cities of Yore
Built from poured stone and metal, these fallen towers and wracked roads now house new occupants: steel-trees, moss, and monsters.
The Hanford Wastes
A testament to the laziness and inefficiencies of those Before, the Wastes are gorgeous valleys and perilous ravines marred by irradiated waterways.
The Once-Emerald Forests
They say these trees were green. Now they are red, orange, purple, blue, and their needles are sharp and hard. Their bark turns aside any axe and their fruit is toxic to all but the most venomous of creatures.
As a LUMEN game, MONSTER GUTS has a simple central mechanic: your scavenger has 3 stats, based on the 3 damage types of their arsenal: Crush, Slice, and Pierce. During play, you'll use whichever stat best matches how you tackle whatever challenge lies before you.
Are you using brawn and sheer force? Crush. Are you using dexterity and speed? Slice. Are you using patience and precision? Pierce.
Each weapon has a unique combination of these stats, and you'll enhance them over time by imbuing monster parts into your weapon of choice.
However, MONSTER GUTS also adds in a new resource: Voracity. You get Voracity whenever you describe what your scavenger is doing in a cool and exciting way. You can spend Voracity to reroll dice or take extra actions in combat. Each monster also has a unique armor set you can craft that gives you new ways to gain and spend Voracity. During the Hunt, where your scavengers track down and defeat a monster, play alternates between Lulls and Bouts.
Lulls are when you're out of direct combat, but still tracking down the monster. It's an opportunity to scavenge for consumables, heal, sharpen your weapons, and switch out your gear.
Bouts are the monster fights themselves. They're a fast-paced, action-oriented affair. While you can make basic attacks using your choice of Crush, Slice, and Pierce, each weapon also has unique abilities and special attacks, creating their unique playstyle. You'll want to focus fire on different monster parts to limit the monster's moveset and get additional rewards at the end of the Hunt.
After slaying the monster, you'll carve them up into parts! Each monster has a short list of Tags thematically linked to the monster. Each broken part grants you an extra random Tag pulled from that list, to be used when you return to the Village.
Great Gristlebear. Art by RAPIDPUNCHES.
Downtime begins upon your safe return home. You can donate those Tags to improve the Village's critical buildings or imbue them into your weapons and armor. As you gain the respect of the Village, you'll be able to invest tags into Building Extensions, unlocking new ways to empower your characters and access more of the world.
Danielle ran MONSTER GUTS 2e for the wonderful folks at Plus One EXP, and you can watch how it all went down! Check out the Hunt and stay for the post-game discussion!
Monster Guts 2E introduces some killer mechanics to help players visualize and engage with the environment while hunting grotesque monsters in a ruined world.
All shipping fees will be assessed and charged separately, after the campaign ends. The prices below are estimates, and the final shipping costs can only be assessed once the books are printed. If you add additional books to your order, your shipping costs may increase.
Shipping will be conducted via the USPS when at all possible.
Danielle Osterman (she/they): Writing, Design, and Layout. Danielle is an up-and-coming queer, trans, Jewish tabletop roleplaying game designer born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. While MONSTER GUTS 1e is her best-known work, she's also published A TaroTRPG from A to Zine and The Osterman Academy of Magical Arts, among others. Danielle cut her teeth running and designing OSR games and has since branched out into more rules-light, narrative-focused design. She recently completed the UW Certificate in Game Design, studying with Jay Schneider, Glenn Jones, and Colin Suess.
This is my first time running a crowdfunding campaign, so there may very well be challenges and costs that I did not anticipate. However, I love MONSTER GUTS, and I'm committed to developing the second edition and releasing it to the world. The second edition is already in development (and getting playtested), and the artists are fully on board to start working on the new art as soon as the crowdfunding campaign finishes. The schedule has been built to accommodate for unexpected delays at each stage, and I am fairly confident about the timeline. If any challenges rear their head, I will be reaching out to let all of you know and be as transparent about the process as possible.
