Characters / Monsterhearts

While Monsterhearts has no pre-established characters in the core rulebook, the game touts several playbooks, or "Skins," which a player uses to create a Player Character. Various fan-made Skins also exist.

Unless otherwise stated, tropes and descriptions apply to the 2017 second edition, Monsterhearts 2, although most also describe the original 2012 release.

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Core Skins

The Fae

• Betrayal Insurance: Because of the core move Faery Contract, the Fae can punish anyone who breaks a promise made to them, often by magical means. And the Fae is sensitive to broken promises.
• Changeling Tale: One origin for the Fae is to have been "swapped at birth," indicating that the player character is a changeling.
• The Fair Folk: Specificially, the Fae skin focuses on extracting promises from others.
• Fairy Sexy: The Fae is described as "alluring." Both of the Skin's stat lines have a positive Hot value, and a couple of the Fae's moves give bonuses to Turn Someone On.
• Land of Faerie: The move Guide allows the Fae to bring over another person to the faery realm. Even outside this move, references to the Faery King and other worlds flavor the Skin.
• Our Fairies Are Different: The Skin allows for various interpretations of fairies and other fae folk.
• Magically-Binding Contract: The Fae's main schtick. Any promise they make or is made to them they treat as one, and if anyone goes back on their word, their powers kick in to completely fuck the oath-breaker up.

The Ghost

• Our Ghosts Are Different: Ghosts are designed to be played as vengeful spirits or creeping poltergeists. However, they are corporeal enough to attend school regularly without being noticed by others.
• Intangibility: The Limitness move allows the Ghost to walk through walls and enable the Skin's more voyeuristic aspects.
• Spirit Advisor: The Ghost can serve as the guide for another player character through the Helpful Spirit move, which grants the move's player a String on another character in exchange for clearing the other character's Condition.
• Unfinished Business: The Ghost's central metaphor is grappling with trauma, often their death, so their prior life becomes a motivator of the Skin's actions. Specifically, their core move Unresolved Trauma means that the Ghost will continously receive the "traumatized" Condition by being reminded by their death, which denies them resolution.

The Ghoul

• Barred from the Afterlife: The "rejected" origin can be intepreted as the Ghoul becoming monsterous because they were rejected from the afterlife.
• Flesh-Eating Zombie: As the Skin's description suggests, the Ghoul can be played as a flesh-eating zombie, especially with the "resurrected" origin and a focus on their (un)death. However, the flesh eating kicks in full force when a Ghoul goes Darkest Self.
• Horror Hunger: The Ghoul's core move is The Hunger, which mechanizes the Skin's heedless pursuit to satiate their urges, such as for fear or power. This becomes especially profuse in the Ghoul's Darkest Self.
• Our Ghouls Are Creepier: Ghouls are undead creatures dominated by The Hunger, which can only be warded off by Keep Your Cool. A ghoul does not necessarily hunger for flesh, but can also feed on such metaphysical concepts as fear and power. Furthermore, the ghoul's sex move also causes sex to become something they hunger for. One perk to being a ghoul is that Short Rest for the Wicked allows one to sleep out death with no downsides except for some lost hours.
• Resurrective Immortality: They've already died once, so they can die again and again. With the move No Rest for the Wicked, a Ghoul can wait out death and wake up with zero Harm a few hours later. While the other Skins have their options for Skirting Death, the Ghoul begins with the ability to avoid the other methods' mechanical downsides.

The Hollow

• Artificial Human: The Hollow skin is any manner of artificially created being, ranging from Homunculi to uplifted animals.
• Blank Slate: The move A Blank Canvas allows the Hollow to use Conditions to alter their sense of self through embodying the Condition, as the Condition is one of the few experiences that the Hollow has received.
• Calling the Old Man Out: The makers are the Hollow's closest figures to parents, so when the Hollow enters Darkest Self, they become driven to confront their makers and hold them accountable, perhaps even lethally.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: One of the Hollow's origins is "machine," when they arise from people who have mechanical parts, implying that the cybernetics have removed the Hollow's sense of identity.
• Really Was Born Yesterday: The Hollow does not have a past, as they're often created not long before the beginning of a campaign. Their naivety and impressionability comes from the Hollow's lack of identity, as reflected by Moves such as A Blank Canvas.

The Infernal

• Be Careful What You Wish For: Through the Strings Attached move, the Infernal can ask for what they really want, but not only does it come with a price, but also an undesired twist.
• Deal with the Devil: The crux of the Infernal is the Soul Debt to their Dark Pact. The Infernal racks up debts with dark powers in exchange for what they desire.
• Power at a Price: The Infernal's main source of power are Bargains made to the Dark Power. While these Bargains come with potent abilities, such as healing harm, all of them require giving a String to the Dark Power. Reach five Strings, and the Darkest Self triggers.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Every Bargain made with the Dark Power brings the player closer to their Darkest Self. In the Infernal's case, their Darkest Self makes them feel even more dependent on their master.

The Mortal

• Cast from Hit Points: The Downward Spiral move allows the player to boost a roll to Gaze Into the Abyss in exchange for taking 2 Harm, risking death to learn more about the supernatural.
• The Dog Bites Back: The Mortal's moves are all about letting other people walk all over you, giving up power and autonomy in the name of love. Their Darkest Self sees them finally snap and betray the people they've given everything for.
• Love Martyr: The Mortal is modelled after characters like Bella Swan. They gain influence and experience by forgiving people who hurt them and ignoring blatant problems within their relationship. Their sex move actually invokes the Darkest Self of the person they're intimate with, thus causing them to hurt the Mortal even more, which feeds back into the Mortal's moveset.
• Muggle: The Mortal skin, whose mechanics centre around falling in love and involving oneself in the lives of other supernatural creatures, is the quintessential one.
  • Muggle Love Interest
• My God, What Have I Done?: The Mortal only escapes their Darkest Self upon realizing the pain they're causing their Lover.
• Polyamory: While Mortals are mechanically required to have just one "True Love," this doesn't prevent them from having multiple partners in practice. The section on "Queer Content" encourages players to pick a couple as their "True Love" to explore polyamorous relationships.
• Turn the Other Cheek: Cynically, the Mortal can weaponize forgiveness. Through the Sympathy Is My Weapon move, they can forgive someone's harm and base nature in exchange of gaining a string, representing the emotional leverage gained through this (often unwise) forgiveness.
• Yandere: The Mortal's moves encourage the player to play either an obsessive or possessive lover, hurting others in the name of one's Lover. But when their Darkest Self triggers, the Mortal will betray their Lover and possibly kill the Lover in the process.

The Queen

• Alpha Bitch: By default, the Queen is the popular, attractive mean girl who manueveurs their clique to manipulate others. The twist is that the Queen can be magical.
• Assimilation Plot: Possible with the Queen. They can be just your typical high school popular/mean girl or they can be mind-controlling parasites or demonic puppet masters or really any kind of being that fits this trope. It's one of the reasons they're popular choices for antagonist characters.
• Girl Posse: The Queen skin centres on utilizing one to your advantage, although the actual gender is irrelevant.
• Manipulative Bastard: The Queen have several Moves for manipulating others to do their bidding, whether it's through bribery (Bought Loyalty), the promise of sex (Many Bodies), or revenge (And Your Enemies Closer).
• Muggle: Like the Mortal, the Queen can be technically mundane but still wield considerable power through their gang.
• My God, What Have I Done?: One way the Queen can leave their Darkest Self is if they've realized that they've used their power to destroy an innocent.
• Telepathy: With the move Streaming, the Queen possesses a telepathic connection to her gang and can remotely hear their thoughts and emotions.

The Vampire

• The Ageless: Vampires of the "many ages old" origin are implied to be vampires who are perpetually physically adolescent. Despite this Immortality, the Vampire can still be killed in-game.
• Ice Queen: Along with being literally cold to the touch, The Vampire also has a positive cold stat and can wield their emotional distance as a weapon. The Cold as Ice move makes the Shut Someone Down move even more effective, and the Sex Move ironically rewards the Vampire for denying others sexually and gaining Strings from being untouchable.
• Mind Manipulation: Hypnotic allows a player character to hypnotize others to do their bidding, even as it comes with risks, such as the victim's sanity becoming unhinged or the hypnotized realizing what has happened.
• Must Be Invited: If a Vampire's player takes the move Invited, the Vampire cannot enter a home without invited. On the flip side, anyone who invites the Vampire in gives a String to them, representing the power that the inviter grants to the monster.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Mainly draw upon the traditional sexual fears that surrounded them in the original folklore. The "Invited" move also brings up, well, the invitation element of the mythology.
• Really 700 Years Old: Vampires who aren't recently turned will be considerably older than what their teenage body suggests, even as that disconnect keeps the player character within the teen drama.
• Seeing Through Another's Eyes: With the move Marked for the Hunt, The Vampire can bond with their victim and gain the power to glean the victim's whereabouts and well-being, along with any other information the MC throws in with Gaze into the Abyss.
• The Power of Blood: The Vampire can feed on the blood of others and gain various bonuses from it, even if it comes with the risk of the victim's death.
• Vampires Are Sex Gods: The Vampire is described as beautiful, and both of the Skin's stat lines have a positive Hot stat, predisposing them toward romance. However, they lose Strings when they have sex with another character, so their sexiness comes more from them turning down others.
• Vampiric Draining: The Vampire's blood-sucking is mediated through the move The Feeding. While the Vampire walks away from a good roll with mechanical bonuses, the best that can happen to a victim is that "they definitely don't die."

The Werewolf

• Celestial Deadline: The Werewolf's Darkest Self, and the powers that come from it, can end when the sun rises.
• Damage Reduction: Werewolves bathed in moonlight can reduce damage that they take.
• Lunacy: Several of the Werewolf's moves involve becoming more powerful under moonlight, in addition to the Moon's role in werewolf mythology.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: They have super senses in both forms, and also draw on spiritual connections between characters. They can also transform without a full moon, as their darkest self indicates.
• Savage Wolves: The game's version of the Werewolf draws from the werewolf as aggressive and violent, both allegorically and literally.
• Super-Senses: The move Heightened Senses grants the ability to use one's "animal instincts" to better make sense of a charged situation.

The Witch

• Beware the Quiet Ones: As the Skin's description explains, The Witch is meant to be played as the brooding, silent classmate who is biding her time to release her revenge on her (perceived) transgressors. The Witch's general arc is to go from being The Quiet One to a force of danger.
• Seeing Through Another's Eyes: The Watching Hex puts the Witch into a deep sleep and enables them to see through the eyes of the hexed, complete with the hexed's more basic thoughts.
• Sympathetic Magic: One of the Witch's tools are Sympathetic Tokens, objects of personal significance that allows The Witch to cast hexes on others from afar.
• Tongue-Tied: The Ring of Lies hex makes a person unable to tell lies and instead receiving punishments ranging from a ringing noise to brain damage.
• Wizards and Witches: The Witch Skin is about judging others and casting cool spells. They also rely heavily on Sympathetic Magic.

Additional Skins — Official

The Chosen

• The Chosen One: The Chosen is the game's Skin for "the chosen one" trope.
• Forgiven, but Not Forgotten: One interpretation of the Mercy move, when The Chosen spares someone they have reason to kill and gains a String on them, is that Chosen spares their enemy to hold that reason over the enemy's head in future encounters.
• Hunter of Monsters: The Chosen enters the game with the goal of defeating darkness in the world. It's up to the group to decide whether that "darkness" stays limited to a Big Bad or ends up encompassing other Player Characters.
• Kid Hero: The Chosen is on the older side of the "kid hero" spectrum, but their youth often affects their characterization more than their heroics.
• Muggle: The Chosen can also be a mundane human amongst humans if the character takes up the calling themselves rather than having it thrust upon them by destiny.
• Not Afraid to Die: The Chosen's Darkest Self drives them to take on "the biggest threat imaginable" without the help of friends, even if it may lead to death.
• The Chosen One: Appropriately, the Chosen could be chosen by fate to vanquish evil, especially with the "destined" origin.

The Serpentine

• Big, Screwed-Up Family: One of the signature traits of the Serpentine skin, as a dysfunctional, controlling family is central to their metaphorical and literal monstrosity.
• Conflicting Loyalty: The Serpentine is constantly torn between their family and the human world; their Darkest Self triggers when they decide enough is enough and pick a side.
• Snake People: Depending in the exact Identity, the Serpentine is often some variation of a snake monster in human form.
• Snakes Are Sexy: With the Hot 2 & Cold 1 stat line, the Serpentine can be "seductive and aloof," on top of being snakey.
• Thicker Than Water: The Serpentine's family expects it of them. When they become their Darkest Self, they either are this, or go all the way in the other direction.

The Cerberus

• Expy: The Skin's description and the game's website admits that the Cerberus is "an elaborate metaphor" for Jughead from Riverdale, which most of their moves being Shout Outs to the television series.
• Hellhound: As the Skin's name suggests, the Cerberus can be a hellhound in human form, if not the Cerberus.
• Wrong Side of the Tracks: Per the Watch Dog move, the Cerberus occupies and guards the liminal space between two communities, one "damned to the shadows." With origins such as "wrong side of the tracks," the Cerberus is often from the less-affluent community.

The Disciple

• Axes at School: The Disciple's central metaphor. The official website even has a warning about it, saying to ask the other players if they're comfortable with it.
• Love Redeems: Unlike the other official Skins, the Disciple has a Heart Move instead of a Skin Move, where a true requited love erases half of the Strings the Wicked Master has on the Disciple. This Move demonstrates how genuine human relationships can de-radicalize.
• Number of the Beast: The Disciple's Wicked Master materializes into the mortal world when it had accumulated a total of 666 strings.

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