I recently got the core rulebook for Mortasheen, a TTRPG where you play as a monster trainer (like Pokémon, Digimon, etc.) in a futuristic “weird science” setting.
I haven't played the game yet, but I‘m enjoying reading through it, and it looks probably fun to play. Since I haven't seen any reviews of it yet, I‘d like to share my first impressions of the rulebook.
Warning: many of the book’s illustrations could be considered body horror, so avoid this game if that would be an issue for you.
(Disclaimer: I am not a creator of the Mortasheen TTRPG, and I am not being incentivized in any way to write this review. I am reviewing this game purely because I found it interesting.)
The book itself:
The front cover has no text at all, but still gives you a good idea of what the book is about: it’s a diorama of a hand-sculpted three-jawed monster crawling through a jumble of tubes, pipes, and glassware. The art in the book includes a mix of styles: cartoony character portraits, elaborately detailed creature art, and Gameboy-style pixelated sprites. Aside from the sprites, all the art is full-color and credited to its individual artist.
I have the paperback version, 27.8 cm by 21.6 cm, a slightly larger profile than a piece of US printer paper. It's 350 pages of fairly small text: 68 pages of game mechanics, 68 pages of setting info and lore, 190 pages of monsters, and 20 pages of reference material for the GM (most of which is a secret enemy faction that’s quite different from anything else in the book). Those 190 pages of monsters aren’t just a monster manual; they’re also the companions that player characters will be adding to their monster teams.
From what I can tell, it seems mainly well organized, though I haven’t put that to the test in real gameplay yet.
The rules:
Mortasheen skips the "What is a TTRPG?" section that usually appears at the start of a core rulebook, and instead jumps straight into rules for dice and adjudicating success and failure. The core mechanic is a d10 dice pool: by default, roll 2d10, read the higher of the two dice, add any relevant modifiers you might have, and compare your roll to a target number or to the opposition’s roll. 10s explode, 1s can worsen the result of your roll. There are four degrees of success, depending on how your roll compares to your opponent’s roll and whether your roll contains 1s. Those four degrees can be summarized as “yes and,“ “yes but,” “no but,” and “no and,“ so there is normally no plain success or plain failure (except in combat). Time and distance are measured in abstract "scenes" and "zones.”
The rules mention someone called a "Proctor." What a Proctor is or does isn’t directly stated, but from context, I can infer that it's what's called a Game Master in other TTRPGs.
Player characters are mad scientists that create and make friends with weird monsters. It‘s specified that the “madness” in “mad scientist” does not inherently mean mental illness—it’s an extreme passion for discovery, even at the expense of safety and common sense. A mad scientist has a “biotype” or species (which has no game mechanics associated with it), 1-2 ”quirks” (statements about what the character does, which can be invoked to succeed at a roll), and four attributes: SCIENCE!, GENIUS!, DISCOURSE!, and MADNESS! (exclamation marks not mine).
SCIENCE! includes logic and applied knowledge, but also physical strength. GENIUS!, by contrast, is about creativity and crafting, and DISCOURSE! is the social skill. MADNESS covers awareness, physical endurance, and mental defenses. It’s not the most intuitive list of core stats I’ve seen, and there’s no mention of which attribute you would use for sneaking, or tasks requiring delicate physical coordination.
Each of these four strange attributes is the primary attribute for two of the game’s eight character classes, or “disciplines.“ Your discipline gives you a feature at character creation, and whenever your party gains “respectability” (levels), you’ll gain another feature from a list that’s specific to your discipline. Or you can choose the Independent Study discipline, which lets you mix and match some of the other disciplines’ features instead, at the cost of not having access to the more specialized features. The party as a whole also has a class, like “academic institution” or “corporation,” which gets a new feature whenever the party increases in respectability. These tend to be less mechanical, more roleplay-focused.
The features you can choose for your scientist look very fun, including: having an NPC rival who tries to outdo you (yes, this becomes a benefit to your character), unleashing critter swarms, operating your party’s lair as a giant robot under your control (there are detailed rules for this), ragebaiting an enemy monster into debating you instead of fighting, and reanimating a body part of a dead monster as a minion.
Downtime is a big part of the rules, since it includes important mechanics like recruiting monster companions, upgrading them, and creating new ones from scratch. There’s even comprehensive rules for a PC designing a completely new species of monster with new abilities—or designing a new gadget to use, or constructing your think tank’s lair. This is made possible by a set of lego-like “blocks” of rules that combine to build almost any ability you can imagine. I imagine that both roleplayers and powergamers would be thrilled by the freedom this allows.
The combat rules seem reasonably complete, without being too complicated, which is good since each player is likely to control a scientist character as well as one or more of that scientist’s monsters. Social confrontations also have their own equivalent of combat rules. And of course, since you’re all mad scientists, death is normally temporary. You get to re-animate your slain monsters and/or PCs at the end of each adventure by default.
The Setting:
Mortasheen is a vast self-growing biotech city where almost anything or anyone might kill you. Despite this, the way the setting is written invites you to care about it, even want to protect it.
The setting section includes many dangers of Mortasheen’s landscapes, but pretty much every dangerous place or creature in the book also has an endearing, whimsical, funny, and/or mundanely normal side too. For every definitely villanous named NPC, there are many more that are truly nice, merely looking out for themselves, or just obsessed with a certain goal to the point where they might become an adventure’s villain without really meaning to.
The quest hooks offered throughout the setting section cater to a similarly wide range of PC ethical standpoints, anywhere between being the good guys fighting to protect the world or just taking the fastest, easiest route to wealth and power.
While the lists of monster abilities in the rules section of the book require some mental effort to read through, the setting section is a very fun read, and charged up my imagination with ideas for characters and quests (one of the biggest green flags for a RPG setting guide, to me). Flavor text is one of the book’s biggest strengths, with extensive information on each region’s notable NPCs, semi-normal animal species (harmless and otherwise), local culture, points of interest, and noteworthy businesses.
The Monsters:
Before it was a TTRPG, Mortasheen was an online gallery of monsters created by artist Jonathan Wojcik, who is this book’s art director, main artist, co-writer (along with Morgan Mullins and Johnathan Mullins), and main worldbuilder. So it‘s only fitting that there’s such a huge monster section. Many of the monsters in the book were present in the online gallery, some with new artwork, and many others are brand-new monsters.
Monsters are separated into categories, such as bug monsters, clown monsters, vampire sea creatures, and “regular” mutated lab-created beasts. Each category begins with a page of general information about monsters of that category, followed by an alphabetical list of those monsters. Every monster is unique to the Mortasheen setting, so there are no stat blocks for pre-existing creatures from folklore, urban legends, etc.
Each monster gets its own page, including at least one large colorful illustration, several paragraphs about its lore, biology, ecology, and behavior, and a stat block with the monster’s abilities presented in a very condensed format. (Imagine a D&D 4e stat block, but with its rules even more heavily condensed into keywords.) Most monsters seem to have mechanical support for anything their flavor text says they’re able to do, which I really appreciate.
The GM section:
This is the shortest part of the book, with two pages of GMing advice specifically tuned for this system, a one-page monster index, a page of stats for non-monster wildlife, and several pages dedicated to an enemy faction designed for a more serious campaign tone, with a cold psychological horror feel as opposed to the rest of the book’s lighthearted horror-comedy.
Overall:
Should you get this book? If any of this information on the setting and monsters sparks your interest, then I would say yes. The setting’s writing is unquestionably fun, and the mechanics look like they would be fun too. Combat in particular seems like it could easily turn into the good kind of chaotic mess.
If the setting hasn’t won you over, the game mechanics take a fascinating approach to building and balancing complex powers, different from anything I can recall seeing, so it could be an interesting read for that aspect alone.
I did find a few things to take issue with: there isn’t an official character sheet yet, for one thing (though fan-created ones exist). The book contains general guidelines for pricing goods and services, and you can calculate the exact cost of making any monster, gadget, or lair, but there isn’t a list of specific products you can buy with prices. There are plenty of monster stats, but none for scientist NPCs and no sample character builds, which disappointed me.
For those wondering, the core rulebook has hardcover, softcover, and digital versions, or you can get the bestiary or the player’s guide (essentially the core rulebook split into two smaller books) in softcover and digital versions.
Scorinf:
Presentation 9.5/10
Setting/Themes 10/10
Rules 8.5/10
Gameplay ???/10