Monster Care Squad (Part 1)

The veterinarians that stare at clocks

Monster Care Squad is a game published by Sandy Pug Games. Financing of the game involved crowdfunding. Game material and content is reproduced here for review purposes and is owned by Sandy Pug Games.

1. Every Individual Component Is The Best

In our analysis, we consider every individual artistic element of a game the best; we don’t find bad or good useful. So, the Split/Party framework assumes it is the best art, best layout, best writing, best design. This is an acknowledgement that nobody makes “bad” art on purpose; any given element is the best art that could have been produced at that point, restricted by its material conditions and constraints of time and effort. This is also because saying something is good/bad art is the most useless criticism that can be given. In practical term, this section is for things we will not touch on the review but merit acknowledgement.

Ludo

Monster Care Squad (henceforth MCS) possesses writing, looks and art direction that would not look out of place from modern hegemonic cartoons: it evokes something that you could easily see in Crunchyflix of Netroll.

As a game text, it has unique ideas and identity to establish rather than rely on generic hype words such as “Ghibli”, “cottagecore” or “solarpunk”; this puts a lot of pressure upon composition and skill of artistic elements to invite you to bring this game to the table. In a medium where masterful examples of writing and art are diminished by odd art direction and/or marketing, the strength of these elements of MCS must be remarked upon — especially, as mentioned previously, it has chosen its own identity than hashtaggy buzzwords.

You can interact with MCS in a surprising variety of ways. At the time of this critic’s writing, I have not have had the opportunity to peruse a print copy, but the game has a website platform, html and PDF version. The html version is a joy to navigate, free to use, optimized for mobile and tablets, a wonder of screen readability and causes the layout choices of MCS to shine. It goes beyond being excellent art, it offers a window about what the future for accessibility can look like.

However, the flip-side — the PDF version — is the perfect example that even when prioritizing accessibility, there may be issues for some; after all, accessibility is an ongoing conversation with the needs and accommodations rather than a checklist you mark across and forget as “done”. If you are to use the PDF instead of the website, you are going to be handling almost half a GB of a monsterfile, slow to process and hard to navigate — a dark mirror to the experience with the website. This speaks to the limitations of PDF as a format — in fact, this experience is not exclusive to MCS’s (you probably gonna have the same experience with a random PDF in your library), just a contrast made clear by how good the website is.

The more you spend with the different versions of MCS, the clearer it becomes that the design team is concerned with accessibility without in any way diminishing the art experience; if you find issues with digital tools that require additional accommodation, they are very likely to be provided.

This is not a vague promise or idle appeasement, but an observation of the changes that happened during the course of this critic; MCS has put money and labor towards improving the accessibility experience post-release. Character keepers have become a requirement for certain groups/online play; an official character keeper version of MCS is offered and supported, allowing you to interact with the game without ever leaving a single spreadsheets.

And that is why I am willing to believe that if you have issues getting to interact with the game, tools and accommodations are very likely to be provided. I hope these are not the limitations that prevent you from experiencing this art.

Brad

Full Disclosure, I have read nothing about Monster Care Squad until I cracked it open for this review, and it does deliver. A wonderful art style, a presentation format that is so pleasing to the eye that my partner commented on it. The fact that the website exists at all is fabulous; as my gaming group particularly goes through a variety of games it can be hard to sell them on buying a huge number of books, and being able to point at an easily accessible website makes things much easier.

Moreso, if you play in the meatspace and not at the GM’s house, the website, pdf and every other tool do make MCS very accessible, and that’s without touching on accessibility options. This is huge (at least for me), but man I really can’t talk enough about what I love from the opening art style, and the willingness of the Sandy Pug Crew to make MCS open and accessible.

2. Meet The Game At The Level It Is At

Each game comes with certain expectations and tone. To properly breakdown, we have to meet the game at the level it is: not lament its choice of premise and wish it was something else, nor resent for not conforming with our politics, not letting “missed opportunities” stand in our way of applying the critical framework relentlessly. It also includes not working with the game as marketed or how it exists in our desires, but as it is.

Ludo

MCS can be a demanding text.

Most of it comes from its unique assumptions. If you come expecting a by-the -numbers PbtA and/or a toothless utopia, you will not be able to get the most from your interactions with MCS. It is also something that may require one to be familiar with the ongoing dialectics of tabletop games as a form of art; it is a snapshot of ongoing tensions and puts itself at the vertices in many conversations about the purpose of games, the assumptions of the hegemon of games and the role of games in facilitating the introduction of challenging ideas and violence.

This is far from the first game we critic that engages with such talks; in fact, all previous games offer more if positioned within their ongoing dialogues: Flying Circus and Fellowship 2e discuss what PbtA can be, Wanderhome offers a dialogue with the concept of adventure and violence, and even a more aesthetic and distant work like Sentinel Comics has something to say about the nature of heroism.

Understanding the dialogues that MCS engages with requires some knowledge of the medium of tabletop games and its historiography; while not needed for playing game, it is essential to go deeper into the meaning of MCS’s choices and its place in tabletop development — leading to a lot of assumptions in the text that may be alienating to casual and new players.

MCS challenges many established pillars laid by the hegemon of the art: what ways players can interact with the world, what is a setting, what is a monster, what is community, can games design something that leads one to pierce capitalism realism and imagine something better or any attempt is doomed to the empty panacea of utopia? All these questions can easily be lost.

A requirement to get what MCS is trying to do is familiarity with Dungeons and Dragons — and the hegemonic position it imposes. It is a crass thing to bring up D&D when discussing indie games and smaller press — specially when we have what, two generations and twenty years of people that have been designing without contact with Hasbro’s tabletop, — but MCS demands the comparison, so ideologically opposed it stands against them. MCS rejects D&Ds neoliberal incubator and the colonial/imperial anti-social behaviors carved into its fossilized bones. And do it with flair.

So, at least someone in the group should have this knowledge.

The game is not coy about its politics: it is pretty to the left, portraying not a utopia where contradictions are neatly resolved but a third order of being in the world that requires constant vigilance and work; MCS offers a Western reading of democratic federalism, while avoiding the usual traps of infantilization, condescension and/or Orientalism.

The game’s political assumptions can present obstacles for those interacting with the text. I have seen plenty liberals and even self-declared leftists struggle with the game’s assumptions about democracy, markets, currency, production organization, policing and community defense. While this is pretty good — such challenges occur in a way that elevates MCS as an art form — the challenge is there and needs to be something one is prepared and open to deal with. However, the mechanics of the game themselves conflict with these ideas and some assumptions, and we will revisit this topic later.

Overall, except for some struggled sessions, the game does a wonderful job establishing the assumptions it requires from you.

Brad

Monster Care Squad feels like a beautiful long-form essay as a game, an essay about a universal experience that every dungeon master (specifically dungeon master) has had. When I was a starting DM, there inevitably came an encounter with a MONSTER, a pinata of health that when hit would drop loot and exp, and my players for some reason felt sympathy for it, they didn’t want to kill this Owlbear that was just trying to live its life, they wanted to help it.

This moment floored me, I had built this MONSTER, and the players decided that it wasn’t one, it was just some poor animal. Monster Care Squad is for those players, and those DMs, the players who feel uncomfortable slaying innocent animals in random encounters. It’s fun as hell because it carries a ton of beautiful worldbuilding, imagining a kinder world in general, but I can’t help but see a game for all those people I had years ago who helped move that Owlbear away from a scary bandit camp.

3. Identify What The Game Says It Is About

Games are about things. Usually. Mostly. That is often the same thing they market themselves as. This often means to establish the relationship of the game with systems, mechanical frameworks, genre, etc. This is how games establish exceptions about the nature of play and create a common space for creation.

Ludo

MCS opens with a direct, strong declaration: a call to action, even! There is a crisis, and you have volunteered to help with it.

With this startling opening, MCS quickly establishes its identity:

• Monsters and Humans live in harmony;

• There was peace, hard-earned;

• A plague — the False Gold — has turned Monsters into poisoned threats to themselves and others.

After that, the game positions who you are and what you do — always a winning strategy with a RPG. You are part of an emerging confederation of veterinaries, formed from people from all walks of life to deal with the False Gold, risking everything to research and cure this evil that brings such pain to your beloved Monsters.

A premise that seems simple but is anything but. MCS marches on, challenging more and more assumptions about gaming, positioning itself as the ideological opposition to other game series with a focus on Monsters. Yes, these are Monsters. No, this is not D&D. No, this is not Monster Hunter.

MCS has some hefty goals, and the cracks show across tension points early. The universal direct democracy lies in the background, untouched by the game systems. People do not carry weapons, but Monster Gifts are de facto weapons, and the weird line between certain tools and weapons. Conflict is supposed to be absent or rare, the crisis existential, the player character’s experts and the resources of the setting post-scarcity; yet, many core mechanics seem to assume scarcity, local reluctance, and lack of cooperation. A single Monster falling to the False Gold can wipe entire cultures way of life, but we are not listening to the bootmaker on the question of this boot?

As a setting, MCS does a great job establishing a world and ideas so powerful that they pierce the fog of capitalism realism and dares to imagine another way of living in the world, with the world. It is already more significant and impactful than utopian fantasies; we will see later how this connects with the game mechanics.

The most glaring disconnect comes from the Monsters. The book does a great job of presenting Monsters and centering the content on them. The setting of MCS is built — sometime literally — around the monsters. However, the requirements of a roleplaying game demand it is centered on the players, and the ways players interact with the game are very Human-centered and Community-focused. The thing is, Monsters are essential for communities but never part of the communities, set apart by Destinies and what not.

This is not an insect and fish depersonalization in Wanderhome situation; that was an alienating read of the setting when looking at it as an outsider.

Monsters are sentient and sapient, but are not necessarily verbal. They are respected, cared for, and loved by the people. Even as some of them are driven to destruction due to the False Gold, most people still consider Monsters beautiful or even sacred.

Monsters are people.

So what does it means when people are treated likes infrastructure rather than part of confederacies and cities? When they arbitrarily distribute generosity, unless afflicted with a disease that renders them anti-social and violent?

And that is when it all came together…

Brad

Monster Care Squad is a focused game, the world built is designed to be important, but it is just the set upon which our players, the eponymous Monster Care Squads, and their Patients interact. Now, I did mislead you a bit there, because Monster Care Squad also cares about the communities, these people whose lives are built near and usually depend in some way on Monsters. This makes Monster Care Squad a very unique game, you are not sneering mercenaries called upon by desperate people to trade a little gold for safety, and you are not outlaw rogues destined to conquer strange peoples to rule over. You are experts in your fields, called upon to look into problems.

But much like Ludo, I begin to dig, trying to figure out what Monster Care Squad was really about..

4. Uncover What The Game Is REALLY About

What the game says it is about is not always what the game is about. This is where we look at all the weird interactions, examining the system that game creates, how the way mechanics interact with the text and art, how it exists in a given context, how well parts flow together or get in the way. This creates a much richer environment that the original design could ever imagine once a game hits the table.

Ludo

MCS is about Kings.

There are few things that are universalized in the setting of MCS — even time bends depending on local material conditions. However, ideas have a mass of their own there; some ideas are so heavy that their impact upon the setting can only be described as “supermassive black-holes”. Confederacies, direct democracy, mutual aid and harmony are such ideas.

But I be damned if one of those supermassive black-holes is not Kings — even if just their absence.

Even a thousand years after the Last War and their fall, Kings still occupy the imagination, an idea that creates the negative space for MCS to exist as it is. The very concept of wealth and common good, the shadow of authority, the weird anarcho-capitalist cult; they all can trace somehow to how the people of the setting dealt with the worries about kingship.

Monsters are the Kings of Ald-Amura — the name for MCS’s continent-sized setting. I am going to go into a deep dive into that; so I pass the ball to Brad and then you can continue reading straight to point #5.

Brad

I also think that there is a powerful interpretation of Monster Care Squad being about isolation. Monster Care Squad is a setting of communities and confederations, and the death of a community or confederation can easily be brought by isolationism, by refusing to engage with a world at large and refusing to acknowledge your place in its network. The Ald-Amuran communities struggle to carefully watch themselves for signs of the evils they defeated 1000 years ago, but it is too easy for a community to slowly slip into “Well our confederation is the greatest, the most organized” and along that path leads to ruin.

The False Gold, a mysterious illness that turns the Monsters against the community is a perfect representation of this slow, dangerous calcification. This makes the Monsters turn on the community, which could lead to its total destruction unless, of course, The Monster Care Squad comes in, these people are from different confederations and are exceedingly skilled. They are part of the larger community of Ald Amura, and not only do they show up and heal the sick monster, but they are also sometimes rewarded with Gifts, mystical power awarded by That Monster, which is at least aesthetically unique to that community, and then the Monster Care Squad departs, carrying forward strange gifts and tales of that community, and helping it reconnect to the greater world.

Ludo

As someone that shares this particular witch’s curse — obsessed, in particular, with the best eight words letter of the English language — I recognize MCS’s obsession with Kings. Unexpected, right? After all, the book does not go into details, but its world is exploding with ideas that can trace their lineage to the literature of Murray Bookchin and Abdullah Öcalan. So where does this King stuff come from in a commercial game with one of the richest leftist traditions you can find?

A fantasy commonly held about ancient people is that there was some “fall from Grace” at some point, that democracy and equality where the norm and somehow lost after some inevitable and tragic event that is nonetheless essential for “civilization” — whatever that means. That is when Hierarchy came and the Rule of Man began. We all heard some variant of these fantasies and they are all as anthropocentric as they are patronizing; they fail to even acknowledge an universal personhood.

As a work that demands the Personhood of Humans and Monsters — it is a requirement for the game’s premise after all — MCS is particularly well equipped to dispel these fantasies.

Marshall Sahlins¹ proposed that so called “egalitarian” and “horizontal” ancient societies are only so as far as one considers Personhood a characteristic exclusive to humans. If one has a concept of universal personhood, possessed by every plant, animal, place, spirit, god, etc, it becomes clear that there is a rigid hierarchy in place. The world is not some idyllic, “pure” place; it is full of danger and arbitrary violence. These metapersons establish a hierarchy over human affairs, creating a feedback that opposes the equality and cooperation among humans.

Bookchin has famously struggled against mysticism, utopianism and above all, primitivist fantasies while elaborating his approach to socialist ecology. Bookchin called the unfair, violent “hierarchy” of the material conditions imposed by “pure nature” the First Nature, the first overlord that humanity knew. MCS, following in this trail, has no patience for Romantic ideas about the natural world. Ald-Amura is a harsh land, full of disasters as well as wonders. To be human, even before kings, to be vigilant about would-be tyrants.

This is usually the pseudo-historical point where most narratives about Kings come in. A second nature is introduced, to “replace” the first one and its cruelty, but with tragic conclusions — we all know it, we all dance at this song of exploitation, we are living it. Bookchin and other social ecologists present an alternative to these two natures. It will be no good to throw away the Human second nature in lieu of the tyranny of the first, but to synthesize a new third nature — where all persons, in a recognized human personhood, are allowed to thrive. Dispelling the illusions and false separations between humans and their world.

Both are in a very real sense natural, and their naturalness finds its evolutionary realization in those remarkable primates we call human beings who, consciously responding to a sense of obligation to the ecological integrity of the planet, bring their rational, communicative, richly social, imaginative, and aesthetic capacities to the service of the nonhuman world as well as the human.²

MCS is a world where society has been remade, and a third nature accomplished. It is not an end state, but something that must be maintained, demanding continuous ever-vigilance and continent-spawning labor. Monsters are that idea of third nature incarnated. But why have I called them Kings?

As mentioned above, there is always hierarchy of metapersons in the first nature: the arbitrary acts of gods, spirits or just other entities with which cooperation and negotiation is impossible.

David Graeber³ has examined the paradoxes and contradictions associated with navigating a world of complex hierarchies and the dominations of metapersons; kings and sovereignty are a very human attempt at resolving such contradictions.

Kingship and the second nature attempts to transform the unequal world into something more manageable, perhaps even equalitarian. Sovereignty, unlike metapersonal godhood can be restricted in time and space, usually in the person of the king. By keeping kings on check and sacred, by scapegoating and limiting their potential to arbitrary violence, by removing internal conflict to the external element of the king, hierarchy is eroded and equality is possible.

In Ald-Amura, as in our world, such second nature failed. Whoever, the people of MCS have done a sovereignty without Kings — they get the metapeople directly involved in it. The world remains as cruel and dangerous as before, but a third nature is created, supported by a dual society: the world of Human Confederacies and Monster Stranger Kings.

We go back to our Monsters: they are essential persons for a community, even if they are not part of it. They are arbitrary with their Gifts; they are tied to unique Destinies beyond democratic universal concerns and they keep disaster at bay through whatever galactic politics move them.

Marshall Sahlins describes “stranger kings” as outsiders, heroic sovereigns, given to great violent potential, unfamiliar with the customs of the local people, law-bringers and yet those that break all taboos. People that have something of Monstrous to them.

Those are the Monsters of Ald-Amura, and MCS is all about them. They are heroic, larger-than-life, the absolute freaks for which we Humans hoot and howl. We love seeing a freak and the False Gold is ruining our Stranger Kings’ lives! How can this be allowed to happen? It can’t, for our Monster Sovereigns are essential for this beautiful dual society to continue.

1. Shalins, M “The original political society” (2017) https://doi.org/10.14318/hau7.2.014

2. Bookchin, M “Remaking Society” (1992)

3. Graeber, “Notes on the nature of divine Kingship” in On Kings (2017)