You're ugly, and your monster dresses you funny.

Not everything that goes on in the lab is a product of in-house gamescience – oh no. There are many fine things brewed up in the myriad bubbling vats of game-dom. And recently among them I've found this – Monsters and Other Childish Things. This is a roleplaying game about children and monsters, and for a change the slimy, barbed, razor-fanged 11-dimensional thing under the bed is not your enemy: it is your best friend.

Monsters and Other Childish Things (Or, if I may be forgiven the abbreviation, M&OCT: at this very moment technicians are testing whether this is better pronounced 'emminocked' or 'emmin-oh-see-tee'. As soon as verifiable results are in I shall report them here.) is based upon the One-Roll Engine (as promulgated by the incomparable Greg Stolze) and was penned (Generated? Synthesized? Cloned? Surely there's a better term out there) by the illimitable Benjamin Baugh. Here the players take the roles of children afflicted with befriended by monsters. Don't go running for the airlock, now – you won't make it past the laser-sharks. Yes, you play a kid. Yes, you're puny and ineffectual. Yes, your monster is a superpower-by-proxy. No, this is not a hard-edged real-world-sim tactical game: if you're looking for that, look elsewhere. This is a game about exploration of the self* in the following context: what you would do, were you a wee child, with the perfect bodyguard-slash-troublemaker-slash-comrade-in-arms ready at your beck and call, to get you into and out of trouble? (Sorry about the hyphens.) Much as Aberrant asked, "What would you do with KEWL, W0RLD-SHAKIN' POWERZ™?" Emminoct asks, "What would you do, if, like, when that jerkface Eric McJerky trips you again on the way to math class , like, you could totally call up a cacodemonical, maddening, eldritch titan-spawn of the Elder Days to kick his ass?"

If the answer is "Do that, and then skip along to class cheerfully whistling 'Tekeli-li, tekeli-li'" then you're on the right road. The trouble arises when Eric McJerky's best buddy, an aeon-striding tentacular cthonic god (and psychic powerhouse!), takes umbrage at poor Eric's mistreatment.

Emminohseetee – I really dig the setting. I enjoyed reading the 'example characters and NPCs' section on its own merits, so much so I was driven to depict a monster named Bugnutz (above, dining upon a perfectly ripe sack of trash). I have a habit playing flawed characters, as anyone who ever faced (or was a friend of) Brendan Jermflux in the Bad Old Days of the Bad oWoD ("Overconfidence" + twin 9mm pistols + a 7-die pool divided into seven one-die triggerpulls – w00t!) knows. And the kids of Emma-knocked are the perfect mix of utterly dependent kid-ness and utterly unstoppable monsterish asskickery to satisfy the both masochist and the sadist within. I am not the Muad'dib of the ORE: at least in its incarnation as Immen-otsi-tí, it's a little more more coarse-grained than I care for. But I don't own (yet) any of the other fascinating ORE games – REIGN, GODLIKE, Wild Talents – so I freely admit to some observer bias. Further testing is clearly necessary!

I will not belabor the mechanics of Monsters &c. here, except to say that I find the idea of emotional damage equaling physical damage in effects to be intriguing, and I wish to subscribe to Benjamin Baugh's newsletter. If something similar shows up in Crows, you are all permitted to point at me and shout THIEF! Hey, it was shiny and I've got more Eyes than Beak. Whaddaya-whaddaya? Don't make me drop The Dozenz on you.

In other news, Deathmagus tops 42K with no end in sight. More on this development later.

In the meantime, science calls –

Dr. Madu

*Scientific tests here at the lab have proven it.