By which I mean that the clever and humanistic game writer under discussion today isn’t Bruce (“Adventure!”) Baugh, but Benjamin (“not Bruce”) Baugh. What’s next? Jensen Achilli? Mike Forbeck? Dare I hint it, Kevin Hite? Is nothing sacred? And as if to further jangle my over-tired nerves, Benjamin Baugh’s Monsters and Other Childish Things (182-page black-and-white hardback, $29.99) from Arc Dream Publishing seems to believe that what Veronica Mars needed most was a crossover with Stanley And His Monster. Seriously. This is a game about youthful trauma (high school, middle school, or grade school) in which the youths have horrible monster companions who eat people. If you buy the premise – which I’m still not sure I do – the bit is terrific. The game runs on Greg Stolze’s One Roll Engine, as seen in Wild Talents, Reign, and NEMESIS, and when I say “runs,” I mean “runs.” There are ORE rules for making up monsters and story conflicts, along with the rules for putting dice into (and taking them out of) Relationships, dealing (and dealing with) Shocks or Scars (physical or emotional), and lots of monster abilities. If you like ORE, you’ll love this. There is simultaneously more and less GM material than I’d look for if I were running: there’s a ton of NPCs (child, monster, adult, and Other) that are either iconic or clichéd depending on your perspective, and a pretty good intro adventure, and two of the three other campaigns on offer provide strange variations on the theme. But the book doesn’t ever just come out and explain how to decide, most importantly, if your campaign setting should have secret monsters or public monsters. Calvin and Hobbes is a different story from Pokémon; Monsters seems to want to split the difference, and I still don’t know how.

Arc Dream goes out of its way to provide me some answers, though, in Ross Payton’s Curriculum of Conspiracy (55-page black-and-white softcover, $9.99) and Baugh’s own Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor (160-page black-and-white softcover, $24.99). The first is a perfectly sound “evil high school” setting that all fans of Buffy will recognize and love. It could use some more NPC students (but the ones from the corebook will do to get started), and it still tries to split the difference a bit, but the rest of the setting is supernatural enough that the thematic hiccups level out. (It forbids monsters on campus, which also helps.) Where Curriculum is good, however, Candlewick is magnificent. The monsters here are internal; the PCs (“Pathetic Children”) have Creepy Skills that leave them shunned and hated. Perhaps that’s why they’re orphans. Perhaps that’s why they’re at the Candlewick Orphanarium. The players don’t know; with Echoes instead of Relationships, the orphans remember their own pasts in play. The theme, mood, and rules of this setting hit all the targets head-on. By adding the surreal Lemony Snicket sensibility and dialing down the monsters, Baugh reaches an ideal sweet spot of campaign design. And the rules – such rules! We get a jaw-dropping set of mystery rules for battling the mystery as though it were a big, amorphous monster – and better yet, for writing it collaboratively in play! Too weird for you? Well, the “normal” mystery creation system is also quite nice (reminiscent of the town creation subsystem from Dogs in the Vineyard) and involves plenty of One-Rolls to rule the story neatly. The setting material is sheerly wonderful, borne along by Baugh’s pitch-perfect tone. Baugh’s writing in both books is pretty great, verging on brilliant with only the occasional sidestep to too-clever. Robert Mansperger’s art throughout is only a touch less good than that, and it’s nestled in Daniel Solis’ predictably excellent page designs in Candlewick and the Monsters corebook. Those two books are worth getting for Candlewick alone, if you have any interest in playing a game of country-house mystery, boarding-school strangeness, even small-town skullduggery.

Note: I originally credited Curriculum of Conspiracy to Benjamin Baugh, when, as Shane Ivey notes with remarkable politesse in comments below, it was written by Ross Payton. My apologies to Ross, although I’m not sure it’s an insult for someone to think you write like Benjamin Baugh. In short, publishers should put authors’ names on book covers.