Dramatis Personae:

The MC (me)
Maria, the Witch (Martin)
Luca, the Infernal (Jerome)
Cage, the Ghoul (Erin Sara)

This game confirmed to me what I've been thinking about Monsterhearts for a while now: it really needs to be a mini-campaign. This session was awesome fun, but it created a fascinating dynamic between characters that begged for further exploration, raised several mysteries that went unsolved during the course of the session, and ended more or less on a cliffhanger. I keep playing one-shots because I love the game so much, but breaking off just when it starts getting interesting just leaves me with an itch I can't scratch.

Maria, Luca, and Cage are students at a snooty private school in a large city, who have been in classes together for some years, but who haven't paid much attention to each other until their paths collide spectacularly.

Maria wants to ferret out other people's secrets. She saw Cage come back to life over the summer, so she's desperate to know what he is, and whether he plays a part in the badness her witchy aunt Clara has warned her about. On the way, she wouldn't mind a bit of revenge on her ex and his new girlfriend, who are all over each other in public.

Luca wants to bring people to his master, the Tyrant. Humans don't really want freedom; they want to be governed, is the Tyrant's ethos, and Luca lives this out as a mini-tyrant at school, ordering younger kids around and paying them to do his dirty work.

Cage just wants to keep his head down, forget that weirdness during the summer, and maybe worm his way into the popular crowd enough to catch Luca's eye, but strange urges for flesh keep getting in the way.

It all comes to a head at a warehouse party thrown by Luca & his friends. I think the defining moment of the game was when Luca was gazing into the Abyss to find out what it would take to seduce Cage over to his master. Turns out, "seduce" is the right word. Meanwhile, Maria is spying on all this with her Watching hex, meaning she gets the full-on vision as well. Jerome's description of gazing into the Abyss, with the whole warehouse seeming to pulse as if breathing, was just the right kind of creepy.

Maria hexes Cage with demonic visions as a warning of what's about to happen to him, but it's too late; Luca has lured him into a three-way makeout session in the DJ booth, in full view of everyone. They start getting pretty hot and heavy, but just at the wrong moment, the demonic visions kick in, with Cage seeing Luca right up in his face as a demon. Even kissing him feels like kissing a demon, forked tongue and strange sulfuric odour and all. But his new hunger for sex with Luca (from the Ghoul's sex move) is strong enough to overcome his revulsion. Meanwhile, Luca's given the Dark Power enough strings in order to make this come about, that he becomes his Darkest Self, and the Tyrant is demanding a sacrifice...

That's when we had to wrap things up, so we quickly went over what we thought would happen next. Luca decides that the sacrifice must be for people to publically abase themselves, which he makes his minions do all over school. His parents (who made the deal with the Power in the first place) get pissed off that he's flaunting it so openly, and take all his privileges away. He shows up to school--not driving his Lexus!

What will the Tyrant demand of Cage? He just wants to keep pretending to be a normal kid, but his urges are getting stronger. Will he end up eating his best friend Zach?

The game ends up being a bit lopsided when there are three PCs and two of them are heavily involved in each other's stories, so clearly the game also needed a fourth PC. We decided it should probably be a Chosen or someone similar, who Maria will go on to enlist for help in fighting the sinister events in the city, which obviously Luca and Cage are both a part of.

I'm beginning to love Monsterhearts.

I agree that it needs a longer format. We seem to end each game at mid sentence - just when things are getting really interesting, and our characters are deepening.