Cast:
Ophelia the Infernal, who sold her soul to save her family from poverty, and probably wishes she could take it back. (Dani)
Cassidy the Werewolf, who was raised by wolves and sucks at human social cues, but isn't about to let that stop her being the biggest alpha dog of all and making out with whoever she wants to. (Sam)
Anders the Fae, the sketchiest fairy in fairyland. (Cash)
Dominique the Witch, who learned both Wicca and a surprising amount of common sense from her dearly-departed grandmother. (Emily)

Plot basics:
-Anders has a thing for both Dominique and her best friend Jessica. He hits on them at every turn, and ultimately resorts to blackmail to get Jessica to agree to date him. The rose he picked for Dominique is a sympathetic token, opening him up to old fashioned black magic vengeance.
-The dark power asks Ophelia for a sacrifice of Cassidy's blood, which she obtains by going drinking with her on the roof and "accidentally" breaking a wine bottle she was holding. Somehow this turned into a blood-smeared bonding moment.
-Cassidy gets into an argument with some bully in the middle of class, and Anders chooses that moment to make the bully lose all sense of restraint using fairy vengeance magic. Result: one concussed bully, and Cassidy sentenced to a life term in detention with the principal (aka "after school skill building workshops for special students").
-The dark power instructs Ophelia to get herself sentenced to detention too, and she and Cassidy discover that the principal is using some kind of magic to make them forget what happens in detention. And also, for some reason, keeping blood samples from all the students who come to detention. She goes to his office to investigate, gives the dark power a string in the process, and becomes her darkest self. The dark power instructs her to murder the principal, climb onto his blood spattered chair, and claim ownership of the school in the name of her mistress below.

We didn't get a chance to resolve any plot threads, which is typical for one session Monsterhearts. It was a good pilot episode, though, and when we ended everyone wanted to know how the cliffhangers were going to resolve. All in all this was a very smooth game of Monsterhearts!

Yes, it was a great time! I really enjoyed Cassidy and Anders. Martin was a great MC who created a cool story and made all our lives interesting. The dice gods sure hated us, LOL. It would be great to somehow return to this and develop the characters further. I could see Ophelia having become a lot darker over the next couple Episodes. It'd be fun to explore Ophelia's dominion over the school (insert bad pun about Cassidy not being top dog here) and how Dominique plans to deal with Anders and all the other weirdness around school and see if Luke ever went for Round Two with Cassidy, how her relationship with Brock played out, and just more of Anders being so creeptastic. (Which is a compliment.) So many good things going on in this game and everyone played their characters very well. I hope everyone had as much fun as I did!

- Dani, aka Ophelia the Infernal

Emily has a play report / system review up here.

I agree that this was a pretty good Monsterhearts session, although by the Law of Whedon I felt that Cassidy's short-term triumphs really, really needed to result in horrible misery somewhere down the line. (Also that the characters I have most fun playing are all rather too similar. Hm.)

The boarding-school setup... hm. I feel as though both the Monsterhearts games I've played didn't give the PCs much in the way of NPC hooks. That'd be fine if you had the time over a full campaign to develop favoured NPCs and PC-PC connections, but... playing Cassidy was fun, but it felt very straightforward, and some firmer pre-established relationships would have done a lot to complicate that. Next time I set up a Monsterhearts character I'll try to give family or NPC friends a more prominent role in backstory.

(I mean, in a oneshot with four PCs there's not a huge amount of time to develop more than one character conflict per PC, let alone play them off against one another. But it seems that that's what Monsterhearts is aiming for, in an ideal world.)

You make some excellent points, Sam. And Emily's review was awesome. I feel that a full campaign would have allowed for more development of relationships between the PCs and certain NPCs to naturally assume a larger role in the story but that is something that comes with the territory I guess. So many wonderful story arcs developing! Next time for a one-shot I too think it'd be a good idea to make things a bit more twisted at the beginning and I see the merits of having characters know about the true nature of the others. The ways they could mislead each other into mistakenly thinking certain aspects of the lore about their type were true or false...

Like Martin said, it was a great pilot episode. I felt it moved along quite nicely and there were no major hiccups with the system or between the other players, if that makes sense.