Tabletop Role-Playing Game
2+ Players
Adventure with Monsters!
50 Monster Species
Choose and Train Your Companions!
Ages 14+
Recommended
Full Color Hardcover Book
• 235 pages
◦ Chosu Region Setting
◦ Game Mechanics
◦ Character Creation
◦ Monster Species
◦ Techniques
◦ Equipment
◦ Character Sheets
◦ Starter Adventure
Downloads
Character Sheet (2022)
Character Sheet (2023)
Character Sheet Form Fillable (2023)
Links
The Game
Monster Wrangler is a tabletop roleplaying game focusing on human monster trainers, known as Wranglers, and their pet monsters, which they tame, raise, and command in battles against other monsters. Wranglers are accompanied on their adventures by anywhere from one to three loyal monsters, which range from sleek hunting beasts to strange, mobile plants to deadly mechanical constructs that were built for war.
Players can create Wranglers that are either adults or juveniles, allowing the GM to run games with all juveniles, all adults, or a mixture of the two. Similarly, monsters can be either juveniles or adults, though they age much more quickly than their human companions!
How to Play
Monster Wrangler utilizes a dice pool system to resolve conflicts. The character making the roll adds their ranks in the appropriate Attribute and Skill and rolls that many ten-sided dice. For each result of "10" the die "explodes" and an additional die is immediately rolled and added to the character's dice pool. Each die that equals or exceeds the Success Value of the roll - typically a 7 - counts as a Success. If the character achieves a number of Successes equal to the Difficulty of whatever she is trying to accomplish, she succeeds!
Additionally, any "extra" successes the character achieves can be spent on Raises to gain additional effects, such as increasing the damage dealt by an attack, crafting additional items, or increasing the amount of health a character heals.
The Monsters
There are thirty-six different monster species in the core rules (technically thirty-seven, if you count the example Loxabox). Each monster belongs to one of six overarching categories: - Beast, Construct, Plant, Scrounger, Brute, or Vermin - which serve as a general description as to what sort of monster it is. For instance, Construct monsters are all artificial machines, while Beasts are quick hunters.
Monsters also possess two different Types, which determine what sort of Techniques (i.e., attacks) it can use. For instance, the Vespark has the Electric and Spike Types, so it is able to learn any Techniques from the Electric and Spike lists.
Each monster also possesses three Primary Traits, abilities that represent the monster's unique physiology and psychology. A Primary Trait might be represent a monster's sharp claws that inflict bleeding wounds with each swipe, a predilection for disgorging valuable gems at regular intervals, or its tendency to fly into a destructive rage when injured.
In addition to these Primary Traits, each monster also has a Secondary Trait, which is randomly determined from a list of three potential options for each species. This provides a bit of variety between monsters of the same species and encourages different monsters to utilize different tactics in order to compliment their innate natures.
All of these options combine to produce unique monsters that feel deep and interesting while still being quick to run in combat.
Advancement
At the end of each session, Wranglers and each of their monsters that participated in a session gain experience points (XP) which they can use to improve their Attributes. Humans can also spend XP to improve their skills and purchase new Perks, while monsters can spend XP to improve their Techniques or to learn new Techniques entirely.
Additionally, at the end of each session, Wranglers can choose abilities from any of the nine available Classes, giving them additional options in and out of combat. These might range from learning new commands to give their monsters in combat to being able to permanently alter their monsters (or their monster's offspring) in various ways.
Setting
Monster Wrangler is set in the Chosu Region, a custom world that is comprised of several different nations. This world has been specially designed to encourage monster-related adventures, and numerous plot hooks are provided for each nation in order to help GMs come up with all manner of exciting adventures!
In addition, we've included a starter adventure set in the Chosu Region, along with six pregenerated characters, to help the players hit the ground running!