Graeme Davis

In a previous post, I mentioned the Frankenstein game that Mike Brunton and I developed at Games Workshop, and promised to say a little more about it.

As far as I know, there was no formal plan to spin off a set of boardgames themed around classic horror monsters. Fury of Dracula came with Steve Hand when he joined GW, and he also created Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb, but the visual presentation of each was very different. Frankenstein, of course, was never published, for reasons that will become clear.

Anyway, here is what I remember.

It all started in a Nottingham city centre pub one evening after work: The Bell, if memory serves. Mike and I started riffing on a Frankenstein concept and throwing out ideas, each more ridiculous than the last. Ale flowed and we were cracking each other up, as we often did, but the following day we thought that we might actually have something. Mike drew up a map and some rules, and I started writing silly text on some blank cards.

The premise of the game was very simple. The board was a hex grid with a lab at each of its six corners. Each of the 2-6 players took the role of a mad scientist involved in a race to create a monster from body parts. The bulk of the board was made up of spaces representing a typical German-ish town from the old Hammer and Universal horror movies, and players set out across the board in search of the body parts they needed. The hospital, the morgue, and the graveyard were able to supply some parts, but a quicker option was to obtain them from innocent townsfolk. Think of it as a beetle drive (the Cooties game, to American readers), with added murder.

Townsfolk came in various strengths, which was matched against the player-scientist’s Lunacy rating in combat. A nice little balancing mechanic ensured that while a higher Lunacy made you more likely to win, it also reduced the number of body parts you could retrieve from an encounter, because you made more of a mess of your victim.

By today’s standards, the range of victims was quite tasteless, including women and children, but this was the 80s and tasteless humor was considered edgy and fun. Take a look at The Young Ones or almost any other British comedy of the time. Anyway…

Other players could try to sabotage you by playing encounter cards on you to increase the difficulty of a combat. Police cards, in particular, could stack to a hideous degree if multiple players decided to gang up. Otherwise, you drew an encounter card when you entered a new space, and either chose to fight it or save it – perhaps to play on an opponent.

The object of the game was to collect all the parts for a complete monster – torso, left and right legs, left and right arms, head, and brain – assemble them in the lab, and wait for a storm (also an encounter card) to animate your creation. Storms came in varying strengths, which affected the chances of success. There were also sabotage cards – lab accidents, rotten parts, and so on – to slow opponents down. The first player to animate their monster successfully was the winner, although we were also considering an expansion pack (de rigeur for boardgame pitches to GW at the time) in which the monsters started terrorizing the town themselves, and fought it out for final victory.

Mike and I assembled a prototype and played it in the GW Design Studio with other writers and designers, to universal acclaim. We were invited to demo it for Bryan Ansell himself at his impressive home (Castle Grayskull to us mortals) just outside Nottingham. Or rather, I was – and that’s where things started to go awry.

Mike was Yorkshire through and through, never afraid to speak his mind and equipped with a wit that could seriously upset anyone whose abilities were not commensurate with their rank – and in his mind, that included most of Games Workshop’s management at the time. It was decided that he shouldn’t be present at the demo, and I should do it alone.

The trouble was, Mike had been tinkering with the rules and the draft I took to the demo was completely new to me. The demo was a disaster, and both Mike and I were berated the next day by various middle managers who denied ever having liked the game and how dare we waste Bryan’s time like that.

Frankenstein was over. I made various efforts to fix the problem, but Bryan had decided it was a bad game and that was that. All the game’s most vocal supporters now hated it, and always had, rather than helping us to get a another chance at a demo. And this despite the fact that the game had already been mentioned in White Dwarf’s news column, the very accurately named “Awesome Lies,” and that cover art had already been commissioned from Les Edwards, the artist behind the Fury of Dracula box art. Our game had failed, and was never to be mentioned again.

And it was all my fault, or at least I felt it was. Frankenstein remains a lifetime regret, although I have to be honest and say that its gallows humor crossed most lines of decency and good taste, and it would definitely not be publishable today.

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And Also…

November’s Monster of the Month is posted on my Patreon page.

The hag is a well-known creature in many fantasy games, but the underlying folklore is complex, varied, and often terrifying. This 6-page, system-agnostic, PDF monster toolkit includes:

• Stat guidelines for d20-based, d100-based, and other tabletop roleplaying systems.
• A full monster description with lists of basic and optional skills and traits.
• Notes on four variants: Black Annis, Grindylow, Cailleach Bheur, and Fad Felen.
• Three adventure seeds, covering fantasy, historical, and modern settings..

As a member of The Monster of the Month Club, you can expect regular, in-depth treatments of creatures from worldwide myth and folklore—some familiar, some not—in a system-agnostic format that is easy for an experienced GM to use with the tabletop rpg system of their choice.
Join us on Patreon at patreon.com/MonsteroftheMonthClub, follow us @MotMClub, or email rpgmonsterclub@yahoo.com.

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