This Town Is Full of Monsters (2nd Edition)

Overview

This Town Is Full of Monsters is a tabletop storytelling/roleplaying game about a smallish community beset by mysterious, eldritch forces. There’s always a Town. There are always townsfolk. And, somewhere, everywhere, perhaps in their hearts and minds, perhaps in the swamp or the woods, there are monsters, mysteries, and secrets.

If you want to build a Twin Peaks / Stranger Things / Life is Strange / Donnie Darko type story and/or world with the help of a couple of friends or friendly strangers, this game may well be a good fit for you. That said, It has also proven to work quite well for stories set in all kinds of worlds and places, well apart from sleepy, small American coastal towns and suburbs. Some notable actual plays have featured underwater casino towns, post apocalyptic cities populated by giant seagulls, and distant nebulae populated by all kinds of divine and terrestrial beings. (So, you know, please don't feel like you HAVE to do a Twin Peaks pastiche, because you can do whatever the heck you want).*

Game Format

This game works well with 3 to 6 players**, but can scale in either direction with a bit of adjustment. 

This Town Is Full Of Monsters is a game about making stuff up and trying to collaboratively (in most cases) piece together something that sort of resembles a semi-cohesive supernatural "small town" drama or melodrama out of all sorts of narrative bits and bobs.

It is diceless, GMless (think Fiasco, Follow, One Last Job, etc., with perhaps a dash of The Quiet Year thrown in to taste), and fairly free-form. It has an optional map-making / murder-board-making component and encourages players to seek guidance from Oracles of their choice (Tarot cards, coffee grounds, runes, or whatever works for you). 

Second Edition

This here is the long awaited Second Edition of the game (the PDF variant, at least), now with all kinds of artwork (hand painted by yours truly), a snazzy new layout, as well as a bit of overall polish and clarification. 

If you, like myself, are currently low on disposable funds but would still like to play this game at your table, the original version is, of course, still available and will always remain available. It is significantly cheaper - it's got a few more typos, no artwork, and a simpler layout, and it is missing the extra page (it really just one page) with the "solo mode" advice on it, but the content is otherwise functionally the same. If you've already purchased the original at some point in the past, you really don't have to buy this one unless you want the extra bells and whistles or would like to support the designer. You're not going to be missing out on brand new mechanics or a total overhaul. This ain't DnD, in other words.

There is a physical, print-on-demand version on the way, but, if you're reading this particular paragraph, then there is still some time left before that's fully wrapped up (first I've gotta send out for a proof and make sure everything is tip top - backers will be receiving their copies shortly after that process is concluded, of course).

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*The titular quote is from Silent Hill 2, of course, but while the Silent Hill series was strongly inspired by Twin Peaks and the works of David Lynch, the specifics of the "survival horror" video game genre tend to set it apart in terms of narrative format. That said, if you want to go "proper dark" with your town, as opposed to "cozy-creepy," there's nothing stopping you from adding all kinds of terrible cults and emotional purgatories into the mix for that Silent Hill flavor (twisted otherworlds and impossible mysteries are already included in the package). 

**This new edition also features some loose guidelines for solo play. TTIFOM is designed as a GMless collaborative game first and foremost, but can be played alone, usually with more than the standard amount of help from your favorite Oracles, as a world-building, story-crafting, and/or journaling exercise. That said, it is assumed that those who wish to adapt it to that modality are already familiar and experienced with solo tabletop roleplaying, and its many quirks. If you're interested in going at it alone but don't quite know where to start, I would recommend doing some research (read, watch some videos on the subject, etc.) and maybe trying out a couple of games that were specifically designed for that purpose, so that you might find your own groove and preferred approach.