Monster Adoption Center

From David Jensen (Stories Tavern), Monster Adoption Center is a GMless RPG designed for small groups (2-3) or solo play. Light-hearted, cozy, and open-ended, M.A.C. is straightforward to set up, allowing you to jump right into gameplay!

I received a complimentary copy for review purposes and will always be transparent about times where this happens! 

Overview

Monster Adoption Center has you or your group working together to build an adoption center, and then find your bundles of joy their forever homes. After figuring out your center (where it is, what it looks like, the general feel of it), you move onto character creation. M.A.C. has no limits on what you can play, or who you can be: even three slimes in a trench coat fit in here! 

Once you know a bit about your character you move onto their stats. In this game you’re using PECK – that’s Patience, Empathy, Communication, and Knowledge. These determine things like whether your character will rush through a task just to see it done, or if you’re able to communicate the needs of the Monsters to their prospective Carers. And if you’re particularly adept at Communicating with Monsters? You won’t be as strong with Communicating with Carers! It’s a neat way to balance stats. 

With that, you’re ready to jump into gameplay. In the Gameplay Loop you have the choice of four actions built around the idea of getting these monsters comfortable and then to their new homes! What the monsters look like, their likes and dislikes, are all up to the collaborative storytelling of the table!

Highlights

That M.A.C. is GMless is a definite bonus for me, and I like that it is explicitly for solo or small group sessions! We all know how difficult scheduling can be, so having games where it’s explicitly said that you’re only looking to coordinate with 1-2 other people, or none at all if you go the solo route, is wonderful! 

Safety Tools! Right at the start of the book there are suggestions for safety tools for general use in multiplayer games. I appreciated that this light-hearted game mentions it being everyone’s responsibility to keep the table comfortable and safe.

The example gameplay loop was VERY helpful, I love when games do this as I sometimes have trouble visualizing based on instructions alone!

As A DM, As A Player

This is a GMless game, so this might seem like a strange section to still be including! This part of my brain doesn’t shut off however, so when reading M.A.C. one of the first things that came to mind was how incredibly fun it would be to have one of my DnD parties play this. Not the players, but for our characters to play this game in-universe as a bonding activity during down-time for some low-stakes, laid back, relationship building fun. 

Finding ways to work supplements and games into ongoing campaigns is something I frequently try to make work. While it’s fun to drop in other supplements and games as side quests, it can eat into session time if things go long. But if it’s the characters themselves playing a given game? They can stop playing whenever! This idea doesn’t work for everything, of course, but it does work for M.A.C. and so one of my groups will be playing this in-character sometime in the new year! 

Final Thoughts

I need to mention the colour scheme! It was nice and light, easy on the eyes and combined with the page borders had this childlike sense of wonder to it that I felt fit the general themes of the games beautifully. The monster art throughout the book is very charming! 

I would love to share a table with some of my younger cousins and play this with them. I just know that the monsters coming into our center would be incredible, and there would be a lot of laughter over their likes and dislikes. M.A.C. really strikes me as a game which benefits from the players not taking themselves too seriously and instead leaning into the limitless creativity and potential silliness that could come up in the course of storytelling.

Monster Adoption Center is available on Itch for $4.95USD [here]. This is Tavern Stories’ first Itch release, and there are plans for a second game which will be a cooperative TTRPG about a retirement home, telling stories and reliving memories hopefully in the new year! To keep up with Tavern Stories, see previous releases and more, head on over to Carrd [here].

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