Anon and the magical realm

Of all the hobbies you had that could lead to you hanging with the wrong crowd and getting in trouble, you never expected table top rpg’s to be the one that actually did.

You’re not sure what it was that got you into ttrpg’s. Maybe it was just a natural evolution from video games. They did basically the same things but what you could do with them was a lot more open. Maybe you wanted a hobby that was a bit more social in nature. Maybe some of your other friends who played them finally convinced you with all their tales of how amazing they were. One way or another your curiosity was picked and you decided to give them a look. MONSTER the roleplaying game was probably the most popular ttrpg that was currently out. A huge portion of it’s fanbase was monsters, and that right there should have tipped you off to what it was going to be like. Most monster popular media didn’t tend to be very conservative after all. You had heard of all the gameshows that got placed in late night slots with unique prizes and penalties for the contestants. But curiosity overcame caution and you bought the core book anyways.

You spent a day or two at home thumbing through the book proper and learning about the game. It was pretty well put together all things considered. The back of the book boasted over 150 playable monster races, and not only was that true but there was a relative amount of diversity between playing one race or another as well. The setting was the far past. The new demon lord had come to power only a century or two ago, the order was still around and things were kind of a mess. Supposedly this left the door open for a diversity of game types, from helping monsters and humans learn to get along to defending human towns from the more extreme monster factions or defending monsters from crusading humans. It was a welcome surprise that the authors seemed to keep away from painting humans as always wrong and monsters as always right. Then again that might have just been to appeal to a larger audience.

The game itself was by and large a dungeon crawler. Besides the variety of races to play there were quite a number of classes with a decent balance between them. The most basic things were there, a tough fighter man, magic casters of various stripes, sneaky rouges and so on. There were a bunch more unique classes from various other sources, some official add ons and some third party. Being what it was there were only really extensive rules for combat and not much else, but a bit of poking around online revealed that there were a decent number of supplements for all sorts of alternate playstyles and settings. Gets that’s the benefit that comes from being super popular.

And that’s when things first started turning weird. Sitting in your bedroom paging through the book you found the header to the section that would dominate the next series of pages: ‘Arousal’. Yes arousal was indeed its own mechanic. The book went on to explain that it existed as a kind of inverse health track that started out at zero or close to it and that you would want to keep as low as possible. There were a multitude of things that could fill it and boy did the book love to go on about those. There were charm spells and entire charts dedicated to the effectiveness of them based on the power of the user and target, there were more natural sources like Alraune pheromones or manticore venom. And there was about two and a half pages that explained how to handle seduction. Hell the seduction mechanics took up about as much room as the combat mechanics did.

The book tried to talk about it with at least some amount of class but it was all still just barely managed to not sound like some cheesy hentai game. There was a sidebar explaining that it was a vital part of the story seeing as how monsters of the era were driven by their desire to find a husband. And then there was the even longer section in the chapter for the monster master, which was their term for DM, about how to appropriately handle sexual themes in the group. You wondered how many groups actually took that sort of advice and how many just threw it all out and did full smut. As of putting as the whole thing was the rest of the game was still decently put together right? And it was so popular that it’s not like every single game could just be one massive smut adventure.

You shortly found your way to the games online forum. As fitting of the game in question the forum was pretty massive, with users in the six digits. Despite the strange nature of the game the forums seemed mostly tame. You suspected that might just be the result of good moderation but all the same it put you a bit more at ease. There was a specific part of the forum for people looking to set up games, posts with information including where and when it would take place, how many players, what type of game it would be or if that would be decided in person and so on.

You had bought the book a few days ago, and after a bit of debating you decided you wanted to actually give the game a try. Going in you still had mixed feelings about how you expected this to turn out. The game was on the weird end of the spectrum no doubt, but the book itself seemed to keep things tame enough and the forums seemed pretty okay as well. You doubted it would be a completely normal game but felt at least mostly safe that things wouldn’t veer into horror story territory. And so you made your obligatory introduction post and worked on finding a game. There are quite a number of groups looking for players, you figure you can’t trust yourself to run a game just yet.

There was one group that appeared to be mostly undead playing some kind of horror campaign. They specified that they wanted a human and he would be mostly on his own, with the rest of the group playing a sort of supporting cast. That sounded disturbingly like playing out someone’s fantasies so you decided to move on. There was a group of amazons and lizard girls who had some strange obsession with group tactics and military simulators, a group with a wights and demons looking for some strange spycraft nobleman corruption story, a group of wonderland monsters looking for god knows what. With every strange forum post your heart sank just a little more.

After looking through at least a dozen or so groups of varying stripes of weird fetish territory, you finally found something that looked mostly normal. There’s one poster who claimed she and a group of friends were looking to set up a group but needed at least one more player. The story they had set up so far was a standard ‘group of adventures get sent to deal with vampire leading undead against a city’. It seemed like a regular sort of game.

You sent them a message and got one back quick enough. They asked for your character sheet and you realized you hadn’t actually made one yet. You told her as much and she said it’s fine, you could just make one in the group before the first session. You agreed that that sounded like the best plan for right now and set up to that you could show up around twenty minutes early.

The date for the first session came a lot quicker than you had expected. You were nervous and unsure why. Maybe it was just the fact that you were going to be trying something new and didn’t know how it was going to turn out. Maybe it was because you were a single man going to play a game with lewd undertones with a group of sexy monsters. It was probably nothing. What’s the weirdest thing that could happen?

The place she told you to meet wasn’t anyone’s house. She said they had tried doing in at people’s home’s before and it had never worked out, so instead you were going to be playing in some weird event place, which you discovered was a game shop after finally arriving. It sold various RPG books as well as figures and card games and the like. You went to the receptionist and asked her about the address you had been given, and she directed you upstairs. Apparently they had separate rooms on upper floors were people could play their games in.

You approach the room she said to meet in. You try and shake off the nervousness as you stare at the door, it’s a strange mix of excitement and anxiety bubbling in your stomach. With a final breath to try and keep your cool you open the door and step inside.

It’s a bit more spacious then you were expecting, though on consideration that’s probably to accommodate the larger species. It’s a plain room, four off-white walls with several slightly cheesy fandom posters all around, and one big table right in the middle. There’s also a lady.

Her hair of all things is the first to grab your attention. It’s a deep rose red, yet somehow you don’t get the feeling it’s been dyed. The color throws a sharp contrast with the jet-black horns curling from out of her head. She must be a succubus.

You’ve seen a few of those in your life, they’re some of the more common monster types after all. They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Some are small and petite, others tall with toned muscles, or flat chests with wide flaring hips. This one has a more straightforward hourglass figure, and as always with monsters she had a figure you thought was impossible outside of porn. She’s wearing a black stripped sweater with regular jeans on underneath so at least you can safely assume you didn’t overdress.

She looks up at the sound of the door opening and smiles, sweeping whatever she had been reading under the table and extending a hand. “You must be anon right? I’m ruby.”

“Yeah, I am, it’s nice to meet you. Or meet you in person I guess.” The nerves return for just a moment as you realize you need to make your introduction good.

“You said online that you don’t have a character ready yet right? We should probably get to work on that.”

“Oh right, we should” She leads you over to the table and pulls out her copy of the core from a bag.

“You haven’t meet the rest of the players yet, but so far we have a minotaur berserker, a mucus toad rouge, and a Gandharva bard.” You move to ask her a question but she answers before you can, “And yes, the players all match their characters in species. Given the make up so far I’d go with a caster character. Maybe a wizard or priest.”

“That’s good, I was planning on playing as one of them anyways.” You spend the next few minutes flipping through the book and working out numbers and possibilities. You eventually do decide on a priest, which is a class more focused on buffing and healing allies then direct combat. You notice with a touch of apprehension that the example art appears to be a cute human boy that looks suspiciously like he wouldn’t be out of place in a doujin with a tentacle girl.

The silence is broken when ruby clears her throat to get your attention. “So anon, there’s one other thing I realize I need to bring up.” You look up from the book to give her your attention. “The rest of the group decided to make use of some extra material for the game. It’s a third party thing.” She pulls a second book out from under the table. It looks like the one you saw her reading when you came in.

The cover is a simple large pink heart with the MONSTER name in it. It’s small, probably under fifty pages. You open it and the front cover simply has the words, immersive arousal.

You look up at ruby. She’s staring at her phone but you get the feeling she’s just deliberately avoiding you. Might as well start reading.
The arousal mechanics found in the core MONSTER book are a mechanic meant to simulate the various husband hunting techniques the monsters of the world make use of and their affects on human targets. To this end they do a decent enough job, however there is a limitation of the medium that many players have made reference to. The disconnect between the character and the player can influence the way the game is played in many different ways, even if the character is tired and hungry their player feels none of these things.

Similarly players, especially new ones, can come to view arousal as simply another number on their sheet. It’s hard and in some cases embarrassing to put serious thought into how a character would react to a given situation of that nature. The advice in this book is to help give the arousal a more immersive and realistic edge.
It only takes you a few works into the next page to slam the book closed. You didn’t need to read the whole text to get the idea, the advice of the book is to molest the player whenever they’re arousal is raised.

“So what do you think?” Ruby asks, still refusing to look you in the eyes.

“Well, to me it sounds sort of like an excuse for nerdy monsters to get handsy with human boys”

“A-anon that’s mean.”

“With all respect I get the feeling that we want different things out of this game, so I think I’ll see myself out” You get up to leave before she puts herself between you and the door.

“Here me out for a second here.” You stop and cross your arms. She pulls out her phone and shows something to you. It’s a community site for the book and related materials by the looks of it, specifically a section comparing the popularity of various publications. The book she just gave you is second place only to the core, and by a slim margin at that. “If you think I’m some kind of weirdo then you’re wrong. I can promise you every game in this city is going to be using this.”

You stare at her and she stares back. Well, it doesn’t look like she’s lying to you. God you knew this was going to get weird. Do you really want to play a game so bad that you’d go through something like this? For that matter would it honestly be that bad? Oh man now your heads going to weird places.

“Look how about you have this first session without me and I can go think this over?” You move past her to the door. You try and ignore her protests and open the door. I try to move outside and jerk to a stop with my head just inches from a bulging tanktop.

You slowly look up to see the person the shirt is attached to, and find the owners face in-between a set of large bovine horns a good foot above your own head. The rest of her is just as big as the chest the size of your head would indicate. The tanktop barely serves in covering that much of her, leaving her well defined abs out in the open. She has a pair of what look like athletic shorts on under that, tearing at the ends as her legs give way to fur and hooves.

 She locks eyes with you for a few seconds before realization spreads across her face. “Oh hey, you’re that anon guy ruby said was going to join us aren’t you” It might just be the quiet, but her voice is loud enough to fill the entire room. Her smile takes on a bit of a lewd leer to it “Ruby really knows how to pick them doesn’t she, you’re awful cute.”

“Oh don’t say things like that just after meeting him, you’ll scare him” A second voice comes from behind the minotaur, there’s something strangely soothing to this one. A second woman a good deal shorter than the minotaur, not that that’s hard, steps out from her side. Her arms from about the middle of the upper arm down are replaced with large wings covered in orange feathers. Her face has the sort of gentle motherly look her voice would imply, and her chest is probably only a size or two smaller than the minotaur’s. She smiles and waves one of her hands at you. “Sorry about her, she just gets excited when she meets new people”

The minotaur snorts and glares down at her. “Don’t go around saying embarrassing things like that.”

“Did the two of you get his character set up?” A third voice comments from the opposite side that the bird. Taller than the bird but still shorter than the minotaur, her skin is all varying shades of green and shines even in the little light coming from the electric lights in the room. Her build is more slender and athletic, she has curves on her but they look more like something you would expect on a normal human. Her arms and legs are normal but the hands and feet end with large digits with webbing covering around the top half of the gaps between them.

“Glad you guys could make it! Anon this is Tarana, Beth, and Connie.” She points at the Gandharva, minotaur, and toad with each name. They all smile and wave when their name comes up. “And yes we did get his character finished, and with you guys here we’re finally ready to play aren’t we.” Her hand goes to your shoulder with a rather uncomfortable grip at those last words. You sigh with the realization that you probably can’t really just walk away at this point.

“Yeah let’s get started.” The rest of the girls smile and move around the table, pulling their own sheets and dice out of