Dungeonhearts: Youth on the Borderlands

Dungeonhearts: Youth on the Borderlands is a short mash-up of Monsterhearts and Dungeon World, focusing on homeless teenage monsters living in abandoned buildings.

As a teenager, you knew something was different about you. So you left to become a wandering adventurer, just like in the video games and books that you loved. Maybe it was your choice or maybe that choice was made for you. Either way, the urban wilderness became your home, and you eked out a living through scavenging, freebooting, and delving.

Eventually, a group of you decided to set up camp in this abandoned building, full of endless corridors and empty rooms, tunnels and crumbling staircases, as well as the occasional secret—a lost diary or photograph, a tunnel leading nowhere, or cryptic graffiti.

Here, with a few other “unaccompanied” teens, you live one day at a time and attempt to navigate the ambitions, rivalries, romances, needs, and excesses of the other denizens. Here you guard your loot and nurse your pain like a dragon in its dungeon, a vampire in its castle, or a ghost in its crypt. You were an adventurer once but now you are a monster. You may dislike or even hate some of the others, but there are bigger threats driving you together: elder monsters and vile horrors lurking in the shadows, such as the Dungeon Master.

Sometimes other teens form groups and venture into your domain, armed either with bricks and bats or with eyes you could get lost in and skin that smells like dreams. Some of them are monsters, just like you, and are looking to get away or to find something lost deep within your cavernous home. They have no clue about the dangers, but you do.