Forget all that boring design talk from the last few blogs, today we are going to talk about monsters. Chronomutants is an intensely weird sci-fi game, but it has one thing in common with real life:

But what kind of monster do you play in Chronomutants? Well let’s run down the character classes in Chronomutants:

• Alien
• Avian
• Brian In a Jar
• Cryptid
• Dead
• Insectoid
• Mamilian
• Many
• Plantoid
• Protect-Bot
• Replica
• Reptilian
• Serve-Bot
• Shaman
• Shape-Changer
• Tiny

Pretty proud of how this smattering of freaks has turned out so far. Just think of all the adventures you could go on as being Dead? Exciting stuff. You may be asking yourself “What does all this gibberish mean?” Well your class gives you two things. A special rule for your character and a skill you are trained in. For example if you are indeed Dead, you gain the special rule:

• You may not be killed by normal means, instead you rise with 1 luck.
• You gain +1 to the Rewrite Reality Skill.

But wait there’s more…

Each class also comes with one of 6 subclass options. Again, taking Dead as our example, you could be a Ghost. Your subclass grants you a second special rule for your character. Being a Ghost would grant you:

• You may become briefly intangible for 1 Luck. You may be destroyed only by Emotional Harm or ritual.

So that’s cute. You get a class with a skill and a special rule, and a second special rule with some neat flavor from a subclass. Sixteen classes X six subclasses, meaning there are 96 different options for player characters, plenty of options.

I say no way.

If I’m going to play a time-traveling mercenary, being a Ghost with a bonus to a skill check to alter all of reality is not good enough. What if I told you that in Chronomutants you get not one, but two Classes & Subclasses?

Now you can finally live out the roleplaying fantasy of taking the role of the Ghost of a Robotic Chef, or a Skeleton UFO, or a Parasitic Cactus. These are the character classes of Chronomutants. You mash-up your two monsters, you throw a wristmounted time-travel device on them, you squad up with some other weirdos and you go out to whatever job they’ll hire you for.

Is that all you get as a level one character? Well, yeah pretty much, I think it’s enough. For anybody keeping track, that's sixteen classes X six subclass options + the fifteen remaining classes X six subclass options, meaning there are 186 different combinations of starter characters, plus the customization of picking an additional trained skill. You roll two classes + subclasses at random and then pick one more skill of your choice to get +1 in and that’s you. Well at least to start… See, messing around with the time stream can cause weird things to happen. It is highly likely that at some point you will end up altering your own timeline, or switching places with a version of yourself from an alternate timeline. This manifests by becoming even weirder, by rolling a personal anomaly AKA a mutation. These range wildly from cosmetic changes, to stat changes, to additional special rules. There are currently 141 mutations on the random table in the current version, plenty of spice to make sure you can never be certain what you may become.

I love this character generation system. It’s been really fun seeing all the freaks it churns out, and how their specializations give a pretty unique and changing set of tools to players. I mean who doesn’t want to roll up a swarm of tiny mechanical replica children, or a mushroom with an evil twin? Plenty of good stuff for players to chew on to start, and we haven’t even started talking about all the weird equipment you can find when traversing possible futures. Just wait until Ghost of a Robotic Chef gets to field test their brand new Tele-Grenade…

Thanks for reading, stay monstrous

-gary