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MONSTER CARE SPECIALIST ARRIVING AT THE SCENE

Hey Sharklion, thanks for the questions. Honestly I have a great time addressing stuff like this and talking it through, you're right that its one of the best and most unique elements of tabletop design. Here's my take on these. I hope it helps you navigate your campaign <3

Swarms

During testing swarms were incredibly fast and difficult to make space around. We nerfed their movement slightly to better align with the sort of play you've identified there; a group of enemies collects around you, then triggers a big swarm, surrounds and blocks off egress and piles on damage. They're intended to have unexpected burst movement; throwing one big limb of itself out to cut off lines, fling themselves in direct stretches, then fill in the space around them when they arrive, but as you said, the ubiquity of Breaker counters them fairly strongly at range, and their lack of movement buffs means they maybe don't get to feel as dramatic and explosive as we'd like. I would suggest exploring miniboss pairings to better enhance their abilities, but I'd also consider a minor buff to swarms generally, granting them some small bonus to Movement that goes down as they get bigger, where 1-7 unit swarms get +3 Speed, 8-15 get +2, etc. I'll throw something up on the errata page when I get chance.

Blazing

It's just not meant to be a super swarm focused mechanic outside of turning very large swarms into danger zones for the GM, and to discourage the prior tactic you mentioned of creating death balls of unswarmed enemies to hound the players. You could say effective swarming is a blazing counter maybe.

Attractors

I would say balancing the "gravity" of the two sounds like the more interesting read but both are valid. Throw a third one in there for some three-body-problem physics and see how that plays out. 

Sharur limit break

I would agree that RAW you should be getting rid of all the tiles, but this is probably an easy concession to make, taking away another player's toys feels bad. Maybe a tweak to the limit that lets them absorb attractors at-will by moving over them for a short span of time would be neat, then the two players can kinda feed each other. A buff to damage or pull-range per devoured attractor or something maybe.

Malakbel

I don't disagree here, they're supposed to be the Fast Armor but it can be annoying getting ahead of everyone and needing to wait. Esp when you include sprinting or the slower squads. 

Provoke

I'd go with the 3D6 option here cause it's meaner.

Theletus

Most of Theleus's guys don't have AGNOSIA effects. I believe the author of that faction intended to write a faction-wide special Agnosia thing that used the system in a novel way but never quite wrapped it up, so several of their minibosses just lack the form change, which is a shame since their whole waking up-frozen thing fits very well. This is on my list of Big Fixes to cover in the future, our bad.

Language of Kings

I roll then use half, but I think a lot could be said for saying its half the max. This was actually intentionally left open depending on your taste for power level.

Harvester

Depends on when it happens, if the AGNOSIA triggers before their turn, they get two turns, if its after their turn, they gotta wait, if its during, I'd say they have to wait. Newly spawned units can, I believe, move and act on the same turn they spawn.

Hazards

So there's kind of two answers here; the Devolve hazard is the only explicitly named Map Hazard in the book. Initially we wanted every faction to have a unique one, but as our authors went on the "Hazards" ended up taking on different forms (See the big snake in MIXIS for example) and the functionality ended up pretty anemic. I mean't to pivot the Map Hazard function to a more PbTA GM Move style arbitrary narrative tool, but never wrote the expanded explanation, so it's a pretty unsatisfying element of the book. I would use it as such where you feel like it (A river overflows, a toxic gas cloud bubbles up from the surface, etc) until I can write up a whole bunch of them for a future expansiony thing.

Hey thanks so much for your kind words on the project and the opportunity to address and think some of this through. HELLPIERCERS is a living game to me, and even with the physicals out in the wild, I want to get in and mess with the guts and clean up some of this stuff as an ongoing project over the next year or so. I'm glad the vision shines through despite the frustrations, and I hope together we can keep refining this till it shimmers.

Much love

Nemesis

Sure, I'll hit you up

probably the damage could use a rework to be more threatening, if it feels a lil anemic feel free to add a push:1 or something, the intention is for the armor to pinball around and create space whenever they end up out of formation. Once fulfilment is done I'll be working on the next update to our errata page.

Hey! Sorry for the confusion, your remaining speed converting to damage is what's intended.

Hey, I wanted to thank you for this extensive feedback. I really appreciate you taking the time to cover so much. As the books approach, I'm working on an errata sheet to include and will be using this, as well as a number of other comments that echo several of these points, in my work. Thanks again, and I hope our next version feels a little better for you.

Nemesis

Good news! There's a fan made foundry module coming soon!

https://bsky.app/profile/boltsj.bsky.social/post/3lv4k22cb3k2y

Hey thank you so much for supporting things like this! We have absolutely done so until it's clear what our next move should be. Right now folks can find us at our website too, sandypuggames.com, we'll be selling physicals there also.

Hope you enjoy the game! Drop us a line and tell us how you get on.

Players Choice for sure, you can loop around too, going from the last prompt to the first and further depending on your roll. I personally end when I reach the last prompt regardless.

That's what we went with! There should be a symbol representing the player in the edition I just posted. Hope that helps! Please let me know if there's anything else I can do.

I'm getting a heads up that searching and text is still goosed in here, we should have a fixed version up later today, along with some accessibility additions, and character/party/GM sheets.

Yeah that's doable. I'll try and get something out soon. Thanks for the heads up!

Almost every playtest we did was one GM and 3 or 4 players. Some of the Variable Action Economy stuff is designed to help ease 2 player teams but you'd probably want to create encounters with that balance specifically in mind.

Yep, it's right here;

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSenTF2DBmxwTJSYFt8RrtH4OFDnmEn_uXXf1yCF...

I already have notes for the ToC and the abilitues errors but pls do log anything else you happen to catch! 

There's been interest but I don't have the means to properly moderate a space like that at the moment. We'd happily support anything that pops up organically though.

There's a handful of preview and public editions floating around, with most of them showing the game in a fairly finished state mechanics wise, lacking mostly polish, fixed, layout, art, and some secondary content. I'll consider updating this page with a free edition as a demo but it'd likely be the preview edition re-uploaded so, maybe just a link to it somewhere.

There's no official character sheet yet; with the development cycle we've had there just hasn't been resources to make one. Homebrew it for now and I'll see what I can make happen

GO NOW QUICK GO QUICK GO NOW RUN RUN RUN

I'll be sending out some emails for them! I forgot to put the usual address stuff in there this go around my b, super excited to send it out!!!

You got it

I write a lil about our methods over here

https://sandypug.school/

A lot of it is that MCS is just one of dozens of projects we've released over 10+ years now, so we've built up an audience and a reputation around us. Part of it is good timing, we dropped MCS around COVID when the themes were really on everyone's mind; part of it is just hard graft, we appeared on a lot of podcasts, we put the game into a lot of people's hands, we paid for coverage and attended conventions and talked to a lot of people. It also helps that we made something really phenomenal, that people get excited to share with their friends!

Yeah that sounds about right. Mook Abuse is one of the quickest and most obvious exploits to beat the planet very quickly.

Heya!

I've uploaded a rip of the wiki I was able to salvage from the Way Back Machine to everyone's purchase. The rules are included, I hope this helps!

Nem

Nothing in my life has understood me quite like this book. The opening chapters finally give voice to a thousand stammered ideas and misjudged moments. I'll be thankful for this text for the rest of my life, and I'll be quoting it for long after besides. Much love Talia, thank you. Pls buy this book!

Yeah, I need to upgrade our hosting when I get back from Honeymoon, should be a week or so.

it's unlikely. We consider the free version of the rules usually hosted at monstercaresquad.web.app a replacement for our community copies at be this point.

Good idea, I'll put something together. I just started working on a bunch of new stuff for this so shouldn't be super far out.

There's also the eternally free version here; https://monstercaresquad.web.app/ tho it looks like we're so popular this month you'll have to wait till our hosting renews 😅`

Yep, just email me and I'll send it through.

I'd really like to port in some city gen tech I've built for other games. Esp now that I've had way more experience doing tables for OSR-adjacent dungeons and game systems I think I could do something neat with this. 

There's a handful of errors in the base building right now, should have it cleaned up soon. Thanks for the heads up! Really excited about where the game is at rn

Your first interpretation is right; I can see why that would be confusing though!

I'm going to have a more formalized feedback system set up somewhere probably next week, but this is fine for clarifications. 

You have access to both, it's a left over from when weapons only had one or the other; thanks for catching it!

Aw hell yeah! That's really exciting, I hope y'all enjoy the game. There is a map, we use it as the background graphic on the opening section and you can see a clean version of it below.

Absolutely; if we were ever gonna do a reprint it would be via a crowdfunder, the barrier is that we can only do one~ crowdfunder a year, and at least at the moment our priority tends to land on Cool New Thing.  When HELLPIERCERS is done and we're clear on our To-Do list, we'll be discussing a reprint more seriously for sure

big file has uncompressed assets is all, it's barely noticable.

On December 1st I'll put up one community copy for every copy we sold this month, should be at least 5!

We'd love to, honestly, but it's incredibly expensive and the interest in niche indie TTRPGs so low that we probably won't ever be able to afford to. If we ever make a ton of cash it'll be on the list of things we'll consider spending it on, everyone on the team shares this disappointment, I assure you.

You can get a couple copies on Ebay occasionally; https://www.ebay.com/itm/196049538123?hash=item2da5768c4b:g:VkcAAOSwj~hlL-ZQ&amd...

Hey, sorry, the campaign page has been up for some time right here; https://jetbacker.com/hellpiercers