Mortasheen Review

Chainsaw Kid: A velociraptor with a chainsaw for a face. And, perhaps, your new best friend.

Mortasheen is an RPG that came out in 2025, set in a world designed by Jonathan Wojcik, aka “Bogleech,” aka “that guy from all the Tumblr screenshots.” You can buy it here, and you should because it’s amazing. 

What is a Mortasheen?

Mortasheen is kind of difficult to describe. It’s basically like Pokemon in that you assemble a team of cool monsters and explore the world with them, only it’s set in a future full of horrifying biotechnology and the monsters are all genetically engineered abominations. Body horror abounds. Player characters are Frankenstein-esque mad scientists who are themselves descended from genetically engineered humans. 

Despite all the body horror, the setting is also relentlessly whimsical. Despite how gory and horrifying everyone’s powers are, death is rarely permanent. Most of the characters combine grossness, horror, and cuteness in some combination. It’s a fun setting. 

As a note, I haven’t played this game. This is a review of the book as a game product, rather than the experience of playing it. 

Zokar here is from a class of monster called Arthropoids, which are hybrids of human with arthropod.

Layout and Readability

The biggest issue I have with this game is the layout and readability. Admittedly this is a problem with a lot of RPGs, but it’s still irritating. Most of the pages that explain the rules are long, unbroken paragraphs full of text. The actual rules are often contained in the middle of paragraphs that also contain examples of play, setting info, or goofy jokes. It’s not true for all the rules in the book, but I found it a pain when creating an example character. 

The order of information is also pretty unhelpful and bizarre. For example, page four has a section called “Game Summary” which has a section that summarizes character creation. The first step is to turn to page 73 to pick a biotype (its version of race), then back to page 17 for a class, then to chapter 2, which is called “character creation” to assign attributes, and then explains how to pick your starting monster. The actual chapter 2, despite being called character creation, only really explains how to assign attributes- it doesn’t explain that you need to pick a class or how to pick a starting monster, those are only written in the summary. Instead, the second half of the chapter talks about the rules for taking damage and resting, which feels like a very random place for it. The whole book is like this- rules feel thrown in at random, rather than where you might expect them to be. 

Vamprey is a vampire, a class of ancient and powerful bloodsuckers

Core Rules

The system’s core mechanic is one I haven’t seen anywhere (Roll a number of d10s and add a modifier, defense does the same) but feels simple and intuitive.

The first wrinkle is that tens explode (so: roll another ten and add it to the first ten), and every pair of 1s results in you losing the highest number. I realize I'm speaking from a place of not playing but this seems like it would be needlessly cumbersome in play, and I'm not sure how much benefit it really adds. 

Moreover, the rules also state that successes (other than crits) should come with a complication, and that failures (other than crit failures) should always have something constructive happen anyway. This feels like a nightmare for the person running this game. I know Apocalypse World and other similar games also do this kind of “success with complication” thing and I do like it there... but the difference is that Apocalypse World is very built around this kind of narrative play. Every move in Apocalypse World lists multiple possible complications for it. Here this is just sort of thrown into the core mechanics and then not supported or mentioned anywhere else. The game asks the GM to constantly improvise without adding any support to make that task manageable. 

Anyway your four stats are SCIENCE!, GENIUS!, DISCOURSE!, and MADNESS!. The all caps and exclamation points are part of the names. I just wanna say I love how these are named- they really emphasize the flavor of the game. Science measures your concrete knowledge (basically Intelligence), genius measures your creativity and inspiration, Discourse measures your social skills, and Madness represents your perseverance to shrug off adversity (basically willpower). 

Three of the biotypes: Zombies, Orloks, and Shades

Characters

Characters in Mortasheen get a scientific discipline (essentially class) and a metahuman type (essentially race).

The scientific disciplines are all both flavorfully mad science-y, and also give you cool powers that integrate into the game. For example, Surgery lets you add extra body parts to your monsters, Electricity lets you build cooler gadgets, Necrotomy lets you heal others and also bring the dead back to life. Yes all your characters will be mad Scientists, but they feel meaningfully differentiated from each other. You can even be a mad psychologist, which is particularly funny. As you level up you get to pick new abilities from your discipline. 

The types of metahumans don't have any mechanical effect- but they're also appropriately bizarre and interesting. For example, Orloks resemble goblins, but they live in ant-like colonies with queens, and were originally engineered to serve as a source of blood for the vampires who created them. My personal favorite are Shades, who were essentially generated by the city itself (which seems to have a sort of consciousness) to act as NPCs and resemble living shadows. 

There's a full list of metahumans here. Each of them feel integrated into the city, creative, and thought out. It's one of the best selection of playable species I've seen in an RPG... and we haven't gotten to the monsters yet.

Monsters Monsters Monsters Monsters Monsters

But of course, the real draw of Mortasheen is the MONSTERS. As a note, many of the monsters have old writeups on Bogleech's main website, although there are many that haven't been updated to the modern, more elaborate art style. 

If this book were literally just 171 monsters with no actual rules attached I would still be excited about it, because the monster design here is amazing. But there are a few things I think Mortasheen does really well with its monsters:

Mumblegog: Beak-nosed monster with virulent exhaust, and my favorite since I was 12

Biologically elaborate. Mortasheen is a mad science setting, not a fantasy setting, and there is considerable thought put into how all these monsters function. In any other setting, Mumblegog here would probably just say “it spews out a poisonous gas.” Mortasheen instead has a full paragraph talking about how its internal organs cultivate a virulent microbiome that it ejects through its nose, inflecting the target with a disease that makes its tissues blacken. Delightful! Every entry also talks about how the monster reproduces.

Mix of aesthetics. The majority of monsters in other books stick to being one aesthetic. Cool things are cool, cute things are cute. Mortasheen monsters freely mix and match styles, and very few of them are just one thing. For example, Mumblegog here manages to be endearingly cute... but also kinda gross. 

Memorably Creative. A lot of monster bestiaries have ones that feel like filler, or like ideas we’ve seen before. Every monster here is something entirely unique and bizarre.  

The Devil Bird of Gluttony manages to be both cute and freaky- much like a real baby bird

Also the art is really good- most of it is done by Jonathan Wojcik but there are a few that have art by other people, which helps add variety. While some people will probably be turned off by the ick-y biology-y-ness of it all, I do think there is a lot to appreciate here. 

But wait! There's more. Because not only do these monsters have cool designs and lore, they also have interesting powers- and because this is a monster training game you can have your own monsters and use those powers yourselves! In addition to expected stuff like doing damage, monsters can: 

• inflict weird status effects on each other, like lobotomized and ruptured.
• Summon swarms of tiny bugs to attack everyone in sight
• Break off pieces of themselves that act autonomously
• Swallow other monsters whole and slowly digest them. 
• Do various non-combat things as well- some monsters are good at seeing things, others have specific skills. The starting monsters also help you with your lab research, which is adorable.  
• My personal favorite, the fectoids, can turn themselves into sentient diseases that inhabit another organism and damage them from within. Seriously, this game lets you be best friends with sentient salmonella.   

The page spread for Scarecrawl, showing its elaborate description and its abilities 

Monster Parts and Customization

But that's still not everything- because this isn't just a monster catching and training game it's also a monster creating game. Every monster is made up of around 3-5 body parts, and each body part has an ability encoded as a series of blocks. For example, Scarecrawl's head has the ability Fear Bomb: [DETONATE][INFLICT +2d10 repelled/brawn][CLEAVE burst]. This means that Scarecrawl can blow up its head to inflict the repelled status effect (which makes enemies run away from it) on everything close by. 

And of course, as a mad scientist, once you've scanned a monster and learned the abilities it has you can add them to your own monsters, or alter them, or even make your own monsters that use them. I can edit my Scarecrawl so it inflicts Mumblegog's rotten status effect instead of repelled- making it a poison bomb instead of a fear bomb! Or I can add the ability to my Mumblegog, giving him his own fear bomb ability! This is a system that immediately makes you want to start tinkering with it to make your own weird creatures, and makes you want to get out and meet as many monsters as you can to learn new abilities. 

Worth noting, the monster system is also used for gadgets and modules in your lair (because of course you have a mad scientist lair), adding even more customizability to the game. This is truly a game made for you to tinker around and daydream about what crazy things you can create.

That said, I think there are some warts on this system as well. For one, the way abilities are written is quite hard to parse, requiring looking up every ability in the description- and as you can see above, even starting monsters have like 8 abilities. This is a system that rewards people willing to really get into its guts, but its definitely not friendly for new people- and I think with a little effort it could have been a lot more accessible.

Painchild: A gleefully destructive telepathic... thing

They did the Monster Math

My other issue with the Monster creation system is that the math around monsters is ... weird. Let me explain. When making monsters you calculate a Mad Science score equal to your SCIENCE! + MADNESS! stats. This number equals the number of points you have to spend on abilities, and also the number of points you can distribute between its brawn and brain stats. At character creation you get 11 points to distribute between your four stats (average of ~3 per stat), and they increase by 1 each time you gain respectability (basically the game's equivalent to a level) which maxes out around 15.

From my read, this means an average character will have around 6 Mad Science at respectability 1, going up by 1 every other respectability, and ending up with an average of 12-13 at the end of the game. Now, from sampling a random subset of the 171 monsters in the book it looks like around 5% require 6 or less respectability, around 30% require 8 Mad Science (which would require our "average level-up guy" to be respectability 6), and around 30% require over 13.

Now, the caveat here is that you can obviously spec more into these two stats to get better at making monsters. You can also create your own monsters from scratch, so even if you do have mad science of 6 you can still make your own creatures and use abilities as you want. And you get to start with a monster that normally requires mad science 8, so you have a decent number of possible starting pals.

But it's still a baffling choice that so many of the monsters in the book are this high-level. Bogleech's monster designs are the selling point of the game. They take up 50% of the page count. I appreciate having some powerful monsters you need to be high-level to recruit, but it feels like most of them are out of reach for far too long. 

Mortasheen City itself, in all its disgusting glory

The World

A full 65 pages are also devoted to describing the world of Mortasheen. Taking place in the far distant future, Mortasheen itself is a giant city that covers a full sixth of the planet's landmass- and one that is composed of so much biomass that the city itself seems to have a sentience akin to an ant hive, even capable of creating its own biological organisms. 

There are write-ups of various locations the players might visit and why they might visit them, as well as a small number of NPCs. NPCs don't have stats but do have their pet monsters listed. Each area also has a short list of monsters that might be encountered there. 

This setting is awesome. It's one of the most creative settings I've read about... but I'm not sure how immediately game-able any of it is. I'm currently running Dolmenwood, and the campaign guide for that is full of NPCs who have desires that immediately tie them into possible adventure hooks and also relationships with other NPCs that put them in conflict. 

The NPCs here are interesting to read about but few of them immediately inspire me to use them as adversaries or questgivers. They feel like cool guys rather than useful NPCs. 

For example: one NPC is Professor Henson, a weird tiny creature who is secretly the dean of the college of biology. Rumor has it that he's secretly the oldest surviving lab rat in the city, imbued with immortality and decades of scientific wisdom. Now, this is cool as fuck... but it's not necessarily something that's going to inspire a DM to run an adventure about him. 

What is Missing?

There is no character sheet included. This might be forgiveable for very simple games, but this is a complicated-ass game.

There is also no sample adventure in the book, or really any guidance on how you're meant to make adventures, or really even a list of example adventures. Given that it has a totally unique system, I would really struggle to run an adventure in it.

Final Thoughts

Negatives: Poor layout. Rules are difficult to understand. Setting is not immediately game-able. Math seems to mean you don't get to use most of the cool monsters you meet, although I might just not understand it. 

Positives: Beautiful art. Creative, weird monsters. A monster creation system that begs you to sink your teeth into it and make cool shit. One of the most unique settings I have ever seen in an RPG.

I dunno what to think here. Mortasheen is a KILLER setting and monster-design game trapped inside an awkwardly written RPG. I have no idea how I would run it and yet I also desperately want to run it. 

At the very least, I think it's a genuinely impressive work of art and is worth a look.