I'm thinking of running a game of Monsterhearts, but moving it from it's default highschool setting. I think the game's tone would suit other settings where sexuality and morality are both questionable, such as the seedier side of a city. As such, I'm thinking of running a game of Monsterhearts set in De Walletjes in Amsterdam. The players could be prostitutes, sex-shop workers, Coffee-shop employees, or any of the other morally questionable sorts that gather in a red-light district.

The game would obviously be an Adult game.

Would anyone be interested in a game like this, or is it too large a departure from the assumed setting of the game?

In reply to TenFoldMore (msg # 1):

From my little experience with Monsterhearts, I'd say that the setting is a bit too open. The high school (and, even better IMO, college) setting puts the characters into a setting that is tightly centered around them, just about ensuring that their relationships and activities are restricted to the group.

With the setting you suggest, there is a huge world full of alternatives, which could scatter the focus. Perhaps if they were all bound into the same circle somehow, maybe new immigrants or seen as outsiders somehow.

Just my two pennies, of course.
This message was last edited by the user at 12:13, Fri 29 Aug 2014.

The Community in De Walletjes is a very close knit one, so I don't think it'd be too hard to keep the focus tight. I want to create an atmosphere that suggests that the outside world is not safe, and that the characters can only make their home in this one district.

The difference is that high school is a relatively homogenous gathering - the majority of the people in the entire building will be going through the same stages of life development, regardless of their background.  Setting it in a city as adults, even in a district of a city, still opens the setting up to hundreds if not thousands (particularly for red-light districts) of outsiders flowing through.  If you're forced to sit in a room with 29 other people for an hour a day, you're going to interact with them whether you want to or not.  If you're working in a coffee shop (or presumably a brothel, too), you're going to see regulars, people you recognize but only see rarely, and maybe hundreds of people in a year you only see once and never again.  If you don't like your boss, you can quit.  Some will be young and haven't experienced the world, some will be at your stage, some will be slightly more advanced, and some will be old and very experienced.  You get a lot more worldviews using a setting outside of some sort of institution.

The theme of monsterhearts is kind of using monsters as extreme metaphors for the sorts of social adjustment teenagers must learn in order to adapt to society post-adolescence.  The goal of the game, beyond telling a story, would be to advance far enough that you get the special Moves.  Essentially once you get advanced Moves, you're no longer the monster (teenager) you were at the start of the game.  You're ready to act grown-up and the game concludes.  How would setting the game as adults in Amsterdam reinforce the mechanics of the game as they're set up?  Would you just ignore the advancement rules and keep playing as if it were a game of Vampire?

I think some of the power of the sex moves would be diminished as well, but not substantially so.  You just have to somehow reinforce the idea that one person can be mean to another and that person isn't really free to go choose from the millions of other people they could access given enough resources.

I think your idea would be a playable game, and you might have fun if you found people interested/knowledgeable about that district of Amsterdam, but I do think it sort of misses the point being so "free."  If you were to focus down a little bit I think it would work out much better - for example, what if every person worked for the same brothel?  Were all prostitutes for the same pimp?  The community might be tightly knit, but it is by choice, which is not true of high school (at least in states with compulsory schooling, which may not be true of all countries).  You'd need to work it out so that if a person tried to leave their difficult situations rather than dealing with them directly, the very environment steps up to force them back into those situations.

(side note:  I think I'd like to run a game of Monsterhearts set in prison :p)
This message was last edited by the user at 20:09, Fri 29 Aug 2014.

You've got a good point, and it's one I'll carefully consider. It's important for the area to feel like a confine, and that there is no way out. It's also important that the characters are forced to interact solely with eachother and not to leave the district with their problems. I feel that ensuring that the characters are a tight-knit group that all have their hooks in eachother mitigates this problem somewhat.