If I could rate a 6/5, I would. Especially for an ashcan, Vermin has written a phenomenal game that beautifully handles both the tense interpersonal drama of the mecha genre and the stunning combats that are its calling card.

This looks great! 

That's fantastic! Let me know when you publish it so that I can boost the heck out of it! I'm excited to see what you've made.

That sounds awesome! I'm so glad you've enjoyed MONSTER GUTS. Please let me know when you publish your game! I'd love to see what you come up with.

Hello and welcome back!
Two great questions. For the first, either I'd use the Crush/Slice/Pierce values of the weapon used on the last Hunt (using whichever attribute best matches the approach taken by the player) or I'd try to find a way to resolve the situation that does not rely on dice.
For the second, I'm happy to share my thoughts. My take is that behemoths (kaiju-scale monsters) are just too big for scavengers to kill. Like in Monster Hunter World, the goal isn't to kill Zorah Magdaros, it's to redirect it to cause less harm. I see behemoths working the same way - if such a creature was heading towards your village, you'd try to incentivize it to travel in a different path, perhaps by driving some monsters it likes to eat in a particular direction, trying to hit it hard enough it decides to move away, etc. Within the game's setting, there is always a resource-dependent goal for slaying each monster - you need Artillamander bits for some cannons your village is building, you want to build a vehicle out of a Titanic Iceopod carapace, etc - and so for Behemoths, the central issue is what your scavengers want from the encounter. Make sense?

I'm so happy to hear that! 

Up to you, as long as its consistent! When I run it, monster attacks are usually consequences for failed rolls, so they just happen, and monster attacks on the GM turn work the same way, but it's important that you play the way that feels best to you! 

That's a real slick idea! Hmm, I might steal that, cuz that might make for a really cool environmental effect. I'm working on MONSTER GUTS: DARK right now, which'll be a DS-themed expansion for the game and include a couple weirdo quasi-ranged weapons, so keep your eyes peeled for that (if you follow me on Twitter, you won't miss it).

But also, you're more than welcome to write stuff up for MONSTER GUTS! There've been a number of amazing people who've created supplements for the game, and I'm always delighted when another joins their number.

Hi S0ra!

Thank you so much! You know, yes, there will be community copies available. I'll set them up right now.

I'm so delighted to hear that! I'm excited to see what you've made! 

You can upgrade your stats as well! Any number on the sheet. 

Good questions! 

Yeah, increasing a clock by 1, and all Monsters have a base clock of 6 for each Element unless otherwise indicated. 

Oh, darn. That's a good point. I might have written out what the clocks do after I decided what clocks monsters had... I'll need to fix that! Probably do something like Mizu's slippery condition. 

Not at all. 

The war bugle is intended to have a fixed base damage like bows and bowguns. I don't have their rules in front of me, but I think some of their special moves scale with Melody. 

Yes, special attacks without listed Harm use the weapon's current Edge value. Also, Edge gets spent after the attack (to avoid the situation your wife describes). 

I'd probably forego the Tempo Change if the monster was stunned, unless the scavengers were in need of a more challenging fight. In that case, I'd just pick something to intrude upon the Bout. 

I'm so delighted that you have dug so deeply into MONSTER GUTS. It genuinely has made me quite happy.

I've updated with answers to most of your questions, along with some guidance that should cover those I didn't specifically address.

Hey! Thank you for your patience! I finally got to your questions here: MONSTER GUTS Rules Clarifications - MONSTER GUTS by Wheels Within Wheels Publishing (itch.io). Feel free to post your additional questions underneath, and I'll edit their answers into the doc!

Yeah, sorry! Had a bunch of bad brain days. While I know there is a forum functionality, I'm not finding how to enable it, so I'll write up a Devlog tomorrow (i.e. not on Shabbos) with that info. Thank you for your patience!

Great questions! I think for visibility to folks beyond just you, I'll write my answers up in a forum post either today or tomorrow.

Hi! I'm so glad to hear that! Here is fine. You can also find me on Twitter, @ostermad.

Crud. Thanks for looking into this.

I'm using Pub 365, the most recent version. Vollkorn has ligature options, but none of the options seem to change the text.

I'm not able to enable ligatures in MS Publisher. When I go to the Font menu, all of the Typography options are greyed-out and unselectable. I'm using the most recent font release (1.51) but can't seem to make it work.

The Tarot Crawl by Wheels Within Wheels Publishing (itch.io)

LIGHT: Trek to the Spire by Wheels Within Wheels Publishing (itch.io)

Fantastic! Thanks! 

This strike is just fantastic. Evocative ideas, beautiful and functional layout.

This is fucking awesome

Awesome!

Would you consider adding Tarot suits? Cups, Wands, Swords, and Pentacles?

A lot of great ideas here. Excited to steal from it!

This game is fantastic, Blake. I look forward to playing it whenever I meet up with other game folx!

This meditation is exquisite, and I am excited to venture into it.

Sounds like a good plan :)

I don't recall how lethal the opening of the caves are, but if your players haven't played DCC or its ilk before, even with 20 commoners each, there's a pretty high chance they'll bite off more than they can chew. If I were in your shoes, I would remind your players of their options (i.e. their ability to flee) frequently.

I started running D&D 3.5 in a custom setting based on Garth Nix's Old Kingdom trilogy. It was really fun, but I needed to do a lot of creative work to make the rules of 3.5 fit the setting - change how races work, brand-new classes and skills, etc. When I moved to more traditional fantasy settings, I still saw a lot of bugs in the rules, things that didn't make sense or were just inconsistently designed (The Alexandrian's 'Calibrating Your Expectations' post really opened my eyes there). My houserules got pretty extensive, and when my group switched to Pathfinder and then Numenera, I kept finding things to improve or tweak. I ran LotFP for a year and really enjoyed it, but I also kept adding and expanding stuff as appropriate for my setting and the tone of my games. I did a lot of research and read very extensively in the RPG blogosphere to see what other people had done and why. Eventually, I decided to stop trying to substantially hack these rulesets and write my own; after 5ish years playing and running, I had run and played in a fair number of different systems and knew what types of resolution mechanics I liked and also had a pretty good idea as to some elements I wanted to explicitly incorporate in my game that I didn't see a lot of other systems offer in a meaningful way. I've been running my own system at my table for over a year now, and the rules are very different in a lot of ways than where I started. Some stuff has really worked, some stuff really hasn't. I'm blessed with several very ttrpg-knowledgeable players and some who were brand-new, so I get a nice mix of opinions that have been incredibly helpful to the design process.

I absolutely second Syth's recommendations. Have lots of character sheets. Rolling up a new character in DCC and other retroclones is intentionally very fast because folks do it A LOT. Get new characters into the action as fast as you can, and keep everything moving. There are a bunch of blogs with a lot of great content for this style of play: Courtney C of hackslashmaster.blogspot.com has a great primer for folks new to retroclone gaming and Alexis Smolensk of tao-dnd.blogspot.com also has some excellent, more advanced things to say on the subject.

If I recall, DCC comes with a meat grinder that inputs a lot of 0-level folks and emerges with a few level 1 characters. I'd definitely do that before heading to the Keep. It should help everyone calibrate their expectations.