Wednesday 3 January 2018

Gaming with toddlers revisited: Motay Motay and the Jail Sisters

Goya wrote that it was the sleep of reason that created monsters. He should have spent more time with three year olds.

Over the holidays, I've been spending a lot of time playing with my three-year-old son, whose favourite pastime is a kind of continuous freeform imaginative play that is exhausting, anarchic, unpredictable, sometimes hilarious, and often extremely violent. It's a good thing the Playmobil fairies are always on-hand, like high-level D&D clerics, to magically resurrect everyone at the end, because the death tolls in his improvised narratives are often staggering. (On one occasion an unstoppable evil triceratops depopulated the entire toybox.) The most ordinary situations - a frog and a dinosaur meeting up to eat pancakes, for example - can collapse into scenes of murder and mayhem with startling speed.

Here are some of the monsters he has invented along the way. I cannot claim any credit for any of them. I wish I could come up with something even half as deranged and horrible as some of these guys on my own.

From left to right: Drill Robot, Pomking, Vampire, Doctor Cat, Fire Dinosaur, and Skeleton Pirate. The Jail Sisters, the Lava Tigers, Mega-Dog, and Motay Motay are thankfully purely imaginary.


The Jail Sisters: Never described. Possibly not even human. They capture people and lock them in prison, sometimes behind sentient talking doors who refuse to let anyone out. On other occasions they use slime to glue people to the walls of their cells. They have swords, which they use to cut people open to see if they have dust inside. It is possible to escape from their prisons while they are distracted, but the Sisters themselves cannot be harmed or vanquished. Sooner or later, the Jail Sisters will always return.

Motay Motay: An animated freight train full of angry bees. He attacks by hurtling up to people and opening all his carriage doors: his bees then pour out and sting everyone until they flee the area. For unclear reasons, the sting of Motay Motay's bees also cause nearby fires to go out. He triumphed over the combined might of Thomas and the Tank Engines in a pitched battle which left him the sole remaining resident of the Island of Sodor. The Fat Controller was driven into the sea by bees.

Drill Robot: A robot with drills for arms and two pipes on his body, out of which pour milk and smoke. He drills holes in people, and if they object he drills their mouths off so they can't complain any more. His secret is that he is actually a man in a robot costume.

Doctor Cat: A small orange cat who has the thankless task of splinting people back together after Drill Robot's rampages. His catchphrase is: 'Doctor Cat.... IS BACK!'

Skeleton Pirate: A pirate skeleton who sails around in a pirate ship, looking for treasure. He has a giant pet centipede in his cabin, whom he feeds on nuts.

Pomking: A two-headed fire-breathing dragon who lives on an island, hoarding ice cream. His rulership of this island is bitterly contested by Andy Pig, a giant pig who gets over-excited when watching car races on TV.

Vampire: A vampire girl who flies around in a bright orange aeroplane pouring drinks on people. Lives in the same house as the fairies.

Lava Tigers: Tigers made of lava who live inside lava flows and subsist on a diet of red grass. They are wildly dangerous, but tend to fall asleep a lot.

Fire Dinosaur: A small red dinosaur covered in spikes, who lives inside a volcano. He heats up his spikes with lava and then tricks people into sitting on his back.

Melon: A vigilante squid who flies around in a biplane, hunting evil-doers. When he catches them he cuts them up with the shiny metal propeller on his plane. He's a bit like a gimmicky cephalopod version of the Punisher.

Eaty Branches: These look like ordinary bushes, but when you touch them the branches eat your hand. The locals deal with this by putting the resulting bleeding stumps into a hole in the side of a magic tree, which gives them new hands made of slime.

Mega-Dog: A giant dog. He is very good at fighting, but he will only fight against birds and/or vampires. No-one else. Ever.

21 comments:

  1. This is so good. I think I’ll steal Motay Motay for my game, but any of these could make great additions

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    1. If you do use him, you should probably give him a secret weakness or something. In the original stories he's totally OP.

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  2. These are adorable and awesome.

    Side note: "Motay Motay" translates to "Fat Fat" in Urdu/Hindi.

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    1. Huh! I didn't know that... but maybe he did? Toddlers soak up language at such speed that it would only have taken one conversation with an Urdu-speaking kid for him to come away with a couple of new words...

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  3. I'm not sure that The Jail Sisters being entirely imaginary is a good thing. I'd be far happier if they had little plastic models I could smile at. But as it stands...

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    1. I wish I knew how he imagined them looking, but he won't be drawn on the subject. I may need to wait until he can paint something other than shapeless blobs.

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    2. Please no. That's probably how you let them out into our world.

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  4. Oh mah gersh. The Jail Sisters are straight out of a nightmare. Consider them stolen.

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    1. Quite possibly their actual origin. When he tells me about his dreams, they sound pretty similar to his games, or his imaginary trips to Mexico.

      ('When I went to Mexico on my own' is his version of 'once upon a time'. Any kind of fantastical weirdness can follow...)

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  5. This is awesome! I needed to read something positive and weird like this. Doctor Cat with his CATchphrase is my favorite!

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    1. Oh, God. Cat-chphrase. He'll love that.

      He'll probably also spend the next several years thinking that 'catchphrase' means 'something said by a cat', but that's childhood for you!

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  6. Kids are vicious. Your kid is more kid than most.

    Jail sisters give Neil Gainman a run for his money. Nightmare stuff indeed!

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    1. I mean, not all his games and characters are like this. Plenty of them are just happy scenarios about polar bears eating cake, or whatever. I've just picked out the ones which can also double up as D&D horror-monsters...

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  7. Thank you very much for posting this. Jail Sisters, Lava Tigers and selfless, grumpy Doctor Cat (I imagine him being in cat-way grumpy) are my favourites, but this is because everything else (Melon, Mega-Dog, Eaty Branches) is simply just good.

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  8. When my son was 4 I started playing a free form imaginative play with him where I would print out a lot of D&D type illlustrations, mainly classic images from MM and stuff, but sometimes just of animals too, and we told stories about them going on adventures using the pictures. We were the main characters, Sir Elias and Squire Ben. I was his squire. It introduced a lot of the tropes of D&D to him, but definitely went in some pretty Fing weird direction. Not as weird as the Jail Sisters though.

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    1. That's a really nice idea, actually. Maybe for when he's a bit older, and the tactile element of the toys is less essential...

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  9. A quick google search turned up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4FpI8M6AqI . I'm not sure what it is, but it sounds sinisterly appropriate, especially the weird fragments of English.

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    1. That'll be 'fat fat' (or maybe 'fatty fatty') in Urdu, like Allandros noted above. Thus the English line: 'Eat to live, not live to eat!'

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    1. I went there for a conference last year. He's been fascinated by the idea of it ever since.

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  11. I think it's pretty remarkable how most of these could totally be from an OSR product or blog. Remarkable in a good way. I think it speaks a lot about the kind of artistic freedom many authors in this scene excercise. Creative impulses unchained from standardized, sterilized, commonly accepted flavor. Just raw creativity without consideration for what's appropriate or acceptable.

    Picasso said that every child is an artist, but that many people forget how to be one as they grow up. I think that's very true and honestly envy this kind of unbridled creativity.

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