Notes on Every New System I Play this Year #1: Monolith

Disclaimer: I encounter many of these systems for one-shots at meetups, where I sometimes won't even know what I'll be playing going in. Because of this, I'll often have mostly taken a deeper look at the parts of the book that relate to character creation, and flipped through the rest. But I'll always have played them!

Played/Mastered on 17.01.2026 with 3 other players and 1 GM.

Monolith wasn't on my radar at all until the GM for the session announced we would be playing a sci-fi hack of Cairn. Imagine my surprise when I saw how fully fleshed out this is. Just shy of 90 pages, this can easily support your space campaign if you let it!

But for this session, we kept it small and played a nice little adventure homebrewed by the GM. An escort mission, where we had to get a POI off of a planet while it was still being terraformed.

The backgrounds from the book worked very well to quickly flesh out our characters' motivations to go on this mission, and I feel everyone at the table felt immediate buy-in.

Like the system it's based on ( Cairn 1e ), Monolith is classless. Meaning none of the advancement options are gated by a choice you make at the outset. But you do get to roll a few starting conditions, each of which seems to have a nice number of options to have very different feeling characters, even if they share one of the twelve provided backgrounds.

The information is laid out clearly, and even the people who didn't have any OSR experience before intuitively got what they had to do to get started for the most part.

After character creation, we players needed the book only once, to check the intended scope of the psionic's "illusion" ability. That's it. Otherwise, the game does a great job of getting out of your way and effectively fades into the background during play.

Overall, Monolith is lean, but pretty complete. It has procedures for space travel, starships and starship combat, a bunch of stuff like augmentations for your characters, etc.

While it does deliver parts of an implied setting in these things, it could support a pretty wide swath of possible tones. Its stated inspirations range from 2001 to Futurama, after all.

Depending on your goals and tastes, this could either be its greatest strength or weakness. There's a lot of creativity on display here, but there's simply another level of flavour only specificity can bring. You pretty much know in advance what you can get out of something like Mothership, or whatever Space Bastionland will ultimately be called. Because their authors pinned down the tone they were going for so well, they could do a lot to control it, drilling down further than a more generic system like Monolith could ever do.

If you have an idea for a sci-fi adventure that sits somewhere in-between Star Wars, Cowboy Bebop, Mass Effect, and similar settings, I feel like Monolith can be a good choice though. You'll just have to bring a lot of the really juicy flavours yourself.

Loved it. | Liked it. | Didn't care for it.