Further ruminations on Monster of the Week

This week we had another opportunity to play Monster of the Week as we took a brief break in our ongoing Call of Cthulhu globe trotting campaign. Monster of the Week is a Powered by the Apocalypse roleplaying game, using similar mechanics and concepts to Apocalypse World.

In this case you play monster hunters, in a similar vein to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This was our second try of the rules, partly because we needed something at short notice, and MotW does work very well in this respect. We had a new addition to our team of hunters, this time the Pararomantic, a new play book which you can find in the Tome of Mysteries expansion for the game and on the Evil Hat website. 

This is a character in a close relationship with a supernatural creature, which has its upsides and its downsides. In this case the player chose the ghost of an ex-love who had died in the suicide pact the player character had survived. Plenty of meat to explore there!

He joined three other team members, the Monstrous (a fae/demon hybrid), the Divine (an androgynous angel) and the Spooky (a psychic). One of the things I like about MotW is the relationship building between the characters, as this creates bonds between them which the GM can explore further in the campaign. In this case we discovered that the Pararomantic is the elder brother of the Spooky (actually her half brother - shared mother), and that the Divine is aware of his tragic secret. The Monstrous knows the Pararomantic has something to do with the Prophecy, although we have not yet fully explored what that is yet.

MotW gives you so much to work with as a GM if you are looking to build a campaign. Whereas in other RPGs there is much writing to be done to create a world around the PCs, here the PCs are almost a world unto themselves. The mission feels incidental to the main story arc.

As we have relatively short sessions to play in these days - three hours is our usual allotment - MotW fits well. I find Gumshoe games, another favoured system of mine, take a lot longer as players explore a mystery. Characters in MotW also feel quite high powered, especially those with supernatural abilities at their disposal. The access to magic for all hunters also makes them pretty formidable.

A case in point - last night's investigation centred around a murder on the campus of Bath University in Somerset. The hunters wanted to use magic to find out what happened to a security guard who was killed, by scrying back in time, but the GM gets to rule on constraints when magic is employed in this fashion. In this case the ruling was they had to be in the location, and that location was a crime scene and guarded by the Somerset constabulary. Efforts by the BBC journalist (Pararomantic) and the Spooky (using her telepathy) failed to get entrance.

Finally, the Monstrous used its supernatural power to simply walk through the walls into the engineering department, and then its mobile phone to summon the Divine into the location. The Divine then assisted the Monstrous in casting the spell. Who needs those pesky mortals anyway?

We got to use all the game's various moves in the course of play, even Act Under Pressure, when the hunters were ambushed in the sewers under the university. The opposition proved pretty dangerous, more so than I feel the faerie adversaries were in our first adventure. The enemy brought a lot more technology to the table, for starters. Luckily the players figured out their Achilles heel early on in what could otherwise have been a pretty deadly final battle. Things could have been helped by use of the Luck resource, but the players are aware this is finite, and are therefore reluctant to use it.

I don't think we are fully clear on the PBtA combat rules - yet. I'll do some more reading on these. They can be a bit of a jump, just as the Gumshoe combat rules are, for those used to the more wargames-oriented combat of Dungeons & Dragons. My initial impression is that they are intended to be scripted more by the GM as events evolve and not intended to conform to the round by round system employed in D&D. Combat is fast and furious however - it can handle an attack by a mob of 30 cybernetically enhanced monkeys in a very short period of time. This is something I feel we need when we only have three hours to roleplay, and I'd rather spend that on building out the characters than getting bogged down in the minutiae of skirmish combat.

We did not use our usual platform of choice - Roll20 - as the system seemed to be on the blink. As it turned out, this was no great loss. We ran the whole session on Discord using a dice roller bot and form fillable character sheets, and sharing images, and guess what, it worked fine! I am currently working on a WW2 Achtung Cthulhu scenario (sequel to my 1939 adventure) which I have created on Roll20, but in retrospect I'm in two minds about using Roll20 in future as it does require quite a bit of set up work.

I feel PbtA games do fit well into the short notice, short session model which we seem to be facing at the moment. The game has thrown up some further questions about the hunters I'd like to explore in future assignments - including the shadowy group that supports them, the Pararomantic's ghostly ally, this undefined prophecy (which is part and parcel of the presence of both the Divine and the Monstrous in this campaign). I shall ruminate further on these in quiet moments.

What else is going on then?

I'm going to try to keep coming back to this blog on a more regular basis if I can. In other news, I'm reading The Templars by Piers Paul Read at the moment, and am pondering a possible PbtA campaign using City of Judas. I've almost finished my Achtung Cthulhu adventure, the Sleepers of Ephesus - it just needs some final tweaking, and it would be my first proper go at leveraging the functionality of Roll20 as a GM. I recently watched the Julius Avery movie Overlord, so remain inspired by ideas of WW2 survival horror games.

I'm going to try and get some more miniatures painting done. My old Frostgrave campaign is obviously on hold due to COVID, and I'm figuring out a solution to play some Lord of the Rings SBG online using Roll20. I am doing some reading about skirmish level medieval wargames, including in the Crusades and Dark Ages periods. I'm going to make an effort at painting some knights - I still have a lot of unpainted and semi-painted Games Workshop Bretonnians lying around. I also have men at arms and archers, survivors from an old Warhammer project gone dormant. I'm wondering whether these can form the basis of a multi-player skirmish game where each player controls a single retinue with a knight as its leader.

Elsewhere, other projects in R&D include a dynastic campaign of some description, either in 12th century England or Harn, and a Middle-earth hex crawl. More on those if they start to progress, but as with many things on my drawing board, they could get axed.