I realized this week that I’ve never written anything here about one of my favorite RPGs that I’ve played in the last couple years.
Monster of the Week is a game which tries to emulate the tropes you would see in a “Monster of the Week” show like The X-Files or Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Supernatural. One GM and a number of players join to tell a story about a group of characters who are clued into monsters around them, find them, fight them, and hopefully kill the monster and win the day.
Monster of the Week is a Powered by the Apocalypse game. Each player uses a playbook, representing different archetypes of characters like The Chosen One or The Divine or The Professional which each have their own game moves to use and their own ways of interacting with the game world.
Monster of the Week was developed by Michael Sands of Generic Games and is published by Evil Hat Productions.
The Package
Monster of the Week is currently sold in a digest-size hardcover that is 344 pages long. That includes fourteen different playbooks for players to choose from and from two to four adventures to get new game masters, or Keepers as Monster of the Week calls them, started with running the game. There is extensive art in the book, but only the cover is done in color. The black and white internal art is still incredibly evocative of the genre and style of story the game is designed to tell.
Mechanics
As stated before, Monster of the Week is a Powered by the Apocalypse game. Each player uses a playbook filled with a unique set of moves they can use to interact with the fiction of the game.
Task resolution is handled by rolling two six-sided dice and adding a modifier from your playbook. A result of 6 or less is a failure, 7-9 is a partial success, 10 and more is a full success. Partial successes generally involve there being a slight cost to your success. Failures generally result in the situation getting worse in new, exciting, and occasionally horrifying ways.
Occasionally, the horrifying result of failure is that the titular Monster gets a piece of you and you take Harm. A Player Character can generally take two or three attacks from a monster before dying. That sets up a system where fighting the Monster fairly is pretty much out of the question.
Instead, the Monster Hunters are encouraged to investigate the mysterious circumstances that brought the Hunters to this place. They seek out the Monster’s Weakness and look to use it to even the odds in their favor.
Character Creation
Character Creation involves each Player picking which playbook they will use for the game. Each player must use a different Playbook from the other players.
Once the playbooks are selected, they contain instructions for a Player to choose moves to customize their own Hunter to their vision of the archetype.
Lastly, each Playbook contains a list of prompts for history between the Hunters. So each group begins with two facts connecting each pair of players at the table and enriching their own shared game world.
Setting and Themes
I love the way all the rules in Monster of the Week come back the reinforcing the core themes about standing up and fighting against the monstrous things, even when the deck is stacked against you.
The Keeper is given a set of guidelines and suggestions for running the game like “Add horror into the mundane” and “Be a fan of the hunters” that help them push events toward emulating the genre of Monster of the Week shows. Your players’ hunters turn into characters like the Winchesters or the Scoobies using their individual cool things to solve mysteries and chase down the things that go bump in the night.
A game with The Chosen and The Spooky will gather a more supernatural vibe from the abilities the characters have; a game with The Professional and The Flake will be tinged with bureaucracy and conspiracies; a character like The Wronged will feature a whole arc about vengeance on the thing that hurt them.
Setting is basically left up to the table to decide on themselves. There’s certainly an assumption of a modern setting in the default game (alternate rules for other time periods are included in the recently released Codex of Worlds) but whether that’s an urban setting or more rural is left to the group to decide for themselves.
Experience Playing
I had a lot of fun playing this one with a couple of the players from my own group. I played as the Keeper, they played as a Wronged and a Mundane who’d crossed paths when the Mundane Janitor had been faced with something a little more Eldritch than expected when he went to clean a bathroom in the apartment complex he managed. The Wronged had had a terrible encounter with a Shoggoth in the past and was dedicated to ending the strange beings.
I based the game in the Youngstown area due to some familiarity for myself and one of the players. In hindsight, using a real world location works better if all of your players have an equal level of familiarity or lack thereof. I’m looking at doing another game using my own hometown that neither of the players has been to, figuring that my familiarity will give me inspiration for creating interesting places for them to visit, but an equal lack of familiarity for the players means that they’re in the same position as if I had made up the city and had to explain it to them as we went, as opposed to one player being able to name and essentially create real locations on the fly and the other player just having to go along.
Our game developed into an arc about a corrupt neighborhood development group using magic to enforce their vision of gentrification on a struggling midwestern town. Along the way, they faced werewolves in an abandoned church, befriended a shapeshifter and named him after Odo from Star Trek Deep Space Nine, and ultimately faced off against a spirit of genericism that was erasing all the distinctiveness from places and people that the development group thought were a mismatch for their perfect vision of the city.
The arc was a blast to watch how it played out as the characters investigated each mystery and then as things went, I decided which threads from previous mysteries to weave into the overall arc.
Overall
I really enjoy playing Monster of the Week, the base style of creating a big monster, deciding what clues it’s left to draw the players to its lair, and what it will do if left to its own devices makes the game easy to quickly prepare for a session coming together at the last minute. Which is honestly how my campaign started, a few players coming together when the main game had gotten cancelled for the week due to some last minute scheduling glitches.
Supernatural, Buffy, and The X-Files are also some of my favorite shows, so I suppose the genre emulation in the game was pretty much guaranteed to pique my interest.
So overall, this is a game that comes together quickly, lets you emulate a whole genre that maybe you’re already a fan of, and gives you and your players a lot of room at the table to come up with the answer to “what happens next?” If any of those sentences appeals to you, I’d recommend that you definitely give the game a try.
Where to Find
From Evil Hat’s Online Store where it is 20 for a PDF and40 for Hardcover (which also includes the PDF) or $24 for a Roll20 module.
On Itch where a PDF is $20.
On DriveThruRPG where a PDF of the newest Hardcover edition along with an EPUB and MOBI of the former softcover edition is $20.
(DriveThruRPG Link is an Affiliate Link)
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