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| 2-6 | 12+ | 2-8 hr | $25 |
Most people don’t believe in monsters, but you know the truth. They’re real, and it’s your task to bring them down. This revised edition of Monster of the Week brings that adventure to life.
Monster of the Week is a standalone action-horror RPG for 3-5 people. Hunt high school beasties a la Buffy the Vampire Slayer, travel the country to bring down unnatural creatures like the Winchester brothers of Supernatural, or head up the government investigation like Mulder and Scully.
This book contains everything you need to tackle Bigfoot, collar a chupacabra, and drive away demons. In this revised edition, you’ll find:
- Character creation rules to bring your hunter to life and create a cohesive hunting team.
- Eight simple moves to investigate and deal with monsters.
- An easy-to-use system based on the popular Apocalypse World RPG.
- Thorough mystery-creation tools and two ready-to-play mysteries.
- New material including an introductory mystery; example monsters like Balkan vampires, werewolves, and other-dimensional creatures; and hunter types like the Crooked and the Spell-Slinger.
Grab the fireplace poker and get your spell book. That monster’s going down!
GAME INFORMATION
Number of players: 2-6
Age of players: 12+
Length: 2-8 hours
Type of Game: Roleplaying Game
Languages Available: English
Suggested Retail: $25
Game Designers: Michael Sands & Steve Hickey
Release Date: early 2015
super excited to play this. are there any differences between buying the book and using the pdfs in the resources section ?
Yep, the book contains a lot of additional explanation of how to run the game, build mysteries, etc. All you get in the downloads section are the playbooks and core moves.
i love the adventure zone!!! the second game they play after dnd they play it. it is epic.
Maybe this has been addressed before, but in the book there are some other Classes listed (Action Scientist, Luchador, etc.) and it says they can be found on the website, but I am having trouble locating them.
Those are likely available from Generic Games.
Is there any way to retroactively order the book+pdf combo? I didn’t know the PDF was lacking so much information that the physical book contained.
Which PDF are you looking at? The Monster of the Week PDF that we sell (which is not the handouts PDF) contains the entirety of the content of the physical book.
I was wondering if there is a record of a session run by Michael Sands or Steve Hickey.
Although I really like the game, there are some rules I would like to see used the way the creators intended then.
Cyrian, I’ve never recorded any of my games, I’m sorry. I am, however, happy to answer questions. Probably on one of the MotW communities would be best: https://www.reddit.com/r/monsteroftheweek/, https://mewe.com/join/monster_of_the_week_roadhouse, or https://twitter.com/MotW_rpg
Thanks for the replay. I will set up a mewe account and ask about further details there.
This is an awesome game. Thanks for the great product. I’ve been looking at some of the fan created playbooks and am sad that none seem templated in the landscape format of the others — is there a template somewhere that I can use to transfer them?
No template, but it’s pretty basic; landscape format, three equal columns, Warnock Pro as the body font, 3rd Man as the header font, a couple bullets-styles that give you unchecked and prechecked boxes.
One more: in terms of when to award experience points, are we defining a session as an entire mystery, or just one sit down, which might only get us part way through.
M sclafani: A session of play is one instance of sitting down to play. The mystery may be shorter or longer.
If you buy the book does it also come with the PDFs?
Yup, as has been the case with all of our books for the past 13 years! More details at http://www.evilhat.com/home/pdf-guarantee
Have there ever been any plans to allow the players the have/play as a dog (not including the meddling kid)? I figure a dog could intimdate civilians and act as an early warning system if a monster is nearby. A dog could also win people over by being begging for scratches, and then there’s the obvious combat capabilities of having teeth and claws. Maybe even a bonus to investigating if there’s a clue related to smell?
Strictly speaking there’s nothing that says any of the playbooks have to be played as a human. You could decide to play a dog version of any of them. Might require a custom move or two sorted out with your GM, but that’s a fairly light lift.
I’m still pretty new to table top RPG’s.Any advice on how to GM a game.
You’re commenting on Monster of the Week, so I assume the inquiry is specific to that. You’re in luck! Monster of the Week is probably at least 60% explicit, direct instructions on how to GM a game. One of the reasons we picked it up for publication. 🙂
If you have a more specific/targeted question about a particular part of GMing, I’m sure someone would be happy to address that — it’s near impossible beyond a “read the book” kind of response to address a wide-open generality tho.
Have a fb group for players and gms ~ https://www.facebook.com/groups/2367782603476441/?ref=share
whats the name of the system it uses? i feel like its a good fit for something im doing but i dont want to have to buy the whole book just to know the rules of the system and not really use the rest.
The book is nearly all system. It’s an implementation of Powered By the Apocalypse, which means it’s got a lot of customizations vs. the baseline because that’s how all PBTA games are.
I just started playing this game via google hangouts and roll20.net since the quarantine. As long as the GM has the main book, the players only need the PDF’s that list the various hunters and the moves. I never played this system before but it’s very easy. Reminds me of a PG version of KULT where the hunters already know that weird creatures and magic exist.
I have this book now and I just found out that the pc’s die every session. How is that even fun to play unless it’s a comedy like Paranoia?
The monsters are uncontainable, always hit, can do massive amounts of damage regardless of their harm potentials. Minions can kidnap regardless of any struggle or resistance.
I was excited about this because a friend was finally going to run something, I started asking about this and suddenly he won’t run. What the hell? Or is the Keeper supposed to be rolling to do this stuff?
If the PCs are dying each session, the Keeper is going too hard on the Hunters and/or the Hunters aren’t figuring out the monster’s weaknesses before taking it on head-on. I ran a dozen-session campaign where the monsters were pretty terrifying; not one PC death.
And more to the point, *where* did you “find out” that every-session-death was true?
Hi Geoff (and Fred): I might be way off but…have you ever played a PBTA game before? It could be that you are not interpreting how the action and narrative flows in PBTA games. It takes some practice to learn when to use hard and soft moves.
I agree with Fred…I have not had that issue… 🙂
That’s a good point, John. The book is very clear about its procedures, but if someone doesn’t take the time to really read the book to learn them (and set aside assumptions that it’ll just play like D&D does, for example), it’s gonna be a weird fit.
Hi, I have a rules question which I haven’t found answered anywhere else, so I’m asking her.
The Divine gets armor with the “holy” tag. However, in the list of tags, “holy” is defined as a weapon tag. (“This will be more effective against monsters with a weakness to holy items.”) The discussion of armor tags on page 116 doesn’t explain what the holy tag means for armor.
So what does it mean for armor to be holy?
Thanks,
David
Any details that are not addressed in the rules should be interpreted fictionally as it makes sense to you and your group. Here, I’d suggest “provides extra protection against the unholy.”
Related reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/monsteroftheweek/comments/i9p5if/divines_holy_armor/
Hello. I made a comment about this previously, but the website seemed to have removed it. I had a question in regards to The Monstrous’ sheet. I noticed that it possessed an ability called “Something Borrowed” I was curious as to how it worked specifically. Is it something you can pick at choose from any playsheet at a given moment since the move cannot be currently in play? Or is it more so like adding another move when leveling up? Meaning that once you choose a move that specific move is permanently part of their sets? Just wanted to know before committing. Thank you.
Permanent. This is a way that the Monstrous can (permanently) get a move from another hunter’s playbook right out of the gate without waiting for an advance that lets them do it (and also lets them take up to three moves from outside the playbook when combined with the two advances that allow that too)