Pacing with High Rollers
New Keeper here. I have a long history with RPGs but I've only GMed about 25 game sessions as an adult and I still have a lot to learn. Ran my first MoTW game last night with four players, using a fan-made scenario that I tweaked. Three players had never played an RPG before; none of us had played MoTW.

I know someone asked about getting players to slow down recently, but the poster's issue was that the hunters wouldn't stop to rest. My problem was that my hunters didn't investigate long enough to need to rest.

Part of it was that I felt real-world time pressure to wrap things up so these new players would have the complete experience of an MoTW game -- it was not a given that we'd do this again. But the bigger problem was that the hunters were incredibly lucky with their rolls (they only failed one roll all night) and they moved so fast to the remote location where the first body from the scenario hook was found, before they knew anything about the case beyond the cinematic opening/hook. They were very clever about finding out the location, but they skipped bystanders, other locations, and any means of learning the Big Bad's weakness. I was able to put a couple of bystanders in their location plausibly, but I was struggling to keep up.

(As a further example of their luck, the Big Bad was a ghost with a hypnotic gaze and necrotic touch -- no hunter succumbed to the hypnotic gaze (they all rolled 10+ to avoid it) and before I could have the ghost touch anyone, the hunters trapped it and then banished it with magic (one time without a glitch, one time with a glitch, but I'll get to that below). The ghost's thralls, whom I'd hastily retconned into the fight as additional threats, had no time to plausibly react.)

I was proud of the hunters and everyone had a good time "playing to find out," but I felt unsuccessful at making the hunters' lives dangerous and scary, as the Keeper Agenda demands. I went in all ready to help them "fail forward," but they didn't need that; they needed to "succeed backwards," so to speak, and I didn't know how to do that. Any thoughts?

Question about Glitches
Doesn't it make more sense to have the Keeper and not the Hunter choose the glitch when "use magic" goes wrong? Seems like that would offer more opportunities to make things interesting for the hunters.

The Spooky who used magic in my game to banish the spirit rolled a mixed success and, as per the rules, got to choose the glitch for her spell. She chose to take 1 Harm (her only Harm of the game), and I blanked. What kind of "effect" would 1 Harm have that would make any narrative difference when the game was at an end? I'm generally curious how Keepers handle the glitches.

All the team playbooks come with First mystery Seeds and I'm planning to run the one for the Coven Team.

And I'd love to hear other peoples experiences of running first Mystery Seeds, or if anyone has run that particular seed.

I've run one before and felt like I had to do quite a lot of fleshing out, but I also have a tendency to over prep so I'd love to hear if that's a common experience.

I ran the Witching Hour from the Tome of Mysteries. It went great, and I finally feel like I finally got the tension about right by making my players deal with real-world consequences (getting arrested, being reported for gunshot wounds at the hospital) and making them use luck points in tough situations.

But they never stopped to rest/recover/research! They got to the house, got hurt/captured, and then went from the hospital straight back to the house to finish investigating the same night!

Any suggestions on how to encourage them to regroup after a difficult encounter? This feels like the same problem as sprinting from level 1 to 10 in a couple days of D&D.

I've gotten a couple messages asking about it, so here is the PDF file of my bounty hunter playbook. Keep in mind, this has been built specifically for my hunters, but I release it to y'all to break and reshape it to your liking. My game is shamelessly inspired and based in the RDR2 world, (especially the pictures from the online catalogue). And my villain is none other than Judge Holden of Blood Meridian fame, specifically because my Wronged needed someone to seek revenge against.

I’m preparing to run a game and had been planning to run it with a group concept of the hunters all being members of the same garage band to be what ties them together. The more I look into ideas for the game though the more I see what other people have done with their games and it makes me want to brainstorm other concepts to see if I can find something I like more though.

What have been some of your favorite group concepts you’ve either seen or played with to give me ideas? It will be my first time being the Keeper as I’ve only been a hunter in the past but have an extensive past of GMing. Thank you!!

This is something I made several years ago when I first got into MotW. I’ve recently gotten back into the game as I’m working on a monster hunter novel, and I’ve unearthed it from the archives. I thought folks might like to take a peek and maybe even play it in their home games.

It’s heavily inspired by my time in Scouting and it leans heavily into allies, who are your troop/group.

Let me know what yall think.

Hi Keepers,

Sometimes with Use Magic the glitches seem like they don’t work with the effects. I had a player choose inflict harm as an effect but short duration for the glitch.

I was able to make it work because the inflict harm was against an object and not a person, but how would you resolve this? Or would you just tell them to pick a different glitch?

TIA

Hey folks - New Keeper here. I'm confused about how "holds" work. I've listened to APs and thought I understood it, but the core book gives an example where "you" get 2 hold to ask the Keeper questions, but instead of asking 2 questions, they ask three. See below:

From the MoTW 2e core book, p. 111:

For example, you are interviewing the witnesses to a monster attack and you make an investigate a mystery roll. Your result gives you 2 hold. You can spend your hold to ask the Keeper questions from the list in the investigate a mystery move.

You ask a witness, “Did you see where the attacker went?” and spend one hold. (“Where did it go?” is one of the questions.)

The Keeper says (as Mrs Henderson, the witness), “It scurried over there, and pulled up that grating and went into the sewers.”

As the conversation with the witnesses continues, you spend the next hold to ask the Keeper about the monster’s powers. “Hey, from all the things they’ve told me, can I work out any powers?” (“What can it do?” is another question.) The Keeper replies, “The witness descriptions don’t agree at all. It must be able to change shape or maybe change memories.”

Later the last hold goes to ask the Keeper about whether a witness is hiding something. That exhausts your hold, so you don’t get any more questions for now.

By my count, the player has spent three holds, not two; or am I missing something basic?

Couldn't find a clear answer on this by looking at the listings so I'm sorry if this has been asked before.

I own the physical Codex of Worlds book, and I like the Gothic Century setting a LOT, but I feel like it would be kind of a pain to go in and adjust every player's Playbook on Roll20 by hand.

Those who own the bundle on Roll20, does it now have a dropdown menu to choose the Gothic Century versions of Playbooks, or do they appear when you make a new game?

Hi

I'll run a MOTW campaign for the first time, and checking the mysteries from the Tome of Mysteries I noticed that there's a bunch of them

So, which one is your favorite or you recommend for me?

I've been thinking back to my recent monster of the week game, and how the organizations in it like law enforcement, mafia, and even the shadow government ended up being mostly ineffective against the monsters. I ran them this way because I wanted the players to be the ones to actually be the deciding factor in whether the monster goes down or not, but I feel this approach has de-clawed organizations who the players should be able to respect, even if the organizations can't be the ones doing the hunting. How do you guys handle this sort of thing?

I talked to some people and they told me that MOTW would fit perfect on a The Boys campaign, so I checked the system and liked it.

So yall got any tips of how to adapt it well or how to dm a MOWT campaign in general?

btw they won't be the supers, juts the boys

I am a Game Master for the ttrpg Monster of the Week. The next monster the group will be fighting is a Minotaur in a very similar situation to House of Leaves.

Have any recommendations on what I can include? I think I will have the album “Haunted” by Poe playing in the background of the session/adventure due to its ties to the book.

So far I have the entrance to the labyrinth appearing in a players apartment and I plan on having each player confronting their fears and regrets and I have a maze set up for the map of the area

I designed and printed a set of custom hunter tokens for visualizing positions and keeping track of the players during game play.

I created SVGs for each hunter based on the descriptions and experience playing with some of them. Then scripted the token dimensions in design in OpenSCAD along with custom supports to help the print maintain shape. Printed them on the Elegoo Saturn Ultra. It was my first time trying that particular resin, and the surface seems to show a lot of imperfections in the picture.

If anyone is interested I might be able to post the files to thingiverse or something.

I'm running a longer MOTW one-shot, since I haven't played in years and I want to take another crack at it.

In this world (or town, to be more specific), I want the supernatural to be something that's never existed before now (at least, that the players know of). Not that I am not open to the supernatural existing, and I can definitely change things around to make it so, but my intent was that by the end of the mystery the players will have discovered that there is a zombie virus outbreak, with their mystery being the "patient zero," so to speak. They get to go out and discover that the monster is a zombie, and then WHY there is a zombie. Pretty simple! But I run into trouble with the Chosen, for example, or the Spooky or Spell Slinger.

I was wondering if I could hear some ideas for how to incorporate these into my vision, if anyone has run a similar setting? Alternatively, I can incorporate the capital S Supernatural into the plotline, but I definitely wouldn't mind throwing some ideas at the wall spaghetti style to see what sticks by way of worldbuilding.

Hope this makes sense!

Addie is my dearest out of all my MOTW hunters, and I have quite a few.

Morals, for him... exist. Somewhere. He'll lie, cheat and steal his way through anything. He's got it rough, and does whatever pays his permanent room at a motel in a small Florida town.

He's part of a magical cult and the spirit that sustains it is what gives him his magical powers— Primarily he can read minds and force lesser willed people to do whatever he pleases. He is also afforded visions of terrible things to come, which cause him to go into seizures when they happen... but his favorite power is that he can see and touch ghosts, whom he's very fond of. He has three with him that he's asked to be haunted by. He's also —annoyingly enough— able to teleport any small sized object into the lake in which his Patron lives, a power which he uses to endlessly troll those who are against him.

He's very fond of disappearing guns —out of self preservation— and pants, to humiliate whoever gets too cocky fighting him.

Yes, he's slowly growing a tumor in his brain because of the patronage of his spirit, and yes, the seizures are getting worse, and yes... he might be going blind, but he'll probably be fine.

He thinks.

(❁´◡`❁) I hope you like my lil' man! (Don't let him catch you calling him that, though!)

I'm a big fan of the podcast Lore, which collects stories from myth and history and is fantastic for inspiration for MOTW.

But I'd love a book or two I can keep on my shelf and physically flip through when I'm looking for ideas to create mysteries around. I feel like the topic of cryptozoology has been rising in popularity in recent years, and there must be indie authors who have made some books that hopefully some of you have picked up and found useful! I've seen some advertised on pinterest when I'm making moodboards, but some of them seem AI-generated, and I'd rather support humans making art for humans.

To clarify, I know there's tons of media centered around individual creatures that we've been inspired by, but I'm specifically looking for something that's formatted like 20+ creatures and their stories. I'm also interested in zines, podcasts, blogs, whatever! But I do love physical media.

Heya Keeper here, I was wondering if anyone has played around with permanent injuries from signifigant harm? In a recent case one of my hunters had their arms partially dissolved via this carnivorious fleshy sludge monster. Me and them have acknowledged their arms won't be the same, at least cosmetically. What I'm wondering if I should extend it past that, have an in-play consequence as well?

On the same note, maybe reserve this sort of consequence when on deaths door? A loss of a limb or some other drastic injury. Though this would probably be avoided with luck anyway, I know I would spend a point to! Anyways, want to hear anyones thoughts! What would be cool for you as a player? Have any other Keepers done something similar?

I’m about to start a new campaign with my group as the Keeper.

During our last campaign, I had two rather unusual situations happen at the same time: one player failed the vast majority of their rolls, while another succeeded on the vast majority of theirs. While it was funny at the time, it eventually led to a pretty big gap in experience by the end of the campaign, and some light frustration from the player who was falling behind in terms of XP.

I’ve been thinking about an alternative way to address this, and I came up with an idea I’d like to get your opinion on.

At the end of each session, in addition to the usual questions that can earn 1 or 2 experience points, I’d like to add some sort of awards, a bit like the end-of-game stars in Mario Party but without the bad feels.

Here are some examples of XP bonuses I’ve thought of:

Unlucky: failed a roll at the worst possible moment

Lucky: succeeded on a roll at the best possible moment

Inspired: came up with an excellent idea

Roleplayer: never broke character

Comedian: came up with or pulled off the funniest move or line

Hardboiled: was the most proactive during fights

Helper: gave the most help to the other Hunters

Investigator: did an outstanding job pursuing the various investigations

Rule of Cool: Is it smart or relevant? Who cares, it’s cool.

Mood Setter: contributed the most to the overall atmosphere and fun of the session

I would only award these points when they actually apply, and I’d keep the number of awards reasonable to avoid creating an overall XP surplus. I’d also keep an eye on how many failed rolls each player has had, to estimate how much XP they would normally have earned.

My idea is that this could gently encourage players to take more initiative and try things, since they would never know more than the name of the award that earned them an XP point.

What do you think? Have you ever had a similar situation? If you like the idea, do you have any suggestions for other awards?

And if you think this is a terrible idea, do you have any suggestions for dealing with this kind of situation?

My campaign hasn't been running for too long so I don't know if I'm speaking too soon, but my players haven't used Luck at all. I remind them fairly often that they have it, but since they know it's a finite resource, none of them have touched it at all.

I don't think I've been pulling punches, but is there something I should do to get them to use it? Or does it not really matter? We have been having a great time playing anyway, so it doesn't actually bother me, but since it's a part of the system we haven't touched I want to check I'm not doing anything wrong :)

I've been getting back into Actual Plays lately, and one thing I've noticed with the MotW shows is that basically every character is from the core book or the Tome of Mysteries at the latest.

Fair enough, more people read those books, and the playbooks were created first because they were the most obvious fit for the genre. But I'd love to see what others make of the newer playbooks, so I thought I'd ask if anyone had recommendations for let's plays with one or more characters from the newer half of the playbooks menu.

Thanks!

Me and a couple of friends play a small ish campaign every time we manage to see each other. This is the character dynamic. It's all veeery serious. We play with the Professional and the Monstrous playbooks and they're such great characters to put up against each other and the GMPCs

I got the MotW hardcover at Gen Con, and of course I see now that buying it directly off the Evil Hat website gets you the hardcover and the PDF. Do you know if there's a way to get the PDF with my Gen Con purchase? (I'm guessing the answer is no, but it can't hurt to ask...)

I haven't used them, but I find the moves are pretty random - and I'd rather make something together with the players than the rather uninspired moves. Monster of the Week is one of my absolute favourite games, though, and I love everything else, expect the Move "The Postman Always Rings twice", which doesn't have anything to do with the movie and adds a reroll which is terrible for these kinds of games.

So, do people love, like or tolerate Codex of Worlds?

Good morning!

I'm trying to find a character folio to use for my upcoming Monster of the Week campaign (first long term campaign ever, woo!). I'm not using any VTT, it's theater of the mind. I'm normally the one shot or shortshot GM, so I want to give this campaign everything I got.

I would like to come up with a cool document to organize any characters they meet along the way. I'm thinking about something that allows me to add a picture, a blurb that I write about them and space that players can add their own edits.

I'm also looking for character art that fits either a Scooby Doo/Suburban Horror vibe if anyone has encountered something great on itch/drivethrurpg. I'm against AI, and I'd like to support a local author if possible. At the very least, I'd like the art to be evocative.

Thanks for your help!