Monster of the Week: Game introduction and rules summary

The following is a modified version of a writeup I did for my players in a play-by-post game we’ve just started on Discord. I wrote it to give the players a brief summary of the game and also to help myself understand the game, as I am also learning it for the first time.

When I finished it, I realized it might be useful for other folks, so I’m posting it here. It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I’m trying to keep up my post-every-month streak and I just realized July was passing me by.

Some of it is lifted verbatim from the rules book, most of it is my own words.

If you’ve never played a tabletop RPG, it’s kind of like playing pretend but with rules. It is a theater-of-the-mind style game where the game engine as it were is our collective imaginations. The players create characters to be heroes in a fictional world. One person plays as the gamemaster, or GM (Monster of the Week calls it The Keeper). The GM describes the world and the scenes facing the characters and asks the characters how they react.

The game plays out like a collaborative story that we write together (but you don’t have to be a writer!), with the characters driving the action and the GM describing the consequences of that action.

Monster of the Week

Monster of the Week (MotW) is modeled around action-horror media (think Buffy, Supernatural, X-Files, Stranger Things, Fringe, etc). If you’ve never seen those, don’t worry about it—I haven’t seen all of them—just imagine whatever monster-based media you’re familiar with.

In MotW, the players play as monster hunters. You’re a group of badass elite monster killers. The best of the best. You use your skills to solve mysteries, find monsters, and kill them. We’ll create characters together and come up with a team concept of why you’re all together. Then we’ll play the first mystery (this is what D&D calls an adventure).

How does it work? I’ll start off with a teaser to set the scene. I’ll explain the situation and tell you where you’re at. That could be as straightforward as putting you at the scene of an incident, a body, or some sort of destruction. Then you will use your various skills to investigate, figure out what caused the destruction, what killed the victim, what is terrorizing the town, etc.

You’ll describe what you’re doing and how you’re doing it and I will describe how the world and its inhabitants react. Sometimes you’ll roll dice (in MotW it’s two regular d6 dice) because you’re using a specific move. Unlike D&D we won’t be rolling dice constantly for every action. If you want to do something your character could do and no one or nothing is trying to stop you, then you’ll just do it. In MotW rolling dice happens less often, but should always result in something interesting happening.

A tenet of Monster of the Week is to do it you have to actually do it. You’re not saying “I attack the vampire.” You’re saying, “I pull out my revolver and fire three shots off. Then I fumble around my pockets looking for the silver bullet I brought for this very purpose.”

You don’t need to be a great writer—I’m not—but you do have to describe what you’re doing and how (and maybe why) you’re doing it.

The mystery is over when you kill the monster for good. What do I mean by, for good? I mean that every monster has a weakness and, if you don’t exploit it, the monster might not really be dead!

Rules summary

We’ll all be learning as we go and I will do my best to explain the rules when they are needed. Here are the basics, though. Make sure you grab the hunter reference sheet.[1]

The hunter agenda

When you’re playing your hunter:

Moves

Most of the time, you’ll be describing what your hunter says, where they go, or what they do without activating a move. That goes for everything that a normal person could do, in situations where failure would not be interesting and where there’s no particular danger. In circumstances where a normal person couldn’t do what you want to do, or the drama of the story requires it, or it’s dangerous, that’s when the moves come in and control how well you do.

I won’t list them here because there’s already a good description of them on the reference sheet. There are the basic moves that every hunter has, and then your playbook will give you some moves that only your hunter can do.

When it’s time to do a move, you’ll roll your 2 d6 dice and add to it your…

Ratings

These are how we track what your hunters are good at. Each one will be a number -1 to +3. You’ll add this number to the dice roll, depending on which rating your move requires.

These will boost (or hinder) the outcome of…

Dice

The dice rolls work like this.

Even when you succeed it doesn’t mean nothing bad happens. For example, if you choose to kick some ass, you will inflict harm on the enemy if you succeed, but the enemy will also inflict harm on you—it’s a fight and it’s dangerous.

You’ll want to make use of your…

Gear

Your playbook will give you some starting gear, like a weapon. If you need extra or specific gear, you can buy it, if it’s a commonly available thing. If it’s not, you’ll have to do something special to attain it (call in a favor, steal it, etc). Your gear, especially weapons, have…

Tags

These are descriptors of how your weapons work. Every weapon has at least a harm tag and a range tag. From the rules book:

For example: Power drill (2-harm hand loud messy)

“2-harm” “hand,” “loud,” and “messy” are the tags. “2-harm” is the harm tag, “hand” is the range tag, and “loud” and “messy” are descriptive tags.

Pages 126-127 of the rules book has a list of tags. But they kind of just mean what they say.

2-harm is how much damage the weapon will do, hand means it’s effective within arms’ reach, loud means it draws attention, and messy means it’s gonna spread a lot of blood and gore around.

Speaking of weapons, they are particularly good at inflicting…

Harm

You can take 7 harm, then you’re dead. Rip, you. Armor can help reduce harm by 1 or 2. Injuries of 1-3 harm will clear up once you get some rest or first aid. Once your hunter has suffered 4-harm, your injuries become unstable. That means that they will get worse unless properly treated (The Keeper will tell you when to mark off another point of harm).

What counts as treatment depends on the wound, but it will usually be one of the following:

Fortunately your hunter can avoid harm and missteps by making use of their…

Luck

Need to get out of a tight spot? Mark off a luck box and you can avoid the harm you were about to take, or retroactively change a roll to 12! You only have so much, and it generally doesn’t refill, so make it count.

When you run out of luck, you’re doomed, which means fate is about to kick your ass (and your hunter’s story is approaching its end).

Your hunter’s story progresses by…

Leveling up

When you fail at stuff (by rolling 6-) you learn from your mistakes and receive an experience point. Once you get 5 of them, you level up and improve your hunter’s gear and or abilities. You also get experience at the end of a session (or in our play-by-post game, maybe a few days or just when the mystery ends). Level up 5 times and you unlock advanced improvements.

That’s the gist of it

Okay that’s my brain dump of the game as I understand it. I’m totally learning just like you. As the Keeper, my responsibility to you is to keep things dangerous and scary, make the world seem real, and play to see what happens. Let’s make a fun scary quirky action-packed story together!

  1. If you’re one of my players, get the one from the PDFs channel in Discord as I removed the Keeper-related stuff. Everyone else, you can grab it from the official website. ↩︎