For the last six months I’ve been running a Monster of the Week campaign for a group of friends who’ve been gaming together since the mid 80’s. For those who haven’t heard of it yet, Monster of the Week is designed to give players the experience of becoming characters similar to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Winchesters from Supernatural, Mulder & Scully from the X-files, or any other setting where mostly regular humans fight against fresh new supernatural horrors on a recurring basis.
A new monster each week you say?
Monster of the Week is a rules-light game, based on the Powered by the Apocalypse system, which focuses more on narrative than mechanics. My close gaming group usually has stuck to D&D or Call of Cthulhu as our primary RPG’s of choice. We even gave D&D 4e a solid run, and dipped into the surprisingly cool Gamma World 4e version. However this would be the first time we, as a group, tried out a PBtA game. A couple of us had been in them separately, but for most this would be a new experience.
So, of course, I decided to muck it up right out of the gate with a ton of house rules and fusing it with another RPG entirely.. Because that’s just what us gamers do.
Normally I’m a believer in playing things as they’re written before messing with them, but in this case I felt my players would really want some more combat and crunch to the game, and be drawn to the character features of Monster of the Week, which has some really thematic “Playbooks” such as The Spooky, the Chosen, the Professional, etc.
However I was really drawn by the setting of another game I’d found while building this campaign. It had a lot of elements that hadn’t really been explored in TTRPG’s, and was a laser perfect fit for my older Gen-X TV addicted OG nerdcore crew.
Signals from the Other Side..
That other game is Public Access, an analog horror vibe-tastic indie game by Jason Cordova, creator of Brindlewood Bay and The Between. The game focuses on a group of folks – The Latchkeys – who find themselves drawn together to investigate strange mysteries in and around their shared hometown of Deep Lake, New Mexico. The gang also starts out with a shared goal discovering the strange fate of a beloved local Public Access channel, TV Odyssey, which literally disappeared into thin air in the early 90’s. None of the other Deep Lake locals remember the channel anymore, only the Latchkeys seem to be able to, and even they are beginning to doubt their memories when a mysterious old VHS tape in a purple clamshell shows up bearing the TV Odyssey logo..
Yeah, the setting hooked me. It’s good good stuff. You should check it out. Now, back to game talk..
Public Access uses the same system as Brindlewood Bay, which is an even more rules-light variant of PBtA. Reducing down the variety of moves to just a handful, and focusing the players more into the roles of regular humans, woefully unprepared for the horrors about to befall them.. It also includes some really unique and interesting mechanics that strongly help sell the feeling of fighting against unseen fates and solving mysteries. For our game, I decided to keep the bulk of Monster of the Week as the core rules, and bring in the setting, and the Keys, and the Questions & Answers systems from Public Access.
Keys, Questions, and Answers
The Keys are very simple in practice. They are a set of pre-authored meta-currency “Keys” which exist and are exposed to the players to be able to use. The Keys are unique, and have names, such as “Key of the Child”, “Key of Desolation”, “Key of the Neon Lights”, etc.
After a player has made a roll, and the results of that (good or bad) have been narrated by the GM, the player may choose to Turn a Key, checking that one off on their sheet to invoke fate to rewrite history and improve their success by one stage. Both MoTW & Public Access use the same staged success rules and rolls as all PBtA games, so this fit very cleanly.
The Key also comes with a prompt, usually asking for a narrative on the player’s character, such as “A flashback showing how you were an outcast amongst your peers” which the player is expected to provide as ‘payment’ for turning the Key. This adds an in-game method for continuing to expand on the character’s backstories, or apply changes to the character’s nature or the world, and is a truly awesome way to add style and story to what amounts to an advantage or ‘luck’ system. I’ll likely be bringing this system even into D&D games I run.
You got your Mysteries in my Monster Hunt..
The Questions & Answers system is a shared narrative mechanic that allows the players a voice in how the campaign proceeds. At the start of each new mystery the GM presents a question to the players, such as “What happened to the family that lived in this strange house?” This question is assigned a challenge rating of how difficult it’s expected to be to solve.
The players then go about their investigation, discovering many rather vague pre-authored clues along the way. The clues are usually things like “Gardening Tools caked with dirt and blood” or “A sequence of numbers scrawled in an unusual place” that allow both the players and GM some freedom to interpret them. Each clue they find has the potential to be used to add a +1 to a raw 2d6 roll to answer the question.
Here’s the twist, once the players have amassed enough clues they feel they ready to take the answer roll, they create a theory of what that answer might be – and must narratively justify how each clue relates to that theory in order to be able to use them in the roll. They total up the clues they’ve worked into their theory, and roll against the rating of the question, and if they succeed – their theory becomes the answer. It becomes the canon of the campaign. The GM accepts it and works it into the setting.
Problems with shared narratives and rules light rpgs – did this help?
I’ve played a handful of shared narrative experiences in the past, and they always tend to fall apart due to too much blank canvas for everyone to explore, turning it at best into a writer’s room experience, and at worst into a sprawling game of narrative telephone..
The theory system of Brindlewood Bay and Public Access does a remarkable job of providing enough ways for the GM to influence the direction of the building narrative, by seeding prewritten clues and having authority over what narratives feel justified to answer the question, while giving many pieces of story in bite sized chunks for the players to riff and hook off of at the same time.
Both the Keys system and the Theory (Q&A) system have fit extremely well into the framework of Monster of the Week, neatly filling in some pretty big gaps which have been missing in core MoTW gameplay for a long time – such as how exactly does one solve a mystery..
Expecting a lot..
MoTW and Public Access both expect a LOT from the GM in terms of improv skills, and pulling ideas out of the aether at a moment’s notice. This is something that’s very common with all rules-light games, including OSR style fantasy, and the freedom that allows is part of what draws many folks to them.
However it’s not always the easiest for players or newer GM’s to navigate. It can create moments where either the players or GM simply have no good ideas on how to proceed, or what’s reasonable within the limited game mechanics. They can be alienating to people who are less creative by nature, or derive their fun from interactions of systems instead of just moving a story along.’
Monster of the Week is notoriously fudgy about how mysteries actually proceed and resolve, and Public Access is extremely light on features or hooks for players to use for inspiration for actions, and its combat is reduced to the same “Day” or “Night” move as every other choice the player’s face. Proponents for narrative games would argue That Is The Point(tm) – and for them, that’s entirely true. As hard as it might be to believe in our internet siloed worlds, not everyone finds fun from the same things. Together, our group of more old-school mechanically fixated players found merging MoTW and PA really did help cover the ‘missing’ areas in each for how we play.
What’s the 411?
We’ve been playing this hybrid game for half a year now and loving it. It’s had some bumps and learning opportunities along the way, but I’d fully recommend checking out both games if you’ve been itching for more freeform monster hunting stories with awesome nostalgic 80’s-90’s analog horror vibes!
