For many months now I’ve been running a hybrid game, merging Monster of the Week with a game called Public Access, a hidden gem of Analog Horror which uses a revamped Powered by the Apocalypse style mechanics from the better known Brindlewood Bay.
The two games are very similar, both using 2d6 vs. a fixed range of values to determine degrees of success, both using “Moves” as the basis for character agency, and both focusing on a shared narrative campaign style.
Mostly Monsters
I opted to use mostly MoTW, playbooks, gear tags, etc. – bringing in the setting and a handful of rules from Public Access to meet the style of that campaign, and to see if they resolved what I felt were some missing gaps in MoTW’s mechanics.
It’s worked out really well for us, and you can read an overview of that here.
Our House Rules
For the morbidly curious, I thought it could be helpful to break down some of the ways we merged those experiences. The following cover the basics of the big changes. The other changes were mainly in fleshing out the Public Access mysteries with more detailed locations, npcs, and MoTW stats for monsters & villains, and in using a Murder Board style for the main campaign ‘maps’.
Questions, Clues, & Answers
One of the biggest missing pieces of MoTW in my humble opinion, is the lack of a mechanic for solving mysteries. It’s left to just “defeat the monster/phenomenon” in whatever feels like a ‘resolution’ to the GM. Even discovering the various weekly monster’s weaknesses, a key part of the game, is left entirely to the GM to handle. All the while the players also have no measurement for how they’re progressing.
Public Access solves this neatly by starting each mystery with a fixed question it asks the players. The GM then plays through scenes to distribute pre-generated clues to the characters. The players then use those clues to answer the question, which then unlocks opportunities to resolve the situation.
Forming a Theory
As Clues are gathered the players often begin to theorize about how they may be connected to given questions and mysteries. When the team feels strongly about their thoughts, and wish to try to Answer the Question, they form a Theory.
To do this they narrate their idea as fact, establishing each clue’s relevance to it to the Keeper, who can approve the use of each clue based on their appraisal of the narrative in the Theory. Each approved clue in a Theory will improve their roll by 1 when they go to answer the question.
Importantly, there are no canonical answers to these questions—players are expected to use their Clues to formulate an answer of their own and then roll dice to see if they are correct.
Answering a Question
When the players have a theory they agree on, they roll and add the number of clues incorporated into the theory, then subtract the question’s complexity.
Roll + Clues – Complexity = Result.
- On a 12+, the answer is entirely correct and something special will happen while the Hunters are pursuing the Opportunity.
- On a 10+, the answer is correct, the Question has been Answered, and an Opportunity opens up which can be pursued.
- On a 7-9, as above, but the GM will add an unwelcome complication to the answer and/or pursuing the Opportunity will be more dangerous.
- On a miss, the answer is incorrect and the GM reacts. Often those clues become invalid to use for answering the question again, at the determination of the GM.
Keys
For our game I also decided to use the Keys system from Public Access, in place of the Luck system from Monster of the Week. The Public Access Keys bring strong narrative elements that vastly improve the storytelling of what amounts to a simple luck system.
A Key represents a turning point in a hunter’s story. An opening of new paths or doorways to a better future. They can either be personal, stemming from their backstory or questions, or stem from the campaign or mysteries.
Keys include prompts which give instructions to either affect the character mechanically, or prompts to narrate something about the character or even the campaign story, such as “Reduce Smarts by 1” or “Narrate a time when the Hunter was so scared they wet themselves”. They usually have catchy names like “Key of a Gatekeeper”, “Key of the Intermission”, or “Key of the Hobo King”.
Keys are created by the Keeper, who makes them available to hunters based on strange calculations of non-Euclidian algorithms, such as “feels right” and “started a new mystery”.
When a hunter Turns a Key
The player narrates a scene linked to the description for the Key. If they can’t come up with anything at that moment, we push the narration scene off to the end of the game session.
- After a die roll, and after an outcome has been narrated, the player can choose to turn a Key and increase their die result by one success tier (so, a miss becomes a 7-9, a 7-9 becomes a 10-11, and a 10-11 becomes a 12+).
- We narrate a different result, and what was previously narrated does not occur (we say it was a different timeline that we got to collectively experience but that did not actually happen).
- The hunter marks the Key as used on their character sheet.
Experience
One of the biggest problem areas in MoTW in my opinion is gaining experience on a move failure. The idea behind that is that “Moves” were meant to be fairly rare during a play session, narrating the entirety of a fight or investigation.
But most of us hairless apes just don’t play that way. Often both players and GM’s are looking to use dice to determine outcomes in much more traditional TTRPG “Did I hit it?” ways.. Leading to players making many many move roles a session. That leads to a rapid escalation of the campaign’s power levels as failed moves rack up the XP. You can see this even in videos of games hosted by Evil Hat (the publisher) themselves..
Since we’re using Monster of the Week playbooks and character sheets, we stayed with using MoTW’s experience track and Improvements. Hunters no longer gain experience from failing a move. Instead they gain it for many other things, more directly related to progress of the story.
Hunters gain experience for any of the following:
- Solving a Mystery
- Saving a Bystander from certain death (or worse)
- Answering a Mystery’s Question
- Turning a Key
- Watching an Odyssey Tape (A special shared narrative event in the campaign)
- Receiving a Signal from the Other Side (Another special shared narrative event in the campaign)
Conditions
Conditions are traits created on-the-fly by the GM and assigned to represent something which is affecting that character’s abilities. Both in Public Access and in our campaign, they are free to be anything, and often have narrative connections to the character’s mental stability or physical state, with fun names like “Ooze Phobic”, “Starchild’s Curse”, or “Horribly Broken Face”.
When you have a condition, the GM at any time can choose to cause you to make die rolls at a disadvantage, if the condition would plausibly hinder your hunter during an action. You can have up to three Conditions. If you would ever take a fourth Condition, you instead are forced to turn one of your Keys.
Conditions are usually added as a result of failing a move. Not every move failure will cause a condition, the Keeper will apply them as they feel makes sense within the narrative.
Conditions are removed by the player narrating an experience which the GM feels justifies removing the condition (often hinged on a Move roll), or when the GM feels it’s been long enough..
Advantage & Disadvantage in MoTW?
Public Access uses a very simple advantage system. We brought this in whole cloth to our campaign, and while Roll20 doesn’t have a native MoTW support for it, it was very easy to implement.
- Advantage: Roll 3d6, take the highest 2.
- Disadvantage: Roll 3d6, take the lowest 2.
So, how’d it go?
All in all, really well! There’s still a lot of ‘winging-it’ involved, but it feels like each system really helps fill in where the other falls off.
The totality of the rules doesn’t feel like too much, and play generally has been rock solid with the only overwhelming elements coming from the GM – yours truly – overly spamming the campaign with too many NPC’s, locations, secondary questlines, etc.. The Usual(tm).
If anything this combo of mechanics from both games has helped created a bedrock the players can hook into, when all my plot arc nonsense gets to be too much.
I’d like to Buy a Clue
About the only issues we’ve struggled with is how the Clues are designed to be intentionally abstract, to allow for the players to fit them into their Theory. There’s a serious art to writing clues for this system, that often was a struggle for the GM and players in our game to work with.
My brain is already spinning with ideas on how to ground them with more concrete connections to prewritten scenes or sequences, while still trying to keep some aspect of the abstract shared narrative that is so critical to the heart of both Monster of the Week and Public Access.
Both games really do a fantastic job providing players a peek inside the sausage factory of how game stories are constructed, and keeping that “no right answer” approach is something I’d love to figure out how to do in a way that works better with folks who struggle with improv story writing.