Category: Monster of the Week Roadhouse: General Discussion

Originally shared by Thrythlind aka Luke Green

So, I read Slip today, one of Fate Core’s worlds of adventure. A lot of it struck me as similar to bits of the situation in my Monster of the Week campaign where a sorcerer is working with an outside of time entity to poke holes in reality and merge several realities into a chaotic mush. The sorcerer plans to get a pocket dimension to rule as essentially a god out if all this. One of the players has the Chosen Playbook and essentially the antithesis of the eldritch entity. He was born specifically to counter it.

But beyond the comparison to my specific MotW campaign I also noticed the Aspect Event frameworks were operating very much similar to an MotW Countdown. Though in practice it seems closer to a Front from other PbtA games.

For those that aren’t familiar with PbtA (because I will be cross posting this) a Front is, I believe a list of scaling events leading to Bad Stuff at the end. The difference between a Front and a Countdown is, I believe, that a Front is set to escalate as players interfere (I may be thinking of a third similar construct with another name that occurs in Spirit of ’77) while a countdown is a list of what would happen if the players don’t interfere.

The Aspect events in Slip seem to be somewhere between that. The book suggests advancing the event Aspect based on milestones reached. This essentially means that, unless the players completely solve the problem, that the escalations will occur regardless of their action or inaction. However, as it is feasible for players to pull something off that would logically slow the escalation down, it also functions a bit like a Countdown since players can set it off the rails.

I would suggest picking up the Slip World of Adventure as a possible MotW setting inspiration. I would also suggest MotW to players of the Fate game to get another view on the concept of Countdowns and such as the book has good advice for setting up countdowns for individual missions as well as whole campaigns.

I would also note that Stranger Things on Netflix could represent a sort of “bleed event”.

Not sure these count as actual spoilers but placing the warning anyway. Definite spoilers in the comment thread.

So I finished watching Stranger Things and it has me thinking in terms of gaming as usual. So I thought I’d toy around a bit with assigning the characters some Playbooks.

It seems a lot like there’s three parallel campaigns going on until they come together in the end.

The Party

Mike – The Snoop / The Flake

Dustin – The Expert

Lucas – The Hard Case / The Wronged

Eleven – The Spooky

The Teens

Johnathon – The Wronged

Nancy – The Mundane

The Adults

Chief Hopper – The Professional

Joyce – The Flake

I tried to keep away from repeating but was difficult with the kids.

Well, this Sunday evening’s (for those in American time) scheduled event is up.  No players for this one (lots for tomorrow’s). I’ll be hanging around a couple of hours twiddling my thumbs to see if I have any late comers interested in playing.

Current plan is to use Monster of the Week to run the scenario…if people want to try my Divine Blood RPG, I do have pre-gens made as examples for this.

Originally shared by Luke Green

A small and plucky team of occult investigators look into some odd goings on at a small town in Washington State. Could it be that they’re in over their head? Quite possibly indeed.