r/monsteroftheweek

How do you get lore to Hunters? One of the parts I most disliked in Supernatural was "i spent 5 minutes searching 'the lore' here is this super specific weakness. "

I'm running a mystery out of the Tome of Mysteries (highly recommend).

No spoilers. The monster is from SE Asia and very dangerous. Toe to toe, the Hunters are toast. But:

- it is repelled by a few common kitchen spices

- it can be weakened by a certain culturally specific ritual, that a person of this culture might guess but isn't obvious

- can be placated by a certain (non human sacrifice)

How do I get information like this into the Hunters hands in a way that feels natural ?

For example, i had a maze mystery, the Mundane spent Luck and thus got something useful, so she found a spool of magic thread. Because of the players general culture/ educational background as Americans, they instantly knew to follow the thread.

I love there being multiple interesting ways to solve a problem, but how do I get them this info?

Ran my first game of this yesterday as a one shot whilst our Dungeons and Dragons campaign took a one week break.

Used 'Damn Dirty Apes' as the mystery. In this a disgruntled professor launches an army of cyborg apes against the university campus and staff that have offended him. The hook involves a security guard being killed by a creature with super human strength (a enhanced gorilla).

We had the hunters as members of a research group interested in unexplained and magical phenomena to explain why they were investigating the incidents.

Overall I think it went well for what was the first time any of us were playing this game. (Or any Powered by the Apocalypse type system).

One issue that did come up was when the party were trying to gain access to the site of the attack. I bore in mind the keeper agenda of 'Make the world seem real.' so had the area covered of as a police crime scene. But realistically the police would not let civilians onto a crime scene, especially to poke around and ask questions of witnesses.

I had them roll 'Manipulate Someone' to gain access but they failed this. Even if they had succeeded it's hard to see what 'price' a policeman would ask to allow them access given that realistically police would not do this.

Is there any advice on how to handle this in future sessions? It seems letting the hunters access the site is an important part of making them feel like the heroes of the game, but it runs against the principle of making the world seem real?

Times this game needs to be taken away from me...

My group is currently gearing up to the last session of this 'season', and will be on a brief hiatus before the next one starts up. I asked my DM a hypothetical question about making a sailor scout, which she's onboard with, so now I'm trying to figure out how it would realistically fit archetype-wise.

For context, my character's gonna be the Biggest Himbo To Have Ever Himbo'd, who I did briefly play before as a Wronged

One of my players is a vampire, who in our lore can't become ghosts. How could I work around this for Haunting at the Old Grand?

So, I got a group together for a 1-off in a few weeks! I’m using the context and inciting incident of “Big Haunt on Campus” but the bad thing from “Curse-Speech.”

The thing is, almost everyone I invited is coming (which never happens), and 6 is a big group for MotW, and this is my first time running MotW.

Any suggestions, things I should look out for, or do I just let the mayhem ensue?

How to know how much damage my monster will do?

I'm a first time keeper, and am going to be running a monster hunt for my friends! The first monster will be a rotten stag with rotten apples on its head, to kill the stag the players must clear the apples from its antlers and stab it in the tangled heart in its chest, now what I want to know is what damage he will deal, there's no monster sheets like in DND,

What kind of ghost lore do you have? I want to avoid the "burn the remains ".

Right now my general idea is that if you burn / destroy the item binding them, it dehumanizes them and turns them from a troublesome, dangerous ghost into an enraged, murderous spectre.

I've been Keeper on a few different short campaigns and find myself rarely consulting the book for rules. I think there are two main rules that I've followed for my campaigns: the hunters can't defeat the monster without finding out its specific weakness, and I'll never tell a hunter to roll something unless they first say they're going to take an action (and then I'll interpret their action into a roll). Other than those two rules, I tend to just dive head first into storytelling with my players and leave the rulebook behind. I'm wondering how everyone else does it. MotW seems pretty light on the rules anyway, so it seems like the perfect system to just play it looseygoosey and focus on the story.