Monster of the Week is the system that powers The Adventure Zone and Critshow. Designer Michael Sands shows his cinematic, player-first approach to creating monster and mysteries, and we meet Marilynn, the improbable fairy creature who nearly derailed an entire playtest campaign.

Transcript: https://scintilla.studio/monster-06-monster-of-the-week-michael-sands/

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Meet my guest:

https://www.evilhat.com/home/monster-of-the-week/

https://genericgames.co.nz/

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/143518/Monster-of-the-Week?affiliate_id=1485089

Music by Jason Shaw at Audionautix.com

As you're sitting at the table and your finishing your cup of tea

with Marilyn your neighbor from down the road, who's just kindly brought you some

food to introduce you to the neighborhood.

And your companion across the table has just made this offer that if

Marilyn reveals a secret, then, he can make whatever she most wants come

true, which may be a surprise to you.

that's a thing that could happen, but Marilyn seems, taken with the

idea she says " that's a very interesting proposition you've got here.

Yeah.

So just a secret you say, and then my desire will come true?"

And, your companion nods.

And she says, Oh, in that case, the thing is I'm not Marilyn at all."

And with that, her form like kind of drops away and sitting there in

place is a thin, green grassy-haired creature, with really long pointy ears.

and it says I'm a fairy.

Who wants to live in this house and thank you.

I think now I do.

And with that, it scampers away opens a door in the dining room that you hadn't

noticed was there before and disappears into a passage, closing it behind it.

You can hear it cackling as it runs down the secret tunnel through your wall.

what do you do now?

Hi, I'm Michael . Sands I'm the designer of monster of the week I

actually managed to finish Monster of the Week in about 2011 and crowd

fund it, and print it on demand and that kind of sold okay for a while.

And until, and then that got picked up by evil hat when Fred Hicks

played it and enjoyed himself and he got in touch to partner up to

try and get into wider distribution.

And from then it's just steadily gone along, until in the last couple of

years, when The Adventure Zone played it Critshow played it and it suddenly

burst up into quite much wider knowledge.

So it's, been doing pretty well since then

what it grew out of was a fan of Buffy from back when it first came out.

and then, supernatural when that started, and I sat down and

thought, I wanted a game like that.

I wanted a role-playing game that kind of captured those vibes.

And although there were a few out there that did that modern monster hunting.

genre none of them were quite what I was after.

I worked on for a couple of years leading up to when, Vincent Baker released

the first edition of apocalypse world, hearing some of the talk about that I

got interested at and pre-ordered that.

And, um, ended up playing a couple of games pretty quickly, just cause

I liked the style of it so much.

So I, was MCing one game for my regular Monday night gaming group who we've been

playing together for kind of 25 years.

now

and also, Yeah, not exactly the same people, all 25 years,

but continuous at least.

Right.

I got an invitation to another game with some other friends who

I hadn't played so regularly with, with someone else to take an MC role there.

So I kinda got both sides of that and both of those games were really great.

And, as I was playing them, I realized like, Many of the problems I've been

struggling with with my existing attempts at monster of the week were

solved by this approach to the game.

so I quickly threw together a draft of it that took all these ideas

from apocalypse world and mushed them together with the ones I'd had.

on my own and that's where Monster of the Week came from pretty much.

And I've heard the phrase for this game and games like it as

being powered by the apocalypse.

yeah.

Yeah.

That's just, yeah, that's the term, I think Baker suggested for, games that

use that design approach that he had in apocalypse world, which is very much a.

Knowing what style of fiction in the game you want to have and making the

rules push you in that direction.

so everything's about maintaining that style for those genre or

themes that you want in the game.

what is the system like?

for me, the key things are the system of moves, which is, rather

than most games that will have your attributes and skills and things, which

you roll, see if you succeed or not.

Powered by the Apocalypse tends to use a thing called a move, which has a much more

specific and guided way to resolve things.

so like in Monster of the Week, there's an investigate mysteries move.

when you roll it, it'll give you specific sorts of things.

You can figure out as your monster hunter is investigating what's going on.

And the reason there is, so that we can make the shape of each mystery,

and how the adventure plays out, fit the genre they're aiming for,

I feel like the dice you role is not very important.

it is quite a key factor that most of them have the idea of you fail, you succeed

at a cost or you succeed completely.

But, I don't think the exact dice you role are relevant to how it

works - it's that idea of how it plays.

I've always resisted having a Monster Manual with a big list of

here's what all the monsters are.

And here's what exactly what they're like.

I feel like it's a game

where

every time you're creating a mystery and the monster that's behind it, you

want to tailor it to the group and, make sure that it's exactly, keyed into how

your group has played and the history.

of that game, it's, the opposite of the idea that you just look up a monster,

grab it and fit an adventure around it.

I like it to be the other way where you think I want the mystery to be about this.

And so what's a monster that would fit in

now in terms of what that illustrates, I think that's, getting all to my ideal

of each monster should look at the game you're playing and where you've been,

and like try and build on that, you know, give challenges to the hunters so we can

figure out like, what matters to them?

what are they going to do?

Where are they going to push?

what ethical choices will they make?

so this is one of just many situations that monster

of the week can give you.

And you're kind of working backwards where I thought, we have the

monster and then we have to tease out what it means and what it

Um, no wonder one of the things about Monster of the Week

and the Powered by Apocalypse in- games in general is the idea that

you play to find out what happens.

So you don't come into it with a preconceived idea of where it's

going to go, but instead set up a situation and see what happens.

And honestly I've always liked running games that way, when I'm in the GM

role, I'm much more comfortable.

And I, I enjoy myself more when it's more of an open situation where I say,

here are the things that are happening.

And maybe here's something that you want to do and then just let it play out.

However it wants.

And most of the week in particular does that.

Where, when you're creating an adventure, you don't create, what's going to happen.

You create a countdown of the things that will happen.

If the hunters don't stop it and it's up to the hunters to figure

out what's going on, prevent all these disastrous things happening

and the countdown should escalate.

So if it gets to the very end, it will be very bad.

Indeed.

so yeah, that's the shape of a mystery in Monster of the Week.

by the way, does monster of the week have a different

name for its game master?

in monster of the week it's, keeper of mysteries

and monsters, but either way you just shortened it to deeper.

Love it.

Get that on a brass plaque on my desk.

I wondered if it might be worth going through the process of how you

do make a monster in Monster of the Week for people who are not familiar with it,

because that might be quite interesting too.

like I say, I've talked about how the mystery is you set up the situation.

so normally I come into it with an idea for the.

Situation and the monster and you pick them on motivation for the monster.

Like I said, what's it trying to do?

there's some classifications in the book that you pick one from,

but then you normally elaborate it, because they're quite generic.

They, things like it's a devour that wants to eat people.

So you might want to be more specific and what exactly it

wants to eat and why, or so on.

and then you.

don't have many stats and monster a week for it.

So you basically give it a list of powers.

define what attacks it has and how much damage it does if

they get into a fight with it.

And finally, the main thing is a weakness.

And the idea is this is a particular thing that you can't

defeat the monster until you.

Deal with the weakness.

So in a traditional way, it might be the werewolves and silver, but I've also

played games where the weakness is, like for a ghost, properly burying its remains

or dealing with unresolved business that needed to be fixed before it could rest.

So it can be anything from the straightforward it's vulnerable to a

particular kind of attack through to.

A special thing you need to do or ritual, you need to take place.

And if you don't do that, the monster can come back, which is a kind of

drives the, how the investigations run because the hunters need to

figure that out before they can do it.

And once you've got those aspects of the monster that's ready to go.

It's intentionally quite a simple system so that you can prep quickly.

as many of us, I have quite a busy life.

So being able to get ready for a game in 20 or 30 minutes is pretty important.

Wow.

That's all.

I think actually with monster week, I can do it in

less now, but I probably, there are a few people who've played more of

that game or know it better than me.

So

I would hope, how long does a game last usually?

I typically play a game session about two

and a half or three hours.

Oh, wow.

That's

Um,

which.

Usually I'm able to ask this particular question of the

monster itself, but maybe this is a question more for the system.

What does that teach us about the world that we live in now?

I'm not sure.

I mean, I guess there's a sense, like, you know, we don't get

to plan things out in advance.

It feels like it's more natural that we've got situations and we don't

really know where they're going to go.

although I guess there's also the idea - because all the pieces you put in place

for the mystery get defined by motivation.

So the Monster's going to have a motivation, what it's trying to do.

You'll also define any Minions it has and what their motivation is.

Bystanders who the hunters meet, who they'll be presumably talking to as

witnesses or trying to save, They'll all have their own motivations.

And even the places you visit will have a motivation in the sort of

things that tend to happen there.

So I think the idea that there's all these different conflicting things that people

want - people and monsters and places in this case - and the hunters have to

navigate that and find a solution is, well, I feel it reflects the world, if

not, perhaps telling us more about it.

That's beautiful, man.

I just want to park in that for a second.

that's going to be it, man.

That's the episode in a nutshell, that's the thing.

That's the thing that I wanted.

if you would like a physical copy, you can get it from,

many friendly local game stores.

Or if that doesn't work, the evil hat productions website

have got, a mail order.

So I to the mayor, so you can order them there.

if you want PDF, that also through evil hat, you can get it

on a trio or drive through RPG.

I've got my own website, generic day games.co.nz, which, has

like the supplementary, but some pieces I've released on my own.

they're mainly PDF things like extra hundred classes

play and that sort of thing.

So if people are interested in those, general games website is the place