What do you think?
Monster of The Week: Hardcover Edition
344 pages, Hardcover
Published February 27, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
February 14, 2025
Super easy to pick up. I love the ways the playbooks really feel like linked ecosystems - allows for some really cool combos. Choices made have a huge effect down the line in terms of resources and abilities.
November 8, 2024
Who wants to play?
May 25, 2026
Someone recommend I take another look at this and once I looked at the PDF, I agreed. I actually had to buy this book again because I can’t seem to find my copy anywhere.
I’ve come to view PBTA games a little bit differently. I still think they are ‘storytelling’ games rather than roleplaying games, but I’m interested in some of the things they might be able to bring to the table.
I don’t honestly remember why I bought it in the first place. I had bought Dungeon World originally and absolutely hated it. Still do.
I think I gave MOTW a try because it promised to be more like an actual RPG people can play - and that’s why I’m interested in reading it again.
The more I read it the more I do recognize that at it’s heart it’s a pretty traditional RPG. It starts with basically character classes which are applicable to the types of adventures a game like this could have. It starts out with 12 of them.
The Playbooks give a wide range of choices for abilities and I like that you can only choose some of them. It makes it feel like a much less restrictive class than usual.
It also has some interesting choices that refine the specifics of your character, so each class isn’t as ‘generic’ as they usually are.
Despite the Playbooks all being rather uniform (which makes them boring to read) they also have everything needed to create a character quickly and easily with personality, distinction from any other character with the same playbook and a reason to be with the rest of the group. Very well done. Creating a character is a 5 minute process.
What’s more it does the game a great service by it looking a lot like a traditional game. Much easier to get into the spirit of it.
I must admit that while I once thought of this game as rather slight - a paint-by-numbers approach to storytelling I now see it as a very carefully constructed game that gives very specific playing patterns but still having enough freedom to tell unique stories.
It’s a fine line between a railroad and an atmosphere and I can see how you can reduce the railroadiness of the game if you try and have good players.
”Creating Your First Mystery” is very well done. It goes through step by step in how to create an adventure and something 99% of RPG’s - including Dungeons and Dragons since version 2 - completely ignore.
It also puts paid to the idiotic idea that you can have a good game without any preparation whatsoever.
”In the example, the hook is the news reports of the first three deaths. ”
Trivial perhaps but I think some kind of preparation should explain how exactly this disparate group is getting the news. Are they all roommates? On a Discord server? Certainly this might have been explained in the group character creation, but either way I don’t think’s it’s something to gloss over. The answer tells you a lot about other things in the campaign. It matters.
Then we get stats for the monsters. Sure. That’s enough. Until you get a player with a brain in his head that says “Wait? The thing spits acid and shoots lightning?! How did they get it to the museum? Didn’t we find any ‘caution-handle with care’ notes at the museum?” Again, you might be able to improvise this, but you should definitely prepare the information that asks ‘How did this situation get so out of hand that the PCs are needed in the first place?’.
Then we get a short description of the minion NPCs and their motivations. Again, this leaves out a lot of detail that I doubt can be improvised easily.
One wants to protect and study the monsters.
One wants to help the PCs.
One wants to provide information.
One wants to impede the PCs.
How? What can they do? What are their resources/what do they know? Where will they be and when? Are you really saying that I don’t need to know this before the game?
Locations gets the same one paragraph. The Natural History museum with the motivation “to contain hidden things.” The plan is to have it full of scary places, and fake-out scares, as well as people to protect and worms to hunt down.
So you’re going to be able to wing this without a map? Or a schedule of when guests are here and/or how many staff members are here at what time of the day? Are there security guards? Are they armed? How are the worms using the elevators? Why don’t they just leave through the doors? Or burn their way out with acid?
The assumption that these details can be improvised easily is very suspect. I’ve played in these games and it’s not as easy as you think and failed improvisation makes a really lousy game. I’ll give you that it’s possible, but not to even mention that you might prefer to get these details ahead of time? BS.
I’ll revise these paragraphs if there is some mention of these later, but in most PBtA games, they are completely ignored.
The more I look at MOTW the more I think it’s one of the best written PBtA games I’ve read so far.
One of the things I’ve seen in her that I haven’t seen in any other PBtA game is Motivations defined for monsters, minons, and bystander NPCs. I’ve seen motivations in other PBtA games, but they are always hand-wavy, vague, ‘just give them a motivation!’ Statements. Here they are categorized and defined to make it easy to assign without having to come up with a whole backstory. They also give a good indication of the plot device use the NPC can be.
It also does the same thing for Locations. Categorize them and give them motivations. I’ll admit the motivations don’t work quite as well, but as a reminder of the purpose of the location I think it’s pretty cool idea.
”Mystery Countdowns” is another truly innovative idea. It’s basically saying to plan what happens if the players don’t intervene and this is pretty common advice. Putting a simple structure on it however makes it much easier to automatically be part of your preparation. And I appreciate that they didn’t see the need (because there never is one) to make you draw a stupid Clock/Pie Chart for it.
Honestly very few adventure creation guidelines are this succinct and this good. I’d add a few things to it for sure, but that’s every GM’s prerogative.
”Introductory Mystery: Dream Away the Time” is an adequate adventure. It’s still just an outline and if you want a timeline of events and ‘how to get the hunters involved’ you’ll have to make up all that yourself. Likewise the NPCs consist of a motivation and one word Trait. That’s it. It might be enough but each GM will have to decide that for himself. Myself I could see myself having to do a little bit of work to be able to run it.
“The Basic Keeper Moves“ provides excellent advice in running the game.
The way that Threats, Minions, Bystanders and Locations are all given a list of Moves, makes the whole idea of moves more plausible and playable.
The Basic Hunters Moves gives a GM’s eye view of the basic moves.
I think the Magic and Big Magic rules are some of the cleverest moves I’ve seen in a PBTA game. They allow for a limited type of improvisation but make sure to keep it balanced such that not everyone will want to be a wizard.
I do have a bit of an issue with the idea of If they want to know if they have a torch (or whatever), ask them ‘Do you normally carry one?’ To which the answer will be: ‘Of course, I ALWAYS carry a geiger counter with me!’.
”Harm” is interesting. I like the idea that since everyone is basically ‘human’ we all have a predictable amount of true ‘harm’ that we can take. Also that once you’ve taken harm, it will likely make everything else you do harder. This is often seen as a ‘death spiral’ in that once you get hurt, you increase your chances of not being able to get around being more hurt. But this is in contrast to many RPGs where you have to be on death’s door to even ‘feel’ that you’ve been hurt.
On the other hand, Harm is handed out so arbitrarily that I can’t see the non-uniformity be anything but troubling in a game. ‘Why did he only have to fall down but I have to have a -1 for the rest of the scene?’ (1-harm or more). How many times in a game do you want to have this fight?
Arc Templates provides some ready to go ‘arcs’. Almost like pre-written plots, only there are broad enough to encompass many different types of monsters. You could use the same arc multiple times and it would be a different adventure each time. Very nicely done. Unfortunately there are only 4 of them. And since one of them is “The End of Days” whose ‘Midnight’ is The world is destroyed (or irrevocably changed for the worse). it seems like more Arc Templates would have been better.
Example monsters come next. Classic Vampire, Monstrosity from Beyond (your basic Cthuloid monster), Demon Prince then the Vrykokas Vampire which really seems like it’s going to be hard to make a story out of. It’s pretty predictable and seems easy to kill.
The D-Identifier however seems pretty unplayable. You can write the description, but there’s nothing that can be played out of it!
There are also a couple of examples of minions and how you can customize them. Only two and its mostly through description rather than mechanics but its nice to have. Bystanders are given a similar treatment. Locations are also given a couple of good examples.
The Countdown gives some examples for building an adventure flowchart. There are only three examples and they are each one page, so they are extremely vague.
Messing with the Formula is a very useful suggestion for changing up the standard scenario structure. And something unusual for this type of section is that they are all pretty good ideas!
Mystery Letters is a technique similar to Bluebooking. A kind of ‘while you were gone, this happened’.
Make the action and fight scenes exciting.
Uh, gee. Thank for the advice.
The first sample adventure points out both the benefits of this technique and the flaws. The benefits are that it is very open ended and flexible, leaving plenty of room for improvisation. The flaws are that it is very open ended and flexible, leaving plenty of room for improvisation. Among many examples of bullet-points that would be really tough to improvise, the locations stand out especially. There are no maps, no relations to other places, no decisions have been made over who occupies the place or what can be found there. Can this all be improvised? Sure. Can it be done well? I doubt it…
”One-Shot” games gives advice for how to run single session adventures. It’s about three pages. I’m not sure it’s needed, but I can appreciate it being there.
”Customizing Your Game” is a section I don’t see often in PBTA games. The first thing it discusses is how and why to create custom Moves. It also includes examples. The first example is An Aura of Terror which states that it is triggered by getting within 5 meters of the creature. Now considering that in this game there is no different between ranged and close combat it seems little weird that you have to know how close by the meter something is.
”Calling the Flame Spirits” is an interesting example of a specific spell that actually safer and more relaible than the generic ”Use Magic.”
”Custom Playbooks” gives outlines on making your own character classes. It mentions where a couple of the standard classes break these rules. `
The last two chapters suggest other PBTA games and the inspiration for games. By default it is the television show Supernatural (which I have never seen).
I’ve come to view PBTA games a little bit differently. I still think they are ‘storytelling’ games rather than roleplaying games, but I’m interested in some of the things they might be able to bring to the table.
I don’t honestly remember why I bought it in the first place. I had bought Dungeon World originally and absolutely hated it. Still do.
I think I gave MOTW a try because it promised to be more like an actual RPG people can play - and that’s why I’m interested in reading it again.
The more I read it the more I do recognize that at it’s heart it’s a pretty traditional RPG. It starts with basically character classes which are applicable to the types of adventures a game like this could have. It starts out with 12 of them.
The Playbooks give a wide range of choices for abilities and I like that you can only choose some of them. It makes it feel like a much less restrictive class than usual.
It also has some interesting choices that refine the specifics of your character, so each class isn’t as ‘generic’ as they usually are.
Despite the Playbooks all being rather uniform (which makes them boring to read) they also have everything needed to create a character quickly and easily with personality, distinction from any other character with the same playbook and a reason to be with the rest of the group. Very well done. Creating a character is a 5 minute process.
What’s more it does the game a great service by it looking a lot like a traditional game. Much easier to get into the spirit of it.
I must admit that while I once thought of this game as rather slight - a paint-by-numbers approach to storytelling I now see it as a very carefully constructed game that gives very specific playing patterns but still having enough freedom to tell unique stories.
It’s a fine line between a railroad and an atmosphere and I can see how you can reduce the railroadiness of the game if you try and have good players.
”Creating Your First Mystery” is very well done. It goes through step by step in how to create an adventure and something 99% of RPG’s - including Dungeons and Dragons since version 2 - completely ignore.
It also puts paid to the idiotic idea that you can have a good game without any preparation whatsoever.
”In the example, the hook is the news reports of the first three deaths. ”
Trivial perhaps but I think some kind of preparation should explain how exactly this disparate group is getting the news. Are they all roommates? On a Discord server? Certainly this might have been explained in the group character creation, but either way I don’t think’s it’s something to gloss over. The answer tells you a lot about other things in the campaign. It matters.
Then we get stats for the monsters. Sure. That’s enough. Until you get a player with a brain in his head that says “Wait? The thing spits acid and shoots lightning?! How did they get it to the museum? Didn’t we find any ‘caution-handle with care’ notes at the museum?” Again, you might be able to improvise this, but you should definitely prepare the information that asks ‘How did this situation get so out of hand that the PCs are needed in the first place?’.
Then we get a short description of the minion NPCs and their motivations. Again, this leaves out a lot of detail that I doubt can be improvised easily.
One wants to protect and study the monsters.
One wants to help the PCs.
One wants to provide information.
One wants to impede the PCs.
How? What can they do? What are their resources/what do they know? Where will they be and when? Are you really saying that I don’t need to know this before the game?
Locations gets the same one paragraph. The Natural History museum with the motivation “to contain hidden things.” The plan is to have it full of scary places, and fake-out scares, as well as people to protect and worms to hunt down.
So you’re going to be able to wing this without a map? Or a schedule of when guests are here and/or how many staff members are here at what time of the day? Are there security guards? Are they armed? How are the worms using the elevators? Why don’t they just leave through the doors? Or burn their way out with acid?
The assumption that these details can be improvised easily is very suspect. I’ve played in these games and it’s not as easy as you think and failed improvisation makes a really lousy game. I’ll give you that it’s possible, but not to even mention that you might prefer to get these details ahead of time? BS.
I’ll revise these paragraphs if there is some mention of these later, but in most PBtA games, they are completely ignored.
The more I look at MOTW the more I think it’s one of the best written PBtA games I’ve read so far.
One of the things I’ve seen in her that I haven’t seen in any other PBtA game is Motivations defined for monsters, minons, and bystander NPCs. I’ve seen motivations in other PBtA games, but they are always hand-wavy, vague, ‘just give them a motivation!’ Statements. Here they are categorized and defined to make it easy to assign without having to come up with a whole backstory. They also give a good indication of the plot device use the NPC can be.
It also does the same thing for Locations. Categorize them and give them motivations. I’ll admit the motivations don’t work quite as well, but as a reminder of the purpose of the location I think it’s pretty cool idea.
”Mystery Countdowns” is another truly innovative idea. It’s basically saying to plan what happens if the players don’t intervene and this is pretty common advice. Putting a simple structure on it however makes it much easier to automatically be part of your preparation. And I appreciate that they didn’t see the need (because there never is one) to make you draw a stupid Clock/Pie Chart for it.
Honestly very few adventure creation guidelines are this succinct and this good. I’d add a few things to it for sure, but that’s every GM’s prerogative.
The book doesn’t have a lot of illustrations, but so far all of them are very flavorful and very appropriate for their location. It’s nicely illustrated throughout.
”Introductory Mystery: Dream Away the Time” is an adequate adventure. It’s still just an outline and if you want a timeline of events and ‘how to get the hunters involved’ you’ll have to make up all that yourself. Likewise the NPCs consist of a motivation and one word Trait. That’s it. It might be enough but each GM will have to decide that for himself. Myself I could see myself having to do a little bit of work to be able to run it.
“The Basic Keeper Moves“ provides excellent advice in running the game.
The way that Threats, Minions, Bystanders and Locations are all given a list of Moves, makes the whole idea of moves more plausible and playable.
The Basic Hunters Moves gives a GM’s eye view of the basic moves.
I think the Magic and Big Magic rules are some of the cleverest moves I’ve seen in a PBTA game. They allow for a limited type of improvisation but make sure to keep it balanced such that not everyone will want to be a wizard.
I do have a bit of an issue with the idea of If they want to know if they have a torch (or whatever), ask them ‘Do you normally carry one?’ To which the answer will be: ‘Of course, I ALWAYS carry a geiger counter with me!’.
”Harm” is interesting. I like the idea that since everyone is basically ‘human’ we all have a predictable amount of true ‘harm’ that we can take. Also that once you’ve taken harm, it will likely make everything else you do harder. This is often seen as a ‘death spiral’ in that once you get hurt, you increase your chances of not being able to get around being more hurt. But this is in contrast to many RPGs where you have to be on death’s door to even ‘feel’ that you’ve been hurt.
On the other hand, Harm is handed out so arbitrarily that I can’t see the non-uniformity be anything but troubling in a game. ‘Why did he only have to fall down but I have to have a -1 for the rest of the scene?’ (1-harm or more). How many times in a game do you want to have this fight?
Arc Templates provides some ready to go ‘arcs’. Almost like pre-written plots, only there are broad enough to encompass many different types of monsters. You could use the same arc multiple times and it would be a different adventure each time. Very nicely done. Unfortunately there are only 4 of them. And since one of them is “The End of Days” whose ‘Midnight’ is The world is destroyed (or irrevocably changed for the worse). it seems like more Arc Templates would have been better.
Example monsters come next. Classic Vampire, Monstrosity from Beyond (your basic Cthuloid monster), Demon Prince then the Vrykokas Vampire which really seems like it’s going to be hard to make a story out of. It’s pretty predictable and seems easy to kill.
The D-Identifier however seems pretty unplayable. You can write the description, but there’s nothing that can be played out of it!
There are also a couple of examples of minions and how you can customize them. Only two and its mostly through description rather than mechanics but its nice to have. Bystanders are given a similar treatment. Locations are also given a couple of good examples.
The Countdown gives some examples for building an adventure flowchart. There are only three examples and they are each one page, so they are extremely vague.
Messing with the Formula is a very useful suggestion for changing up the standard scenario structure. And something unusual for this type of section is that they are all pretty good ideas!
Mystery Letters is a technique similar to Bluebooking. A kind of ‘while you were gone, this happened’.
Make the action and fight scenes exciting.
Uh, gee. Thank for the advice.
The first sample adventure points out both the benefits of this technique and the flaws. The benefits are that it is very open ended and flexible, leaving plenty of room for improvisation. The flaws are that it is very open ended and flexible, leaving plenty of room for improvisation. Among many examples of bullet-points that would be really tough to improvise, the locations stand out especially. There are no maps, no relations to other places, no decisions have been made over who occupies the place or what can be found there. Can this all be improvised? Sure. Can it be done well? I doubt it…
”One-Shot” games gives advice for how to run single session adventures. It’s about three pages. I’m not sure it’s needed, but I can appreciate it being there.
”Customizing Your Game” is a section I don’t see often in PBTA games. The first thing it discusses is how and why to create custom Moves. It also includes examples. The first example is An Aura of Terror which states that it is triggered by getting within 5 meters of the creature. Now considering that in this game there is no different between ranged and close combat it seems little weird that you have to know how close by the meter something is.
”Calling the Flame Spirits” is an interesting example of a specific spell that actually safer and more relaible than the generic ”Use Magic.”
”Custom Playbooks” gives outlines on making your own character classes. It mentions where a couple of the standard classes break these rules. `
The last two chapters suggest other PBTA games and the inspiration for games. By default it is the television show Supernatural (which I have never seen).
Which I first read Monster of the Week my impression was that it was very slight. That it, there’s not enough game here to really play. And there isn’t.
But I’ve read a few other PBTA games and I’ve got to say there is more game here than in many of them. What is particularly noticeable is that it is only trying to do one thing - but that one type of game can cover a lot of ground and can certainly provide a lot of good evenings of fun.
You have to get the players to drink the PBTA kool-aide, but honestly this game makes it seems a lot easer than a lot of the others.
It’s also organized very well and provides just enough examples to work from. If I were thinking of running or writing a PBTA game, this game would be my first stop.
4 stars
December 26, 2025
Monster of the Week is a game that has given me so much over the years so it’s admittedly a bit hard to stay unbiased when taking objectively about it. That said, I have both positives and negative opinions which I’ll try to properly explain here.
First of all I’d like to say that MOTW is an easy to pick up game for anyone regardless of TTRPG background/skill level. Being a Powered by the Apocalypse game, the gameplay of Moves and the character creation Playbooks are easy to understand and accessible. My own players (some of whom were completely new to the system) were able to fully immerse themselves relatively quickly in part to MOTW’s ease of access.
On the Keeper’s side, MOTW offers multiple different tools to create impactful mysteries. More specifically the templates for monster/phenomena design as well as the “countdown” made planning easy and fun!
My only gripes/complaints come with the combat system the game offers. Coming from D&D, the switch from HP to Harm was a difficult swap to make, especially when trying to create scenarios that felt balanced for my players. The lack of a proper turn order is still an issue I have trouble acclimating to.
This mainly happens during more dramatic moments when I’m trying to describe a monster’s actions only to be interrupted by multiple members of the party attempting to say what they’d do to interrupt/stop the action. This though is more of a group issue than an issue with the system itself. What feels a bit more hard to properly implement is equipment and its tags. I personally just wish there was more of a mechanical explanation aside from “This weapon can do x”
All of that said these were nitpicks at the end of the day. I adore Monster of the Week, it’s an amazing game, and it’ll be my forever recommendation to any new tabletop hobbyists/GM’s.
First of all I’d like to say that MOTW is an easy to pick up game for anyone regardless of TTRPG background/skill level. Being a Powered by the Apocalypse game, the gameplay of Moves and the character creation Playbooks are easy to understand and accessible. My own players (some of whom were completely new to the system) were able to fully immerse themselves relatively quickly in part to MOTW’s ease of access.
On the Keeper’s side, MOTW offers multiple different tools to create impactful mysteries. More specifically the templates for monster/phenomena design as well as the “countdown” made planning easy and fun!
My only gripes/complaints come with the combat system the game offers. Coming from D&D, the switch from HP to Harm was a difficult swap to make, especially when trying to create scenarios that felt balanced for my players. The lack of a proper turn order is still an issue I have trouble acclimating to.
This mainly happens during more dramatic moments when I’m trying to describe a monster’s actions only to be interrupted by multiple members of the party attempting to say what they’d do to interrupt/stop the action. This though is more of a group issue than an issue with the system itself. What feels a bit more hard to properly implement is equipment and its tags. I personally just wish there was more of a mechanical explanation aside from “This weapon can do x”
All of that said these were nitpicks at the end of the day. I adore Monster of the Week, it’s an amazing game, and it’ll be my forever recommendation to any new tabletop hobbyists/GM’s.
Did Not Finish
June 1, 2026interesting! there's a weird bleakness underlying the rules, mostly in that eventual rewards for leveling up include "retire this character" or class-specific things like "fail your mission" and "turn evil again". Not having watched Buffy or Supernatural (the two explicitly most referenced inspirations) I can only guess this is roughly in line for those shows. just got in a vaguely bad mood reading through all these character playbooks and envisioning a plot where things consistently become worse from accumulating luck, wounds, and experience. bummed me out!
June 18, 2024
This is the first PbtA/Apocalypse Engine game that I fully grokked. I love pretty much everything about the engine and this game. Near zero prep for a GM/Keeper is perfect. I will be running more PbtA games because of this one. Awesome.
October 25, 2023
I’ve been playing this game weekly with my friends for over a year. Hardcover adds phenomenons which are my favorite type of mystery, and 2 highly engaging character sheets.
December 24, 2023
One of my favourite RPGs to run and play if I want heavy RP.
December 30, 2023
Fun and easy system to get into. Great for short campaigns (not sure how it would go for anything really long).
December 20, 2024
I did’t mean to to read this, but the book just pulled me in and kept me reading. A really nice PbtA-game!
May 26, 2025
This system is awesome, and the book is great to read.
My players love to play those kind of sessions. Adventures wrote themselves thanks to easy-to-learn principles straight from screenwriting guides. Monster of the week is MY system. I’m always coming back to it.
Feels like home. Spooky, weird home, but home nonetheless.
My players love to play those kind of sessions. Adventures wrote themselves thanks to easy-to-learn principles straight from screenwriting guides. Monster of the week is MY system. I’m always coming back to it.
Feels like home. Spooky, weird home, but home nonetheless.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews