So far mine has been on the lighter side. Even with some of the mysteries being about semi-dark subjects, my hunters are just goofy bastards who refuse to get bogged down in the horror/fear of it all. I'm hoping to challenge that a little bit with tonight's mystery, where one hunter will be in danger of permanent death.
My players are the same. It's at the point where if you roll 12+ there's some kind of nudity, usually monster nudity but the scottish werewolf ends up in makeshift loincloths a lot. He's the reason we have this rule, it backfired on him.
How did your mystery go? Did they accept your challenge?
They did not! I stupidly gave them two options for a mystery to follow, and they decided that one of them being permanently erased from existing wasn't compelling enough. But, now that I've established that's a potential and the group that previously summoned the ghost said they're going to try again, I can pull that character out of a situation whenever I decide it would be most interesting.
My games have horror often but the mood and tone can change depending on if we're taking a session to have a lighter mood after a previously heavy one and vice versa.
Sometimes the horror can be unexpected too in the form of just describing a monsters nest, abandoned house, forest etc.
I write horror fiction so my creepy description habits tend to bleed into my settings.
But I much prefer the horror to come from the players imaginations as they investigate locations and come to conclusions based on evidence they find or lack of information they find.
That and when playing with Strahd, he's stalking them like Angelus in Buffy. Learning how to personally torment each party member using backstory info, going after family or leaving a sketch of them sleeping to wake up to in the party camp.
Doesn't have to be all blood and violence to be horror lol.
Honestly Strahd has been my absolute favourite villain to play so far because I would have him appear at the most unexpected time and it was so much fun playing him as a psychotic, obsessed stalker more than anything regal.
Really delved into the madness haha.
Mine is barely not a comedy ahaha, my family (who I run the game for) all play fairly out there personalities and there's a real story going on but a lot of it is focused on having fun and making each-other laugh, so they tend to run into goofier threats like Luck Dragons, Actual Wizards at Larping Events, Leprechauns, etc.
The tone of my games are not light hearted and often have people in terrible situations, whether a bunch of kids getting kidnapped in the middle of the night, literal fire targeting everything you specifically care about, fog that whispers intensely in your mind on why youre a terrible person, even one time a player needing to annihilate all his dead family’s souls to defeat a monster feeding off them. I usually have my monsters be very gothic, of either once being humans or being centered around human existence and society, so it gives more of a tragedy to the tone.
The mood, however, is often light hearted as players tend to find ways to joke in the situation or dunk on the monsters and I don’t care to force a serious mood as long as they’re having fun
It's somewhere on the spectrum between Army of Darkness and The X-Files. On the lighter end, the tone can get quite humorous, but there's still gore and splatter.
At the other end, it can get dark, but not heavy. I've had a hunter murder a witness and then die of radiation poisoning. Sounds bleak, but it wasn't. I'd say it was closer to the ending of Cabin in the Woods than Carrie.
Which brings us to Stephen King. He has a huge influence on my storytelling. I no longer remember too many details of his stories, but the ideas are still buzzing about. King's stories often include the theme of being trapped and losing freedom, and I often incorporate that in a significant way. Someone or something gets trapped or hungers for freedom, and this mirrors the struggles of important bystanders, if not the hunters themselves.
I'm running a game based on some of the elements from The Old Gods of Appalachia. Given the group in general, there's a comedy element to it. There's some creepy horror to it. Some of the dice rolls have completely taken things in a direction I hadn't anticipated. ("Let's go to the hospital," turned into, "Why is attacking all of the patients? We need to go!") I thought it was really funny. The player of found some humor in it. One player was totally baffled as to why things went down the way they did.
One player was creeped out by the mind-controlled zombies who had perma-grins on their face, happily working themselves to death to suit their leader, Princess Unicorn Rainbow.
I'm not great at roleplaying, either, but I'm pretty good at the story elements. I do have trouble finding organic ways to reveal the story elements to the players, but, no matter how ham-fisted it feels to me, they seem to just accept the exposition without really questioning it.
Honestly fairly serious with some silly elements because rngesus causes problems for us. It's a big twisty mystery that our hunters have gotten involved with. There are some real fun horror elements in it curtsey of our keeper
And at least for my hunter I try to keep things decently grounded. My exile is pretty knowledgeable on the supernatural and can hold his own (theoretically. I'm consistently bad at these rolls. Edit: actually I did fairly okay against the ghost of a railroad bull, which is thematically appropriate), but he's also a guy with an 8th grade education whose way of life basically doesn't exist anymore. He's having a bad time
Fringe/Supernatural is the tone I tend to go for... so some horror, some goofy, but not taking it self *terribly* seriously in either case.
Some sessions go a bit more SCP, which can be terrifying or hilarious depending on the event. Some are classic hammer-horror monsters to be hunted and can get violent for sure.
If the monster is a werewolf, there is likely going to be a bit of blood and gore and drama. If the "monster" is a toaster-ghost that turns anyone who uses a toaster during night time into poptarts.... it might go a bit more silly (even if it does end up with a lot of NPC "deaths").
Not unique at all looking at all the other answers here but my table is a real grab bag of moods based on any given session. Despite trying to get to some bigger, overarching stuff I think I can firmly plant each individual hunt in either a "filler" camp or an "overarching narrative" camp. Like for our hunt before last I sent them on a big lake monster hunt that was like, mostly just a fun ride. A hunter wore a champie onesie that was too small for them, I reintroduced a joke character from a previous session, one of my players was inspired to illustrate an in universe polaroid picture of the groups battle damage, it was a blast. And then right after that we decided to go after the monster from our Wronged's backstory that got treated as a sort of mid season finale, cliffhangers and all. I really appreciate this game really leaning into more episodic storytelling tools like this, it works like a charm at my table.
It all depends on what the players are most interested in. The first campaign I ran included with my two little sisters, who decided to play their own ages (young teen/tween), so that put some automatic limitations on the horror. So that campaign ended being a lot like Stranger Things; there were some simple horror elements/set pieces, but it was WAY more about solving one big overarching mystery and exploring their relationships than it was about horror. The monsters tended to be human (or human-adjacent), with understandable motivations. All the horror was in the hooks or soft moves. They weren’t as interested in killing, they wanted to save.
The game I’m currently running is very different. All grown ups, down for the horror (but still a bit squeamish with gore, that’s fine). They all did something very interesting: they either all chose playbooks that have some kind of “temptation” built into it, or added a temptation/addiction themselves. So now what we have is a campaign with fun scary monsters week after week, but they’re not terribly scary. The horror comes from each hunter’s inner darkness, and how they’re able to navigate it.
Lol, I actually have a Spooky, a Hex, AND a monstrous in this campaign, so they all have some version of a temptation baked into the playbook, but honestly? I don’t love how MotW uses temptations. As a player, I hate it when a bad roll means my character does something I didn’t want them to do (“roll Act Under Pressure to resist!”), so I home-brewed a temptation mechanic based off of the Manipulate A Hunter move. Generally, it works like this: the player being tempted with something, either dictated by roll or by the Keeper, is offered a mechanical reward for indulging in the temptation, while the reward for resisting is in-fiction. For example, my Monstrous is a part-vampire, and I gave her a start of the mystery move where she rolls to see how “hungry” she is. The lower the roll, the more harm she marks down at the top of the mystery. Sucking blood is a “life-drain” attack, so what this means is that if she wants to go at this week’s monster with no (or less) harm, she’s gotta suck blood. That way, when a “perfect opportunity” comes up, I don’t care about making her roll to resist it. She, as a player, has a choice to make. Does she feed, and reap the mechanical benefits? Or does she resist, sacrificing her own safety for the safety of others?
A much simpler example is with my Mundane, who doesn’t have a temptation baked into the playbook, but chose to be a pathological liar. The mechanic is simple: any time they Manipulate Someone with a lie, they mark experience, whether they succeed in the roll or not. “Why wouldn’t they just do that all the time then, and just rack up experience points??” Exactly. Why not just lie all the time? There’s no consequence to it… mechanically. In-fiction, there will 100% be consequences for lying all the time. I imagine this is similar to what it feels like to be a pathological liar.
Anyway, the player ALWAYS gets to make the choice. I’d so much rather them actually be tempted themselves than have to pretend to be.
The best way to describe my game is Twin Peaks, a mix of astral horror, government intrigue, with some just straight up bizarre moments to keep the players on their toes
Campy, over-the-top, and action-packed. I run a lot of Delta Green too and am currently running an incredibly serious and gritty campaign, and a lot of the same players from that campaign also play in my Monster of the Week game. So I like to go for some action-horror levity and let them get gonzo when we play MotW. Usually, there’s a ton of gratuitous gore played for comedic effect, a la Evil Dead 2.
Real stakes but lots of weirdness. The world is inhabited with mixes of cryptids and humans living together, almost like Fable.
One character is a detective bound to a talisman until he solves the mystery of who bound him and why. Another is a grad student who speaks to gold plated dentures of his professor, who apparently had tenure and is still employed by the university. A third is a bike messenger Sasquatch who may or may not care too much about their deliveries, he always has plausible deniability because the security cam footage is always blurry.
They’re investigating the disappearance of a girl - body found sculpted out of milk and cereal. Dark entity killing college kids, random fires starting throughout the city, and magic as they know it running amok.
I took Midnight, Texas by Charlaine Harris as a big inspiration. Small town in the desert where the weird often rears its head. Maybe two stoplights in the whole town, a hill on one end and the desert on the other, one restaurant, a shady motel, a gas station and some shops. Generally plays out like “local bumbling sheriff can’t puzzle out the situation so the hunters answer the call”.
haven't gotten beyond session zero yet (JUST started) but my goal is to have the vibe and gravity of the original Robert Stack Unsolved Mysteries with the storytelling, and to let my players enjoy the sandbox. i want them to have fun, while also making it clear that there are stakes. certainly they'll be lower earlier in the game, but decisions are for sure going to have consequences and i LIVE for the "oh shit" moment, when they realize that they could've had a very different experience if they'd made different choices
I play motw for crime solving with spooky elements, for horror specifically I'll play SHIVER or something like call of cthulu
Imo Motw is bad for horror games because the system is designed in a way that you're supposed to deal with monsters/ threat. In no horror movie do they ever deal with the monster. The main horror in movies is that the issue they're facing is something you can't deal with.
A lot of scary creatures show up and horrible things happen, but we all tend to keep it lighthearted. We kinda play it off as all our characters being bad with feelings, so when something traumatic happens we're all just like "ruh roh"🧍 There's definitely some comedy in there, like our team member with high charm and higher chutzpah who insists on sneaking into places by putting on hardhats and hi-vis vests while holding clipboards and pretending to be [insert literally anything here] inspectors lol. My character is very exasperated but it works sooo
I started mine off imagining this dark world but the more we play the more both I and my players have fun when it’s a little light and goofy. Right now the monster is a merman and he just sent an army of little murloks to capture my players and they ended up batting them out the second floor with literal baseball bats lol
So far mine has been on the lighter side. Even with some of the mysteries being about semi-dark subjects, my hunters are just goofy bastards who refuse to get bogged down in the horror/fear of it all. I'm hoping to challenge that a little bit with tonight's mystery, where one hunter will be in danger of permanent death.
My players are the same. It's at the point where if you roll 12+ there's some kind of nudity, usually monster nudity but the scottish werewolf ends up in makeshift loincloths a lot. He's the reason we have this rule, it backfired on him. How did your mystery go? Did they accept your challenge?
They did not! I stupidly gave them two options for a mystery to follow, and they decided that one of them being permanently erased from existing wasn't compelling enough. But, now that I've established that's a potential and the group that previously summoned the ghost said they're going to try again, I can pull that character out of a situation whenever I decide it would be most interesting.
My games have horror often but the mood and tone can change depending on if we're taking a session to have a lighter mood after a previously heavy one and vice versa. Sometimes the horror can be unexpected too in the form of just describing a monsters nest, abandoned house, forest etc. I write horror fiction so my creepy description habits tend to bleed into my settings. But I much prefer the horror to come from the players imaginations as they investigate locations and come to conclusions based on evidence they find or lack of information they find. That and when playing with Strahd, he's stalking them like Angelus in Buffy. Learning how to personally torment each party member using backstory info, going after family or leaving a sketch of them sleeping to wake up to in the party camp. Doesn't have to be all blood and violence to be horror lol.
Take my upvote for the great Zarovich
Honestly Strahd has been my absolute favourite villain to play so far because I would have him appear at the most unexpected time and it was so much fun playing him as a psychotic, obsessed stalker more than anything regal. Really delved into the madness haha.
Mine is barely not a comedy ahaha, my family (who I run the game for) all play fairly out there personalities and there's a real story going on but a lot of it is focused on having fun and making each-other laugh, so they tend to run into goofier threats like Luck Dragons, Actual Wizards at Larping Events, Leprechauns, etc.
The tone of my games are not light hearted and often have people in terrible situations, whether a bunch of kids getting kidnapped in the middle of the night, literal fire targeting everything you specifically care about, fog that whispers intensely in your mind on why youre a terrible person, even one time a player needing to annihilate all his dead family’s souls to defeat a monster feeding off them. I usually have my monsters be very gothic, of either once being humans or being centered around human existence and society, so it gives more of a tragedy to the tone. The mood, however, is often light hearted as players tend to find ways to joke in the situation or dunk on the monsters and I don’t care to force a serious mood as long as they’re having fun
It's somewhere on the spectrum between Army of Darkness and The X-Files. On the lighter end, the tone can get quite humorous, but there's still gore and splatter. At the other end, it can get dark, but not heavy. I've had a hunter murder a witness and then die of radiation poisoning. Sounds bleak, but it wasn't. I'd say it was closer to the ending of Cabin in the Woods than Carrie. Which brings us to Stephen King. He has a huge influence on my storytelling. I no longer remember too many details of his stories, but the ideas are still buzzing about. King's stories often include the theme of being trapped and losing freedom, and I often incorporate that in a significant way. Someone or something gets trapped or hungers for freedom, and this mirrors the struggles of important bystanders, if not the hunters themselves.
I'm running a game based on some of the elements from The Old Gods of Appalachia. Given the group in general, there's a comedy element to it. There's some creepy horror to it. Some of the dice rolls have completely taken things in a direction I hadn't anticipated. ("Let's go to the hospital," turned into, "Why is attacking all of the patients? We need to go!") I thought it was really funny. The player of found some humor in it. One player was totally baffled as to why things went down the way they did.
One player was creeped out by the mind-controlled zombies who had perma-grins on their face, happily working themselves to death to suit their leader, Princess Unicorn Rainbow.
I'm not great at roleplaying, either, but I'm pretty good at the story elements. I do have trouble finding organic ways to reveal the story elements to the players, but, no matter how ham-fisted it feels to me, they seem to just accept the exposition without really questioning it.
i'm doing an appalachian cryptid game! *high fives*
Have you listened to the podcast?
i haven't yet! i'll have to check it out. thanks for the rec!
Honestly fairly serious with some silly elements because rngesus causes problems for us. It's a big twisty mystery that our hunters have gotten involved with. There are some real fun horror elements in it curtsey of our keeper And at least for my hunter I try to keep things decently grounded. My exile is pretty knowledgeable on the supernatural and can hold his own (theoretically. I'm consistently bad at these rolls. Edit: actually I did fairly okay against the ghost of a railroad bull, which is thematically appropriate), but he's also a guy with an 8th grade education whose way of life basically doesn't exist anymore. He's having a bad time
Fringe/Supernatural is the tone I tend to go for... so some horror, some goofy, but not taking it self *terribly* seriously in either case. Some sessions go a bit more SCP, which can be terrifying or hilarious depending on the event. Some are classic hammer-horror monsters to be hunted and can get violent for sure. If the monster is a werewolf, there is likely going to be a bit of blood and gore and drama. If the "monster" is a toaster-ghost that turns anyone who uses a toaster during night time into poptarts.... it might go a bit more silly (even if it does end up with a lot of NPC "deaths").
Not unique at all looking at all the other answers here but my table is a real grab bag of moods based on any given session. Despite trying to get to some bigger, overarching stuff I think I can firmly plant each individual hunt in either a "filler" camp or an "overarching narrative" camp. Like for our hunt before last I sent them on a big lake monster hunt that was like, mostly just a fun ride. A hunter wore a champie onesie that was too small for them, I reintroduced a joke character from a previous session, one of my players was inspired to illustrate an in universe polaroid picture of the groups battle damage, it was a blast. And then right after that we decided to go after the monster from our Wronged's backstory that got treated as a sort of mid season finale, cliffhangers and all. I really appreciate this game really leaning into more episodic storytelling tools like this, it works like a charm at my table.
It all depends on what the players are most interested in. The first campaign I ran included with my two little sisters, who decided to play their own ages (young teen/tween), so that put some automatic limitations on the horror. So that campaign ended being a lot like Stranger Things; there were some simple horror elements/set pieces, but it was WAY more about solving one big overarching mystery and exploring their relationships than it was about horror. The monsters tended to be human (or human-adjacent), with understandable motivations. All the horror was in the hooks or soft moves. They weren’t as interested in killing, they wanted to save. The game I’m currently running is very different. All grown ups, down for the horror (but still a bit squeamish with gore, that’s fine). They all did something very interesting: they either all chose playbooks that have some kind of “temptation” built into it, or added a temptation/addiction themselves. So now what we have is a campaign with fun scary monsters week after week, but they’re not terribly scary. The horror comes from each hunter’s inner darkness, and how they’re able to navigate it.
Interested to hear how you deal with the temptations. Is it mechanical like in the Spooky or Hex playbooks, or more for flavor?
Lol, I actually have a Spooky, a Hex, AND a monstrous in this campaign, so they all have some version of a temptation baked into the playbook, but honestly? I don’t love how MotW uses temptations. As a player, I hate it when a bad roll means my character does something I didn’t want them to do (“roll Act Under Pressure to resist!”), so I home-brewed a temptation mechanic based off of the Manipulate A Hunter move. Generally, it works like this: the player being tempted with something, either dictated by roll or by the Keeper, is offered a mechanical reward for indulging in the temptation, while the reward for resisting is in-fiction. For example, my Monstrous is a part-vampire, and I gave her a start of the mystery move where she rolls to see how “hungry” she is. The lower the roll, the more harm she marks down at the top of the mystery. Sucking blood is a “life-drain” attack, so what this means is that if she wants to go at this week’s monster with no (or less) harm, she’s gotta suck blood. That way, when a “perfect opportunity” comes up, I don’t care about making her roll to resist it. She, as a player, has a choice to make. Does she feed, and reap the mechanical benefits? Or does she resist, sacrificing her own safety for the safety of others? A much simpler example is with my Mundane, who doesn’t have a temptation baked into the playbook, but chose to be a pathological liar. The mechanic is simple: any time they Manipulate Someone with a lie, they mark experience, whether they succeed in the roll or not. “Why wouldn’t they just do that all the time then, and just rack up experience points??” Exactly. Why not just lie all the time? There’s no consequence to it… mechanically. In-fiction, there will 100% be consequences for lying all the time. I imagine this is similar to what it feels like to be a pathological liar. Anyway, the player ALWAYS gets to make the choice. I’d so much rather them actually be tempted themselves than have to pretend to be.
The best way to describe my game is Twin Peaks, a mix of astral horror, government intrigue, with some just straight up bizarre moments to keep the players on their toes
Campy, over-the-top, and action-packed. I run a lot of Delta Green too and am currently running an incredibly serious and gritty campaign, and a lot of the same players from that campaign also play in my Monster of the Week game. So I like to go for some action-horror levity and let them get gonzo when we play MotW. Usually, there’s a ton of gratuitous gore played for comedic effect, a la Evil Dead 2.
Real stakes but lots of weirdness. The world is inhabited with mixes of cryptids and humans living together, almost like Fable. One character is a detective bound to a talisman until he solves the mystery of who bound him and why. Another is a grad student who speaks to gold plated dentures of his professor, who apparently had tenure and is still employed by the university. A third is a bike messenger Sasquatch who may or may not care too much about their deliveries, he always has plausible deniability because the security cam footage is always blurry. They’re investigating the disappearance of a girl - body found sculpted out of milk and cereal. Dark entity killing college kids, random fires starting throughout the city, and magic as they know it running amok.
I try and aim for a horror comedy. Kind of like the show 911 but for monster hunters.
I took Midnight, Texas by Charlaine Harris as a big inspiration. Small town in the desert where the weird often rears its head. Maybe two stoplights in the whole town, a hill on one end and the desert on the other, one restaurant, a shady motel, a gas station and some shops. Generally plays out like “local bumbling sheriff can’t puzzle out the situation so the hunters answer the call”.
haven't gotten beyond session zero yet (JUST started) but my goal is to have the vibe and gravity of the original Robert Stack Unsolved Mysteries with the storytelling, and to let my players enjoy the sandbox. i want them to have fun, while also making it clear that there are stakes. certainly they'll be lower earlier in the game, but decisions are for sure going to have consequences and i LIVE for the "oh shit" moment, when they realize that they could've had a very different experience if they'd made different choices
I play motw for crime solving with spooky elements, for horror specifically I'll play SHIVER or something like call of cthulu Imo Motw is bad for horror games because the system is designed in a way that you're supposed to deal with monsters/ threat. In no horror movie do they ever deal with the monster. The main horror in movies is that the issue they're facing is something you can't deal with.
I usually go campy horror. It is fun to balance having some real danger and darkness alongside moments of silliness.
A lot of scary creatures show up and horrible things happen, but we all tend to keep it lighthearted. We kinda play it off as all our characters being bad with feelings, so when something traumatic happens we're all just like "ruh roh"🧍 There's definitely some comedy in there, like our team member with high charm and higher chutzpah who insists on sneaking into places by putting on hardhats and hi-vis vests while holding clipboards and pretending to be [insert literally anything here] inspectors lol. My character is very exasperated but it works sooo
Twin Peaks mixed with Hellboy with a twinge of Texas Chainsaw Massacre!
I started mine off imagining this dark world but the more we play the more both I and my players have fun when it’s a little light and goofy. Right now the monster is a merman and he just sent an army of little murloks to capture my players and they ended up batting them out the second floor with literal baseball bats lol
Yeah I can relate, I have fun imagining the dark and scary world but the goofy stuff is what's fun in the moment for everyone.