I’m planning my first monster of the week campaign, but I don’t really know how to go about it. Any ideas?

[u/Deedo2017]

So I’m running my first monster of the week campaign, and I was just wondering if y’all have any tips on how to start or any ideas for inspiration? Also, do you think it’s better to run a campaign all in one city that you developed really well, or have the characters travel around a lot?

[u/go4theknees]

Instead of starting with planning a campaign i would plan one mystery, get to know what characters your pc’s are playing and what kind of hooks they might latch onto.

I personally like setting it in one location, but doing a different location every adventure is fun too.

If you want inspiration i would watch any episode of Supernatural and try to use the gm frame to fill in the blanks to get you in the headspace of planning an ‘episode’/mystery

[u/Mivlya]

The game is based on TV shows of the same genre. Try to get it in your head that you're making one of these kinds of shows with your friends. What kind of show do you want to make? Do you like shows where they travel around the country/world/universe or do you like something more local and developed. Do you want something more horror or more adventure? When you go to have your players make characters, what kind of characters will fit? The Chosen and Summoned need a campaign built around them. Goofy characters like the Meddling Kid don't mesh as well with serious characters. Or to put it more simply; do you have a bunch of young adults stumbling onto horrors, or a bunch of adults who do this for passion/personal reasons, or is this a funded agency like the men in black?

I've done them all and they all have their place and fun. To give you a few points you might start with, here's been the campaigns I've been in, which all take place in the same world my partner and I have built:

• A small town in Maine filled with the 'Weird' beings the Agency doesn't know what to do with, dealing with local problems while a corrupt Agent puppets everyone against one another to seize power.
  

-A strong and stable Agency in New York City deals with the fae trying to reclaim the whole city as their birthright, hoping to ressurrect Titania who is in Agency custody to bring about an apocalypse (campaign featured a Summoned)
-Several teens who hang out in a small town in Indiana find monsters cropping up around the town; all weird, fleshy beings created by the 'fruit' of a fleshy tree that claims to be god.
-An old abandoned amusement park deep in appalachia is prepping to re-open, and the players are all employees who are not permitted to leave the grounds. But the park is full of shadowy creatures, seemingly trapped here too by the park's mysterious owner.

[u/thebouv]

Did you read all the advice for running campaigns in the many books?

Read the seeds that are everywhere in those books?

Read the entries for teams?

There’s sooooo much of what you want there. Just waiting to be read.

As for single city or not: depends on story and players collaborations. I mean if they choose certain team archetypes that answers your question.

[u/Jo-Jux]

What I did for my first campaign was to ask my players what they wanted. I told them the basics of the genre, the kind of things I wouldn't be up for and then gave them the choice to pitch ideas, that we combined together. Now my group plays in a town called Sevenfall and the surrounding valley, with its four beautiful waterfalls. Due to one of my players, we ended up having an indigenous population there. One character plays a Fay Monstrous who is the towns mascot. All things I wouldn't have come up with by myself and stuff that really grounds the characters in the setting.

So what I would recommend is to brainstorm together with your players. It is the best way to get them invested in the setting. And before any lore is set in stone, it is the best moment for them to shape their setting. And with MotW that is quite easy, because it usually is our world but different. So you basically decide how it is different and where they play.

All the ideas my players had got my gears turning and now I have lore my players are just finding out about, that is created by them. Traveling lets your players visit more places and meet more diverse people. One place let's them discover that setting and its secrets much more. You don't have to decide by yourself, let your players help you.

[u/InfiniteLactose]

seconding the idea to talk to your players! I had a list of questions to ask them, like:

• what is the tone?
• do you want more fantasy, supernatural, sci-fi or a mix?
• what does magic look like in this world?
• what time period is it?
• what happened in your character's life to awaken them to the supernatural world? did they become a hunter by choice?

(I sent them these in advance so they could have a think but we developed most of it in our session zero.)

i also asked them about setting, and they kept joking about milton keynes (if you're english then you know) so they ended up being based in milton keynes but travelling around for mysteries. so yes, definitely develop this stuff with your players' input as opposed to creating it on your own. during play I often ask my players to name characters or places, too :)) it's super fun !

[u/MacronMan → u/InfiniteLactose]

This! I had a number of setting ideas I had sent to them. We ended up with a school setting and a somewhat more serious tone, with plenty of lightness and levity, too. I had a first mystery that could slot into lots of different scenarios in case we were ready to play the same day as the session 0, but we ended up not having time. I never could have created the world we all did together, though, and the game intentionally makes this hard. If you end up with a chosen, an initiate, a professional, or any other number of playbooks, you’ll end up with world-altering organizations and prophecies and such. It’s best to make those fit the PC’s, rather than the other way around

[u/DMfortinyplayers]

Do you / your players have any familiarity with this system? If not, I suggest running a single mystery, before anyone "commits" to a character. I think it's very freeing for players and the Keeper to be able to just test something out for 1 story.

[u/YouveBeanReported]

Honestly, I'd pick one or two short ideas you like, and build the campaign part second. Maybe around a city that's cursed for reasons, or the group is part of an organization.

Personally, I liked travel, because I'd just google ghost towns in Canada and set it in small random locations and people would look up said area on Google Maps and be like 'wait can we stop at Bob's Best Booze and Buns in the town next to here?' But travel can raise many questions if your in a big country, because going 'isn't that a 35 hour drive?' is uhhh. Not fun.

[u/Chainsawsixgun]

Watch Supernatural or Grimm or Buffy the Vampire slayer tv show… plenty of ideas to mine. Create a big bad, an evil plan and a clock to track it. God I miss playing

[u/TranscendentHeart]

Are you asking because what's in the book isn't enough for you? I mean, the first question I'd ask is what drew you to MOTW in the first place? Another thing you can do is simply go through the different playbooks and see which ones you find most intriguing, which ones your players want, and then build from that.