ICYMI — Last week, we saw the first installment of this year’s Pilot Season: the Blades in the Dark-powered family crime drama, Proper Villains. This week, pilot season rolls along — excited to hear what you folks think!
Monster of the Week
Monster of the Week, published by Evil Hat, is one of the most well-established games of the Powered by the Apocalypse family (to which Stonetop also belongs). If we go forward with this story, the rules of the game will all be quite familiar, though it’s focus will be very different: In MotW, the story consists of a series of investigations into — you guessed it — monsters of the week. The core play loop is roughly this: The player characters discover signs of a supernatural creature preying upon innocents, they investigate to learn about the creature — its nature, its strengths, its weaknesses, and its dark agenda. If they are successful, they intercede in that agenda and defeat the monster; if they fail, the monster runs rampant.
In this campaign, we’ll follow a posse of bounty hunters on the trail of a sorcerous outlaw known as Sam Crow. Unlike Proper Villains and PTFO:Stonetop, and as a result, we’ll focus much more on the player characters in this setup — there’ll be substantially more detail on the characters and their backgrounds, and comparatively less on the setting and web of starting NPCs. The scenario of hunting down a sorcerous bandit is inspired by an indie RPG called The Devil, John Moulton, which is a system entirely built this concept — you can see it on DriveThruRPG right here.
Sam Crow, our quarry
Samuel Crow, true name unknown. Wanted dead or alive in two dozen states and five territories. Some say he is merely the deadliest outlaw ever to wear a shooting iron — a peerless gunslinger and duelist, a robber of banks and trains, a fomenter of revolts, and a dealer in all manner of sin. Others whisper darker secrets about the man: That he is a sorcerer, that he deals with the ancient spirits of the world, that he calls up devils from the pits of hell, and that he sold his soul to Lucifer for power in this life. And a few even claim that he is the Adversary himself, broken free from perdition to raise an army of the wicked and the damned to burn down all creation so that the smoke might reach up to heaven and sting the eyes of the Almighty.
Whatever the truth, our hunters are sworn to bring him to justice, though hell may bar the way. Some time ago, Sam Crow has left the big cities back east and come to the Badlands, the untamed wilds out west, where he has recruited a gang of outlaws and horrors of the night and waged a campaign of crime and terror against the cattle barons, mining magnates and other big men of the frontier.
The Hunters, our Heroes
Each of our heroes is on a personal mission to confront Sam Crow — bound together by a common purpose and the loose sponsorship of the powers that be back east.
Like Blades in the Dark and Stonetop, Monster of the Week uses playbooks for its character creation. Characters in MotW have 5 stats: Charm, Cool, Sharp, Tough and Weird — they do more or less what they say on the tin, with Weird being the stat that covers using magic and engaging with the supernatural. Like in Stonetop, each of these stats is tied to one or more of the basic moves, which we’ll grow very familiar with if we go forward with this story. You can take a gander at them here — some familiarity will go a long way in groking the system commentary below.
For this campaign, we’ll follow four hunters. Let’s meet them:
Sergeant Daniel Ross, the man without fear
Sergeant Daniel Ross, retired from service in the Federal Army1 that put down the secessionists’ rebellion twenty years ago, has been a soldier nearly his whole life — he ran away from home at age 13 to join his three older brothers who were drafted to fight. Daniel was a drummer boy for the first two years of the war, and when he was 15 he officially joined his brothers’ regiment on the eve of the northern army’s first major invasion into the rebel states, becoming a skilled, if cautious, soldier. Daniel stuck fast to his brothers for the whole of the war — he was often afraid, even terrified, but his loyalty to his brothers and his unwillingness to leave them kept him going through the mud and the blood.
Daniel is tight-lipped about his story to his fellow hunters, but this much is clear: He lost his brothers in the war at the Battle of Devil’s Den, and not to rebel gunfire, but to a monster wearing grey. The creature set upon the regiment’s camp in the dead of night, slaughtering soldiers as they slept. It took the form of a fearsome wolf, and most of the soldiers fled rather than face it — those who were able to take aim with their Enfields found that musket balls fell off its hide like spring rain.
Ross was one of the few survivors who made it back to Federal lines. While he lay recovering in an army hospital, a stranger appeared to him — a stranger Ross would later learn went by the name Sam Crow. No one but Ross knows what transpired in that tent, but when he emerged, his wounds were healed, he was armed with a silver pistol, and he was filled with a terrible purpose. He returned alone to the backcountry and returned having killed the beast.
After the war, the army investigated and promptly covered up the events of the Battle of Devil’s Den. Ross was recruited into the Regis Detective Agency, a private police force that contracts with the Department of War to investigate paranormal occurrences with discretion. Thanks to his remarkable calm in the face of terrifying monsters, Ross rose in the ranks of the agency for the next fifteen years, until finally he was tasked with his latest, and likely last, mission: Track down that devil, Sam Crow, and bring him to justice. He’s been on Crow’s trail for a year now and has recruited a few hunters to the cause.
Daniel Ross’s playbook is the Professional, a cold-as-ice operator who works for a powerful monster-hunting organization — you can see all the MotW playbooks here for free. This playbook’s genre archetype is represented by characters like Agents Jay and Kay from Men in Black, Dana Scully from X-Files, or, in a deeper cut, Riley Finn from Season 4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
His base stats are Charm=0, Cool+2, Sharp-1, Tough+2, Weird-1. He’s good in a fight and can keep his cool in risky situations, but he’s not the smartest of the hunters, and he knows little of magic.
The professional Playbook allows three special moves — the first is Unfazeable, which raises his Cool to +3. This is linked to his meeting with Sam Crow — after that moment, Ross was known to be fearless. Since MotW is based on a 2d6+bonus system, a +3 is a really substantial bonus — it means Ross will rarely ever miss on moves like Act Under Pressure and Help Out. As part of Ross’s character creation, we’re also establishing that monsters in this world are terrifying, in addition to whatever else they do — the fear of these creatures often makes eyewitness accounts hazy and uncertain, which helps keep knowledge of the supernatural somewhat suppressed2.
His second move is Tactical Genius, which allows him to use his Cool instead of Sharp when using the Read a Bad Situation move, making him quite observant in dangerous situations. His final move is Battlefield Awareness, which gives him an extra armor — useful, since armor is not particularly common in the old west.
The last part of the Professional’s playbook is to envision the company he works for, the Regis Detective Agency, with two positive tags and two negative ones. For positive tags, we’ll choose Official Pull and Offices All Over. They’re tied in with the War Department, after all, and since our story will see the PCs travelling all over, that tag will keep them accessible. For the negative tags, we’ll choose Dubious Motives and Live Capture Policy — the agency may not be entirely on the up-and-up, and often the company offers substantial bonuses for the live capture of supernatural creatures (and has required Ross to capture, rather than kill, Sam Crow).
The last choice we have to make for Sergeant Ross is his Use Magic move. By default, Monster of the Week’s Use Magic basic move, available to all characters, looks like this:
Source: Monster of the Week // Michael Sands
As you can see, it is an extremely versitile move. In a lot of Monster of the Week-genre stories, there are a a few characters who make magic part of their core identity, but pretty much anyone can do a little magic when it’s really important. In MotW, however, you also have the option to swap that basic move with a list of alternate options, published on the Evil Hat site. Ross will be using one — Trust Your Gut, which allows the player to explicitly ask the GM where to go next. An oddball one, in a solo game — Since MotW is a mystery game, and I will generally know the answers to the mysteries as I write them, this move can help add some mechanics to whether and how quickly the player characters choose to go in the right direction. Importantly, Ross has Weird-1, so has a good chance to miss, which will lead the party into danger.
Rose McCannon, the frontierswoman-turned-sorceress
Rose was a frontier woman, carving out a ranch claim in the Sea of Grasses at the very eastern edge of the Badlands with her husband and two sons. The family fell upon a few very lean years, with a sickness making most of their herd food for the vultures. For a while, their neighbors helped, but soon their fortunes were falling too, and everyone turned sour. Next the creditors came calling, and it seemed that Rose’s family might lose everything. She prayed every night that their fortunes would change, and soon, her prayers were answered by a man in a long black coat, who introduced himself as Sam Crow.
Crow said her family’s plight had moved his heart, and if she would accept his help, he could lead her to a great treasure hidden right on their claim. Rose’s desperation warred with her suspicion, but in the end, she felt she had no choice. She shook Crow’s hand, and that night, she dreamt of a strange rose bush growing on their land, with black blossoms, and buried beneath it, a shining, golden treasure. The rest of her sleep was troubled, with visions of men shouting, angry words, and the smell of black smoke. She awoke early and went out into their pastures, and found the rosebush with its dark petals, and there she dug. The treasure she found wasn’t golden, but black — oil bubbling up from the ground. She brought her husband to see, and he fell to his knees and thanked god. Rose could only think of Sam Crow’s smiling face.
In an instant, everything changed — the oil strike attracted the attention of wealthy buyers, and soon the family’s money troubles were over. Or so they thought — their creditors claimed the land was in legal limbo when the oil was found, and soon they sent lawyers, and the lawyers hired Pinkerton ‘investigators,’ who turned their neighbors against them and dogged the family’s steps whenever they came into town. It all came to a head one night when Rose came back to the ranch to find her home engulfed in flames. An accident, it was claimed, started by oil-soaked rags left in a pile, that claimed the lives of three good men.
By this time, Rose had an idea of who she was dealing with, and she knew some old magic from her grandmother to call him. She went to a crossroads, burnt an offering, and met Sam Crow again. They quarreled, a bit, over Crow’s poisoned gift, but in the end, what she really wanted was revenge.
And so, Rose joined the Sam Crow Gang — a sorcerers’ coven joined with an outlaw crew that roamed the Badlands, attended by all manner of monstrous servants. Rose robbed banks and trains, participated in debauchery and violent delights, and, as they crisscrossed the badlands, Rose found the Pinkerton who’d burnt her homestead, the lawyer who paid the man, and the banker who gave the order and revenged herself on them one by one. With Crow’s help, she got away clean — more or less.
Once the last murder was done, Rose fell to pieces and fell out with the Sam Crow Gang. They left her in a ghost town in Tall Pines, and she crawled into a bottle until her money was spent — she was tormented by dreams of the Hell that awaited her for accepting Crow’s deal. It was in this state that Ross found her — the Agency had sent him to kill her for her crimes with the Sam Crow Gang, but our next hunter, Father Justos, interceded and persuaded him to recruit her instead.
Rose’s playbook is The Spooky — this is your Sam Winchester from Supernatural, or your Willow from Buffy. Eleven from Stranger Things also fits the bill. In her time with the Sam Crow Gang, Rose learned some magic of her own, in addition to general outlawry.
Her statline is Charm=0, Cool-1, Sharp+1, Tough+1, Weird+2. She’s easily rattled, but good in a fight, and has some facility with magic and the supernatural.
Her first move is The Sight, which allows her to ‘see the invisible, especially spirits and magical influences.’ We’ll envision this as part of Sam Crow’s gift to her, which allowed her to find the oil strike.
Her second move is Premonitions, which triggers at the beginning of every mystery, giving her a chance at a vision of something terrible that the monster might do, allowing her a chance to prevent it. This is also part of Sam Crow’s gift to her — she had the premonition of the discovery of oil, but also the strife that came after it.
Her last move is The Big Whammy, which is an offensive ability that represents aggressive magical or psychic abilities — in our case, we’ll envision Rose is a pyrokinetic, an ability tainted by the indeliable memory of her family home in flames. This is some mojo Rose picked up from the Sam Crow Gang, rather than a specific part of her deal with Sam Crow.
Finally, the Spooky also has a Dark Side — a malicious presence in her mind that is strengthened when she uses her powers. To define this dark passenger, we pick three thematic tags from a list — I chose Rage and Poor Impulse Control, and for a third, I made up my own, which is Anarchy. Rose harbors a deep resentment for the gentlemen in suits and ties who took everything from her, and her dark side stokes those flames.
The way the dark side is played at the table is the Keeper (MotW’s word for GM) can ‘ask you to do nasty things (in accordance with the tags), and if you do whatever’s asked, you mark an XP. If you don’t do it, the Keeper has the option to cut off your powers until the end of the mystery (or until you cave). Serious stuff.
Unlike Ross, Rose will not swap out her Weird move — she learned magic during her time with the Sam Crow gang, and her magic will take on a distinctly infernal bent.
‘Father’ Justos, the priest’s bastard
Justin Dee, who now goes by Justos, the name his mother Julia called him when he was young, learned about the ‘haunted world’ from his father when he was just a boy. His father Ethan was a priest, and an initiate in the Society of St. George, a clandestine order of exorcists and monster hunters backed by the church. He met and fell in love with Julia, a nun from Costa Dorada, in the course of one of his investigations. Despite his effectiveness at fighting the creatures of the night, Ethan was already on poor terms with the church and the Society — he had brought heretical practices and strange magic with him from the Old World, and this forbidden liaison and bastard son was the last straw.
Father Ethan, undeterred by his defrocking and excommunication, set out as a Badlands pastor, occasionally returning home to give Julia a roll of greenbacks and to teach his son the tools of his trade. When Justos was 15, his father’s visits became less frequent as he began to follow the trail of Sam Crow.
Ethan Dee maintained some of the church’s ancient, and now heretical, practices, including that of sin-eating3, a confessional ritual said to be able to cleanse the sins of a soul that has already been judged and condemned. He came to believe that Sam Crow could be defeated — and perhaps saved — through the use of this ancient (and forbidden) ritual. He enlisted Justos as his apprentice in this quest, after a few years on the trail, on Justos’ 20th birthday, he went missing.
There was never a question of what Justos would do next — he is very much his father’s son, with a fiery sense of right and wrong and a passion for seemingly unwinnable fights. He took up what notes and tools his father left behind and set off to find him, or, failing that, to find Sam Crow and consume his sin, whether it leads to his destruction or redemption. He and Ross found one another early in the sergeant’s hunt, and Justos eagerly joined the mission when Ross offered.
Father Justos’ playbook is The Expert, with a twist, which I will go into below. The Expert archetype is represented by, of course, Rupert Giles from Buffy, along with Bobby Singer from Supernatural.
His statline is Charm+1, Cool-1, Sharp+2, Tough +1, Weird=0. He’s going to be the best in the gang at looking for clues and knowing stuff about monsters, and he’ll also be better able to talk to people than our other two hunters. Normally, he wouldn’t be great under pressure, but his first move mitigates it.
That first move is I’ve Read About That Sort of Thing, which represents the training his father gave him along with his careful study of his father’s notes. It allows him to roll +Sharp instead of +Cool when using the Act Under Pressure basic move. His -1 Cool no longer matters, except for with custom moves (which big monsters often have).
His second move is Preparedness — this allows him to procure unusual and useful items from a stash, representing the tools and supplies he inherited from his father. It’s not unlike the Stonetop move Have What You Need, but Monster of the Week puts a greater emphasis on planning and preparation, so this move is more valuable and exclusive to the Expert playbook.
His last move is Dark Past — here’s the text:
Source: Monster of the Week // Michael Sands
This move represents primarily his father’s dark past, allowing Justos to consult his fathers’ stories and notes for the answers to the above questions.
The standard Expert playbook includes a Haven — a secret lair with all sorts of goodies. But since our party is on the road, we’ll replace that with a feature from another Playbook — the Initiates’ ‘Sect’ , which will represent the Society of St. George. To create the Sect, we choose two ‘Good Traditions’ from the list — I selected Ancient Lore and Integrated in Society, since they are part of the church, and for their Bad Traditions, I selected Strict Laws (which we established a bit of with his backstory) and Factionalized (which we’ll make use of later on, as the story unfolds). Initiates also get a move they can trigger “when they are in good standing with the Sect,” but Justos will not begin the game in good standing. Over the course of the story, he may rectify that.
For his Use Magic move, Justos will keep the default. While he is not an ordained priest, he knows more-or-less everything a priest knows and can perform the relevant rituals and rites, and can ably perform (or impersonate, depending on your point of view) that role. This includes ‘church magic,’ which is to say things like exorcisms, abjuring things that you could reasonably describe as unholy (Werewolves? Probably not. Vampires? Probably.), warding, cleansing, etc.
Ulysses, the Wildcard
Ulysses is the enigmatic and sometimes absent fourth hunter. Tall, slender, fair-featured, and dressed in fine, tailored suits, caked with the dust of the road, Ulysses is a roguish gunslinger who is the most recent addition to the party. They met at a cattle town in the Sea of Grass, where Ulysses was scheduled to swing by the neck until dead, courtesy of the local hanging judge for a murder after a card game turned bloody. It seemed like Ulysses’ long career of boozing, gambling, lascivious behavior, gunfighting, and general lawlessness would soon come to an end, but the hunters didn’t let him hang.
With the Sight, Rose could see something was strange about Ulysses, and Justos interceded on his behalf with the judge, agreeing that they would take him out of town and never return.
The party doesn’t know much about Ulysses, but they know for certain he is not human. Rose detected some sort of great power within him, and they have seen him perform near-superhuman feats of strength and speed. He comes and goes as he pleases, vanishing in one town only to meet the party weeks later after crossing hundreds of miles, but he always seems to turn up when he’s most needed.
This is a bit of an experiment in the PTFO format: Ulysses’ playbook will be a mystery in the early part of our story. Veteran players of Monster of the Week will be able to speculate pretty easily, but for now, let’s leave it in the shadows. This can work at the gaming table, if done well — one player character comes in with a secret backstory that the other player characters unravel as it becomes relevant. It can be enormously frustrating if the character is being secretive about themselves for no good reason, particularly when their secrets will help the party enormously, so I’ll endevour to give Ulysses a good reason for being mum about his true nature and history.
His statline is Charm-1, Cool+1, Sharp=0, Tough+2, Weird+1 — he is perhaps the strongest fighter of the party, and he carries a special weapon: a fine, double-barrelled shotgun with a dark wood stock and gold scrollwork up and down the bluish steel barrels. Inlaid in gold on its right side is its name: “Ultima Ratio.” He also uses the alternate weird move No Limits, which allow him to “push your physical body past its limits,” giving him the fictional positioning to bend bars, lift gates, leap the widening gap between two train cars; that kind of thing.
The Badlands, our hunting ground
Hop a train in one of the great cities back east and ride west. You’ll pass by the Robber Barons’ opulent mansions and spires of industry, grand courthouses, and august capitols where senators and judges play their games with the lives of ordinary folk and the hallowed cathedrals where holy men preach god’s judgment of the wicked and sinful. Once those mighty places are far behind you, you’ll cross the Bellariva, slow as honey and wide as the open sky, and finally, you’ll reach a broad, free country: The Badlands.
From the banks of the Bellariva to the golden shores of Costa Dorada, the Badlands are a place where the great and the good and the wicked and the cruel can make their fortunes by their own hands, free from the Robber Baron’s exploitation, the priest’s condemnation, and the government man’s boot.
Before you make the trek, there’s one thing you should know: Out in the Badlands, the nation’s laws don’t quite reach, and the lights from your lanterns and hearths don’t quite pierce the dark of night quite the same way the electric streetlights do. There are strange, dangerous things out in the wild country. A few folk know about the haunted world of monsters, spirits, and demons that lay just beneath the surface of the world most folk know — those that don’t know are the lucky ones.
The setting for this adventure will be the Badlands, an Old West reimagining of the Ironlands, the excellent setting for the solo RPG Ironsworn. It’s worth checking out both how Ironsworn approaches worldbuilding with its multiple choice “Your Truths” questionnaire, as well as what Keith Stetson, the author of Badlands, made from it. You can download the Ironsworn version for free here, and Mr. Stetson’s itch.io page is here — the Badlands materials are PWYW, so if you’re able, support the author.
Unlike Blades in the Dark and Stonetop, the Badlands are very loosely defined. Duskwall and Stonetop give a lot of room for GMs and players to flesh out the details, but there’s a ton of foundational worldbuilding to use as a jumping off point. By contrast, in Ironsworn and Badlands, we have a few regions/biomes to envision the territory and some broad ideas to rough it out, and you discover it through play. Here’s what I roughed out using the Badlands “Your Truths” worksheet — To keep things brief, I’m only going to reproduce the answers I selected (and only a selection of the questions themselves) so follow along on the worksheet if you want to see the other questions and choices:
The Weird: Strange occurances populate the land if you know where to look, and wary folks look elsewhere. Only the foolhardy would venture into the night alone and unarmed.
As alluded to in Father Justos’ introduction, the idea of the ‘haunted world’ exists among a select few — the hidden, supernatural underworld that lurks just beyond the mundanes’ sight.
Exodus: Badlands folk fled for all manner of reasons: Religious persecution by the church, the oppressive governance of the state, or the grasping hands of the Robber Barons. And each of those reasons is creeping westward with each passing day.
This is a custom answer that combines all three of the worksheet answers. The idea of the ‘iron triangle’ of church, state and industry will be a background theme in this story.
Native Peoples: A wary peace exists between the Badlanders and those who first lived on the land we occupy. Relationships — commerical, social and familiar — are not uncommon, but can still draw ire from those set in their ways.
For our version of the Badlands, we’re going to depart from real-world history and envision a world where the native peoples of this region were much more successful at holding onto territory by force of arms, and the territory occupied by the Badlanders represents a compromise, not a conquest. Large swaths of the Badlands are recognized as native territory, and the territorial governments are, aside from a few hardliners, eager to avoid renewed hostilities.
Back East: The powers-that-be back east think we are nothing but their colony and seek to rule over us as they did before we came to the Badlands. Their meddling is constant and oppressive.
This will be largely represented by the reach of the robber barons, who will often complicate our heroes’ quest.
Iron Horse: Surveyors from the railroads have started to appear in the Badlands, planning out routes and taking notes. A few rail lines have already been built, creating a few communities that could almost be called cities.
This is a slight modification of the answer in the worksheet. Much like a lot of Old West stories, the encroachment of modernity will be a background theme of this story.
That’ll do for a quick overview — the bulk of the setting will be built as we go, using Oracle Rolls, reader polls, and, hopefully, a bit of creativity.
Session 1
Session 1 of That Devil, Sam Crow will see our heroes take the first step on their quarry’s trail, reckoning with the chaos he’s left in his wake. My hope is that each session will feature a new monster hunt, and each monster hunt will advance us closer to learning the true nature and agenda of Sam Crow.
If this tale of monsters, sorcerers, devils and gunslingers intrigues you, vote for That Devil, Sam Crow! Voting will be true ranked choice, and we’ll be conducting it during the first week of 2024. Next week, we’ll see the full reveal of the final pilot.
As always, thanks for reading! Now that two pilots are out, I am very curious how you all rate them against one another and against more Stonetop. If you have a hot take, bring it to the comments section!
A quick worldbuilding aside — the setting will be a fantasy version of the American West, and for the purposes of maintaining that fantasy, I plan to change the names of certain people, places, and concepts. During the Civil War, the Union Army was often referred to as ‘the Federal Army,’ so it’s not exactly a huge change, but I plan to use some renaming and some oddball word choice to signal that we’re in an alternate universe here.
Longtime Urban Fantasy fans might recognize this as being an homage to the Delerium from White Wolf’s World of Darkness — it was a supernatural fear of werewolves that drove mundane humans mad with terror, causing them to forget or rationalize what they had seen.
"...to burn down all creation so that the smoke might reach up to heaven and sting the eyes of the Almighty." What a great phrasing; really calls out the spite of it
"...to burn down all creation so that the smoke might reach up to heaven and sting the eyes of the Almighty." What a great phrasing; really calls out the spite of it
Oh damn, this is fire. 🔥