I’ve been doing my best to avoid using the same genre two days in a row, and have thus far been able to do that. We’ll see how the rest of the month goes. For today’s #CharacterCreationChallenge, I turn to the Monster of the Week RPG with an Initiate named Amon Ali.

Amon belongs to an ancient sect – the Children of the Resistance – that watches for the return of the aliens that once enslaved the great Egyptian nations pretending to be gods and working through their pharaohs to extract precious resources for their own diabolical purposes.

As an Initiate, Amon is trained in mystical powers that can be used to fight these aliens – powers originally learned from the aliens themselves. The sect also relies on mystical artifacts from the old times to support them in their task.

Still young, Amon gets nervous around strangers but, in the heat of battle, he maintains a sharp mind and cool demeanor. He is no fighter, preferring to ally with others to see the mission through.

Monster of the Week

This game, created by Michael Sands and now updated and published by Evil Hat Productions – which also publishes Blades in the Dark and Scum and Villainy, among other titles – is billed as a urban fantasy-horror RPG. It’s inspired by things like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, X Files, Dresden Files, and even Scooby Doo. It runs on the Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) framework.

The premise being you are monster hunters (eldritch, alien, or other monsters) and undertake a different mission each session. Of course, nothing prevents you from having underlying ties between the sessions to relate them into a larger narrative.

Character creation is like other PbtA and its derivatives in that you select a playbook and then fill out your character’s attributes (ratings) and skills (moves). It takes far more effort to come up with your concept than to actually build the mechanics of your character, which is nice.

The published playbooks are, how shall I say it, less than ideal?

The sheets themselves include all the helpful selection criteria rather than separating them into the rule book. That makes the sheets two pages when they could almost be on an index card. There are many fan-built sheets out there that do just that so, if you’re planning on playing the game, I recommend checking those out.

I do love Forged in the Dark games like Blades in the Dark and, since those we built off of PbtA, there are enough similarities that I think I’d like playing this, too. Delta Green, which I mentioned earlier, can also support this same genre, though in a more number-heavy way, and so I’m not sure which I would end up trying first.

You can get Monster of the Week from DriveThruRPG, where they even have a Roll20 bundle if that’s a VTT you use. It looks like a fun RPG and I’ve seen a good size community that plays it, so bringing it to a table, or joining an existing one, seems totally doable.