Your experience: monster of the week games

[Mark Hoover 330]

So my current campaign is a homebrew following a non-linear design method. Needless to say even though the PCs are only level 4 there's a LOT going on. They've discovered fey influences, dragon and demon cults, and there's still a vast wilderness out there.

We're now only playing 1/week on a weeknight for 2.5 to 3 hours per session. I am getting the feedback from my players that just throwing out a hexmap and asking where they want to explore isn't working for them right now. I was thinking of taking some inspiration from TV and doing a monster-of-the-week type style with it instead.

By "monster of the week" I mean that the PCs would hear of something related to the BBEG in an area. Once there they'd encounter some local threat, either directly related to the BBEG or exacerbated by the big bad's actions or whatever. The local threat would be dealt with and then, as an epilogue they'd get a little closer to defeating the BBEG once and for all.

Please tell me your experience with this style of a campaign. If you have suggestions to make it go well or pitfalls for me to avoid, let me know. Thanks!

[W E Ray]

I recommend checking out Realm of the Fellnight Queen by Neil Spicer.

You may not be the biggest fan of published modules but if you're looking for a change and you have a wilderness-like grid, using the Fellnight Queen as a monster-of-the-week could be exactly what you're looking for.

Read it and use whatever parts you like that will fit your needs.

[W E Ray]

When I find a monster whose background nature and ecology (and illustration) I really like, I'll introduce it this way, as a kind of 'monster of the week.' I've found that more engaged I get into the monster the more engaging my lead-up to and encounter with the PCs goes. When I'm really jazzed about a monster and introduce it to the PCs it makes for a much better encounter or sequence of encounters than when I'm just emotionlessly introducing a random monster in the woods.

[Douglas Muir 406]

I like the MotW concept a lot; I've used something like it myself, without thinking of it in those terms.

D20pfsrd's Advanced Monster Search is probably your friend here in terms of finding monsters of a particular CR and/or type. Want a Fey creature with a CR between 5 and 7? Bam, the AMS will give you all of them.

Doug M.

[taks]

Fight of the week, that's how we always played until we started on the APs. There was a loose backstory, but generally we were mercs trying to protect some community's interests. Each session was a rather complex setup that we had to work to overcome, typically uncovered in some tavern. We were so slow that a few battles would take 6 hours or more.

[THUNDER_Jeffro]

I had a very short lived campaign idea that I would characterize as "monster of the week" or adventure of the week. It works well if your group has a limited amount of time and isn't particularly interested in an overarching story. Being able to round up each adventure in a session or two also allows you to do more diverse adventures if you aren't trying to follow a specific campaign theme.

If you're curious, the adventures I ran were homebrew, generally followed a "five room dungeon" template, and the two I managed to run were a haunted house that was actually occupied by gremlins and a gnome village that had come under attack by Werebadgers.