Help Me! Monster Hunters: Review of Play

[mlangsdorf]

So the Saga of the West March online group decided to take a break from Dungeon Fantasy and try ourselves some Monster Hunters. As the GM, I've decided to write some commentary about the experience. Hopefully, some of the players will comment on it, too.

Here's the wiki for the game: http://westmarchsaga.wikia.com/wiki/MH/Monster_Hunters

The first step of playing Monster Hunters was figuring out what seeds to use. We tossed around some ideas and eventually agreed on a mixed Exterminators for Hire/Road Trip campaign with some elements of Secret Wars. Essentially, the PCs would be mercenary monster hunters, traveling the US and Canada to find monsters or clients. Meanwhile, the monsters mostly have extensive but highly factional societies, so the hunters have to work around the edges of multiple warring monster domains.

When writing up the wiki, I called their company "FIXME" as a reminder that the PCs needed to come up with a name. They went with it, and we decided they worked for "Help Me!" Initially, Help Me! was going to be an entirely private organization, but I allowed the PCs to have Patrons and Wealth if they wanted to handle it that way. Help Me! became an undercover (and technically illegal) branch of the FBI.

With the background more or less set, we started working on character creation. That went slightly wonky, when the mercenary monster hunters included 4 Philanthropists, but then the PCs started talking to each other. We ended with a pretty good mix: a Criminal/Commando, an Operative/Experiment, an Atoner/(mummy) Inhuman, a Hired Gun(?)/ teleporting Psi, a Philanthropist/pseudo-Sleuth, and a Philanthropist/Witch. This was some discontent with the templates, and everyone rolled their own in at least some way -- Crakkerjakk based his Sleuth on the Action Scout, and Bruno's mummy Inhuman is an entirely new racial package based loosely on the Mummy from MH: Enemies.