Unexplained Phenomena Unit, sessions 1-2: Mini Movie Monster Mayhem

Monster of the Week is a roleplaying game about groups of monster hunters in the modern world, trying to cover up and defeat supernatural threats to humanity, such as spirits, cryptids, aliens, and people with superhuman abilities. The mechanics are much simpler than D&D, but also a more roleplay heavy experience, and straight-up melee is much more punishing, the game tends to encourage a much more trap or stealth based way of fighting things.

In this campaign, players are members of the Unexplained Phenomena Unit (UPU), a government task force that exists to investigate its namesake. I don't usually ban classes in roleplaying games, but for this first experience I banned the magical playbooks until we had figured out what magic looks like in this setting.

The game plan for this mystery - Mini Movie Monster Mayhem - can be found in the book 'MOTW: Tome of Mysteries'.

Session 1:

Players:

Ghost, the Crooked Assassin (Aaron) - a quiet, stoic assassin, he's with the unit as long as they keep paying him. Wears a black leather jacket, tank top, tribal wolf tattoo on his right arm, sniper rifle in an inconspicuous case that he has slung over his shoulder.

John Moore, the Expert (Kye) - the teams man with the van, and the van has everything an organised monster hunter could ever need. He's a rough middled-aged guy with greying brown hair and a scruffy short beard, wears fairly smart clothes.

Mike "the sensorite" Jones, the Flake (Paul) - the least jaded and most caring of the team, an excitable young nerdy guy obsessed with sci-fi, fantasy, occultism and conspiracy theories. Wears a long red coat, jeans, illuminati T-shirt, John Lennon style round sunglasses, serpent pendant, rings on every finger.

Salem, the Crooked Charlatan (Harvey) - a meticulous, sly and bitter con-man, born from a life of crime, looking for ways to manipulate the supernatural to his advantage. He looks imposing, with sharp black hair and goatee, tight grey suit with black shirt and tie.

This team has worked together on a few missions, all of them hoaxes, so they were surprised to find some actual paranormal activity when they were sent to Sandford Hospital - tiny bloodsucking creatures scampering around, looking like monsters from classic horror movies, steadily growing bigger the more blood they drain from unsuspecting patients. The mission was a bust, they burned the hospital down to hide evidence of a King Kong they had decapitated and a security guard they had killed, but several creatures escaped and they still had no idea where they were coming from.

Session 2:

New player:

Alexander Demonaco, the Professional (Dom) - focused and humourless, a professional agent of UPU, the most devoted to the organisation of the team. He has black hair with shaved sides, handsome face with a goatee.

A couple days of hiding in a safehouse later, Alexander was brought in to get the group back on track - no more human casualties, no more evidence of the supernatural getting out. No more room for sloppiness. Following the trail of unusual requests for pest control lead them to a specialised chemotherapy centre. Killing more movie monsters, you eventually tracked the cause to one patient - a 12-year-old girl, Miri Lee, has been visiting her mother while she's sleeping, and using a book of spells to magically extract the cancer from her mothers body, not realising that she's been subconsciously turning the extracted flesh into monsters based on movies she's seen. Salem and Ghost dealt with the CCTV footage, Alexander and John dealt with confiscating the book of spells, Mike dealt with consoling the young girl, and bonding over their shared taste in movies. The girl shares a secret with Mike, that he decides to keep because he's afraid of how his trigger-happy teammates would react - she stole the book from an aunt, who is a part of a community of inhumans that are hiding peacefully amongst humankind. Mike adds Miri Lee to his network of online friends.