A bit more on Monster of the Week: It is a sleekly designed machine to tell one kind of story, the "monster of the week" episodes of Supernatural, Buffy, X-Files, Kolchak and so on. (I think I remember that the game was originally designed as a homebrew system to run a Supernatural campaign.)
The playbooks create pretty much every character from those series -- sometimes pretty blatantly -- but with enough flexibility to make things your own. (When I run it, I intend to have the Chosen One be chosen by a UFO cult, rather than a bunch of upper class English twits, for instance.)
The player-side mechanics help drive the plot forward, with every playbook having some sort of related plot hook (maybe you're working against a conspiracy that attempts to foil your monster hunting, maybe you are fated to die saving the world, etc.) that ticks forward when you accomplish certain things or spend XP.
Player characters are heroic and badasses to various degrees (even the sidekick types get to have their moments, as in BtVS's "The Zeppo"), with failures typically being partial successes or successes with a cost. But eventually, the fight against the monster will consume them all, leading to another monster hunter taking their place.
Adventures have an open-ended design, typically featuring a monster with an unknown weakness that has to be discovered in order to defeat them. But there's a ticking clock: If the players dither, the monster's agenda keeps moving forward with some sort of horrible event happening when the clock has ticked down. So the player characters are spurred into action to get investigating and attempting to disrupt the activities of the unbeatable-at-the-moment monster in the meantime.
It's episodic in nature, but the player-side plot engines form campaign arcs through regular play. And if they're at all synched up, you can expect one hell of a season finale every dozen or so sessions.
There's a
new crowdfunding campaign to introduce new settings and group playbooks via a supplement (play Locke & Key or Penny Dreadful in Monster of the Week!) and a new hardcover version of the game, with a bit of new material (including material from a prior supplement I suspect they want to let fall out of print) comes out on Feb. 27.
This is
not Hunter: The Vigil, with hunters eventually becoming serial killers who justify their actions for the greater good, or even the upcoming Apocalypse Keys, which is more Hellboy trying to prevent the world (or becoming the thing that will cause the end of the world himself).
But if you ever wanted to play a government monster hunter having to look over their shoulder for the conspirators lurking in the shadows of their own agency, or the criminal who's seen too many things in the dark to look away any more, or even a vampire (or werewolf or angel or whatever) siding with humans against the supernatural -- and especially if you want all of these folks to team up -- this is the game for you.
