GURPS PDF Challenge Review: Monster Hunters Encounter 1

8th in our series comes a Monster Hunters book, the second most supported series of campaign frameworks.  This is, in essence, an adventure book, but it actually manages to contain not one, but two adventures for the same page count.  How is it able to do this?

My TL;DR summary is: This is fine.  It feels rather by-the-numbers, and I'd end up fleshing them out a lot, but unlike some other works I've panned, the skeleton provided by Rice is actually quite useful.  Of the two, the second is definitely better than the first. The more I work with them and dive in, the more I like them, but neither of them are going to "wow" anyone.  They're work-horse with some decent design.  For $3, you could do worse than this set of adventures, and it's a decent illustration as to how Monster Hunters should work, but I would have preferred the first one to be more innovative.  All that said, this is worth your $3.

Digging In

The book has only two chapters, which are the two "encounters."

• The Midnight Bordello
• The Moon Clan

Both encounters follow the same structure: they lay out the basic premise, then they lay out "the hunt."  They detail how the Hunters might uncover that a monster needs to be hunted, they handle what an investigation will reveal and what the difficulty will be.  Then it dives into how you'll go from investigation into full on hunt, and what the final confrontation and its aftermath will likely look like.

The Midnight Bordello

Or, as I like to call it, "That Time Dean Winchester Couldn't Keep It In His Pants."  The core of this is that there's a whore-house full of sexy, sultry vampires and you need to stop them, and the head mistress, Beatrix.

The biggest weakness of this adventure is how obvious it is. Once a monster hunt leads players to a dark bordello, the first thing they're going to assume is vampires: they're all hot, they like necking, they operate at night, they've got to be vampires.  And then you spring the big surprise on them: it's actually... yeah, no, it's vampires.

This is compounded by how difficult it is.  For example, the What is -8, which means a Sage will only get it on a 9 or less, and a dedicated Vampire-hunting Sleuth on a 6 or less.  Once the players have looked at their first dead hooker who seems a little wane and pale, they're going to immediately guess "Vampire" and playing footsie by saying "but is it?" feels obnoxious.  On the other hand, this might be intentional.  Monster Hunters gives a +4 to deduce the truth of a situation if the players first guess it, so the "What" might, in practice, be a -4 rather than a -8, precisely because the players will guess it, which actually brings it in line with the other Encounter's difficulty.  Similarly, the "Where" seems a gimme, given some of the suggested discovery conditions (such as the PCs just encountering the bordello).  The Who is probably the most interesting investigation, as we learn later in the adventure that Beatrix, if caught, will try to pass herself off as just one of the victims of the true head vampire, or even just one of the girls. Thus, if the players end up at the Bordello, assume Vampires, and then just start carving into everyone with garlic-tipped bullets, they might just miss their real target, as Beatrix slips right through their fingers.

The final confrontation is nicely written, with options for both day and night, and sets up the series of conditions, including a great "panic button" moment in the form of a bunch of feral vampires she can unleash when it comes to it, which is important: all the best "final fights" should have at least one twist available.  

This has a second one, in the form of a suggestion that between her social skills and "glamour" she might manage to "talk her way out."  I'm personally a bit skeptical of this. Once you start rolling behind a table and informing players what they think of her, or that they like her, or whatever, they tend to get very suspicious.  I think the core idea is fine, as I noted above with the "Who" investigation and its importance, but this needs to be handled with a subtlety that's not really elucidated in the text. But "How to run a good social encounter" is not really the premise of this book, so it gets a pass. Just be warned that you should be good at handling social encounters before running this particular adventure.

The aftermath notes what she does if she escapes, and discusses the vampire who created her, which is a nice twist, because it means this is an encounter that could easily spawn into a campaign, and reminds me of a single node on Night's Black Agents Push Diagram.

I find the difficulty of it a little off-putting, as "Night of the Sex-Vampires" is going to be an adventure I'll have a hard time selling as the Deeply Serious Affair the difficulty levels involved, as well as some of the subtlety suggests. Given its aftermath, it feels like it should be more introductory.  I'd run it in a way that felt "for the laughs" at first, and slowly got worse and worse as they players realized the stakes, especially if they lost track of Beatrix. It's also a nice way to introduce some good recurring NPCs; while the text discusses nothing of the sort, this begs for the addition of a troubled teen, a corrupt cop and/or a hooker with a heart of gold who's in a little over her head, and all of these are easy enough to add.

The Moon Clan

The Moon Clan is a bunch of lycanthropes who follow some witch-wolf who believes the moon is some sort of "trapped spirit" and seeks to release it with bloody, monthly rituals that often demand sacrifices, which can mean people going missing.

The investigation is easier than the Midnight Bordello, with difficulties of -4 to -6 rather than -8. There's also a lot more things to learn (including an interesting When and Why), which means it's a fairly easy encounter to add some urgency too if one of the PC's favorite recurring NPCs was captured by the Moon Clan. It's also complex.  While "people disappearing in the woods" doesn't require a genius to figure out "werewolves," the story is more complicated than that, with layers involving magic and cult practices, which means careful players will be more rewarded with deeper investigations in this encounter than the previous one.

Once the Moon Clan has been uncovered, Father Moon's magic seems the toughest part of the adventure.  Perhaps I've missed something, but Monster Hunter's werewolves never struck me as especially terrifying, but the encounter makes up for it with numbers and home-ground advantage.  The text points out the difficulty of attacking 30+ werewolves and cultists with a typical Monster Hunter party, and suggests a more careful game of cat and mouse, though I'm not sure what in the investigation would guide them to this.  Instead, it might be best to run the final encounter as a slowly escalating set of encounters: as you start to make headway in your investigation, you'll encounter some werewolves and cultists.  As you dive into the woods to face them, you'll meet patrols and someone will suggest secrecy, and if the players screw up and attack head on, we can figure out some way to leave them an escape route (to prevent a TPK) and then harry them with the werewolves as Father Moon intones that "they know too much."

The aftermath highlights the fact that the clan is a clan.  They have children, family, and essentially make up a small town.  What do you do with all of that once you've gutted them of their weird moon cult? This doesn't draw the players down a rabbit hole the way the Midnight Bordello does, but it nonetheless poses interesting questions for Monster Hunters.

More than the Midnight Bordello, this adventure has an interesting cast of characters, such as the Traitor Son, and Father Moon and Mother Moon. It also practically begs for a a weirdo, fanatical serial-killer type "Dragon" as a major worthy, and some cunning folk who live nearby and warn the players away from Outer Haven, and also perhaps try to hide their own connections with the Cult.  There's a lot you can do with this one.

Also, an aside: I really appreciate that there's a cult in a book that's neither a crypto-christian cult, nor a satanic cult, nor a cthulhu cult.  I don't necessarily mind these, it's just nice to have a bit of variety.

A Moment of Reflection

I have mixed feelings about these encounters. On the one hand, they're very by the number.  Chris essentially went through Monster Hunters 2 like a checklist, filled it in, and gave us two adventures out of it.  Neither is wildly creative or the sort of encounter that will have players sitting up and talking about how unique, innovative and unexpected it was (though with a bit of polish, the Moon Clan begins to push in that direction).  So, the worst we can say about them is that they're fine.  And for $3, that's good enough.

On the other hand, "going through a checklist" is a useful exercise for student GMs to explore. Once you see how these are constructed, cross-reference them with Monster Hunters 2, it becomes more obvious how you could create your own adventures.

Furthermore, the encounters don't hold your hand, and that's a good thing. These are not a carefully scripted adventure. Instead, it's an outline for a situation that is going on, plus advice and detailed rules on how to handle specific elements of the hunt.  The rest, though, is up to you.  Which means these are pretty easy to plant into any ongoing campaign.  Yes, if you want a few more NPCs and ties to your players, you'll have to provide those, but you always have to provide those.  Rice gets that, and doesn't try to do it for you. He gives you... encounters! It's up to you to decide how to work those into your larger campaign.

I also appreciate that Rice didn't bother to pad his wordcount.  Chris can be ruthlessly conservative with his time and wordcount, and it really works in his favor here.  These are fairly barebones and, realizing that, we get quantity.  And I'm not entirely sure, other than an even deeper description of the NPCs and their combat capabilities, and a deeper discussion of the investigation and the sort of clues the PCs might find, what we'd fill out that wordcount with.  

I think there's room in the world for a true Monster Hunters adventure, but for my money, if I'm honest, I think I prefer this Encounters format. I rarely run scripted adventures for a reason, but one of these encounters is actually pretty easy to work into my style of GMing.  So I have to admit, for me, I like them.  Thus, I see no reason to hesitate in recommending them to you.  They're a decent and cheap addition to a Monster Hunter collection.

Also, the art is hit of miss, and feels more like "GURPS standard" than the brilliance of some of the other books, but that's not really a problem.