Post by studentloandebt on Sept 10, 2022 18:38:35 GMT
Monster of the Week is a standalone action-horror RPG. Set in an urban-fantasy setting, it relies on the TV trope of monster of the week, where each episode has some new monster for the hunters to track down and stop. The game takes direct inspiration from the shows that use this format, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural, The X-Files, Scooby-Doo, Dresden Files, many shows and properties. An issue with the game, however, is that it works very well for a high magic setting, which doesn't really fit the fantasy limits of DSA role play. The game can work very well in a low magic setting, but there are some parts to the game that are inherently too fantastical for it to be canon in the DSA world of Delusia. That's what this forum post is for.
This forum post is going to assume that you know how to run ttrpgs as a Game Master and is going to assume you do not need a tutorial as to how ttrpgs work or how MoTW works. That's not what this is for. This is for adapting the fun game to work canonically in DSA Role Play. I go into details that I think are going to be needed for people who know the actual game and not the DSA-version as there are things I think need to be done differently than how the actual games works, so all those details need to be explained.
Defining The Limits of DSA Fantasy
We allow fantasy in DSA RP. A lot of people have fun with it. However, there are limits to it. The words I think best work are “low magic” and “high magic”. Low Magic refers to more natural-based magic while High Magic refers to more divine, celestial, and otherworldly-based magic. I think you can start to see a difference there in how you imagine it, with nature seen as more realistic and celestials being more mythic. While, yes, both are unrealistic in that they’re both magical and magic doesn’t actually exist, I think it’s pretty understandable that one just feels more realistic than the other. Low Magic implies that the world isn’t as mundane as we think it is and there is a little weirdness to it. It’s magical, yes, but in a more grounded sense, like if there was a scale of “0=mundane, 10=eldritch incomprehensible fantasy”, low magic raises the scale up to a 1 or 2.
I’d see the former as having characters, settings, and story that are more realistic ideas of magic and not as mythic as we think of with magic in the latter. Some examples I can think of would be like this.
High Magic
-Angels
-Fireballs launching from your hand
-Summoning a storm
-A knife that can cut holes through space to create portals
Low magic
-Ghosts
-Controlling your body heat to burn people on touch
-Summoning fog
-A knife that, when held, drives you into a murderous rage to kill everyone around you and then yourself
One just feels more realistic, like if the world was just slightly weirder than you thought it was. Possiblities are expanded, but they aren't floodgates.
Realizing When The Limits Don't Matter
Just because there are limits on what the magic can canonically be does not mean that there is a limit as to what the character believe. People irl will see their toast came out a little funny and think it's literal evidence of divinity. You can get away with high magic if it's only high magic in imagination. The best way to approach this is through the power of illusion. Illusions would be a low magic and, since illusions are all abotu deception, you can have them be anything. Illusions allow you to get away with so much and trick the hunters into believing something that isn't true. Also, you can get away with the most highest of magics as long as, in the end, you can justify it as merely a low magic illusion.
Illusions also don't have to be just magical. The DSA world has some advanced tech and you can get away with disguising modern scientific technology as some kind of a natural and fantastic magic.
The Basic Moves of Monster of the Week
The Basic Moves
With this understanding of fantasy, I believe we can go on and talk about some of the integrated parts of the game. Each hunter has a series of basic moves available to them. Most of these are fine. The issue, however, comes from the moves that involve the +Weird stat. This directly concerns our interest in limiting the fantasy of the game. Some of the alternative moves are fine. Moves like No Limits, Trust Your Gut, Sensitive, Empath, Telekinesis, and Weird Science are alright as they easily work in a low magic setting.
However, there are 3 moves that are more questionable, those being Illuminated, Past Lives, and Use Magic.
Past Lives is an issue because it involves incarnations. While ghosts are allowed to a certain extent, I feel that incarnation goes beyond that and goes into high magic territory. The best way I can think around this is if, rather than incarnations guiding the player, if it was rather instead other people who are connected to the hunter. This could apply in multiple ways, with my go-to concept being something akin to Frankenstein’s Monster (which works in the Constructed playbook). I believe it could fit in the limits that someone could surgically connect together different body parts to create an artificial being. How I think Past Lives could apply here is that, when trying to channel your previous “incarnations” to discover something, you are rather channeling memories that are still connected to the body parts you are made from. You’re not actually talking with your right shoulder, but your right shoulder does still contain the memories of the fast-food manager who died and whose shoulder is now yours, so you can search their memories for assistance. Other things could possibly work. If you have ever seen the show Sense8, where 8 individuals around the world share an almost magical mental connection with one another, I think that might also possibly work within the fantasy limits. It is a reworking of the mechanics, but reworkings are required to make any of this work.
Next is Illuminated. Straight up, I don’t know way around this. You’re basically asking for divine knowledge from gods. The best idea I can think of as a reworking is, maybe, you having access to some object or totem with a consciousness to it that could answer questions, but the consciousness being hardly a person and more like random knowledge radiating from it in a way where, if you squint, maybe it can feel like a person. This is a tricky one to work in my opinion.
Lastly, there is Use Magic. This one is perhaps both the easiest and hardest to rework. “Use Magic” can basically be used to do anything. There are some effects in the list that work, like observing another place or doing something beyond human limitation, but then there’s much more iffy ones like summoning a monster into the world. Depending on how you work these, they could work. I could probably see everything on the list working depending on how you explain it could work in a low magic setting, like maybe instead of “Summon a monster into the world”, it's more like “Receive aid from the local animals/cryptids”. In my Basic Moves document, I swapped out some for others I thought might work better, but I also included the option for more depending on how you make the argument. As long as you can justify it working in a low magic setting, I think it should be fine.
There’s also a move called “Big Magic”, which is basically how to bring high magic into the game. I ran my campaign not even offering that as an option. However, the game also says that “Big Magic” could also be when non-magic hunters attempt magic, so it could work in that way depending on how you run the story.
The Playbooks, aka “No Divination”
The Playbooks
Most of the playbooks work perfectly well in a low magic MoTW. Some, however, have some issues while others just can’t work, no matter how you rework it. I’ll go through some I think need to be brought up.
The Chosen’s main thing is that they’re a chosen one. That trope usually has some kind of high magic assigned to it, especially when it comes to prophecy. In DSA RP, we do not allow people to actually see into the future. Regardless of your view of the Free Will vs Determinism debate, our RP policy is that the future cannot actually be known and, thus, prophecy isn’t allowed. That doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t make prophecies, just that they can’t actually be the magic ability to see into the future. People could, also, make predictions about the future. One work around I think can happen is people having very strong pattern recognition abilities and, through that, can make pretty accurate guesses as to what will happen, but this getting weaker and weaker the further into the future you’re guessing. None of these are guaranteed, too, just very good guesses. That is the edit I made for “Destiny’s Plaything”, that the hunter isn’t receiving future vision, but getting some boost in pattern recognition where they can guess what might happen. This advice will apply to all other playbooks that involve future vision.
Regarding that, the idea of “Destiny” would seem like that couldn’t happen, either, and you’re right. I think, however, keeping the wording around is fun flavor, and the “heroic” and “doom” tags can be fun things you’re allowed to use against the Chosen, regardless of if they were actually destined for it or not.
There are some additional playbooks that are not within the original edition of MoTW, and I think some work good and I include those. Some, however, need reworkings, and so I reworked some. The Constructed was one of those. I think the biggest issue there was with this playbook was the “Animating Force” part, and I think the solution is just altering which energy sources can be there. “Aether” is an option in the original version, but that just doesn’t seem to work in low fantasy, so I didn’t use that.
The Crooked only has a few things I changed. The move “Deal with the Devil” implies the existence of a real devil, so I swapped that out with “devil” in quotes, so just perceived as one and not an actual one. Maybe it’s a person, a monster, or just your recklessness personified. As for their “soul”, could just be their death or could be a metaphor, like sacrificing your goodness. Lastly, the Crooked has the “Underworld” section. I just removed the examples because those give worldbuilding I’d want to reserve for myself rather than have the game do for me. Also, some of those options are high magic, like gods.
The Divine just doesn’t work. I tried, I really did, but I can’t think of how to rework it while keeping the theming solid. You’re straight up a celestial answering to gods and you can teleport. I couldn’t think of any moves to substitute those that wouldn’t be basically creating a whole other playbook that isn’t even the Divine anymore.
The Exile is a tricky one. The moves weren’t that difficult to rework into low magic. The main issue is that this character is from the past and time travelled. I think it’d be obvious that time travel just wouldn’t fit, but there are ways around it. I think there could be low magic that can reduce the speed of time. Actual time can be slowed irl, so I don’t think it’s that much a stretch to have it be able to slow in some other ways. Perhaps the Exile was in a coffin or tomb made of some magic material that slows them down exceptionally so that, when they are pulled out of it, it’s much further in the future now. Or maybe some ritual had the Exile in a coma and was being fed the life force of others in the meanwhile (I’d see that as different than vampiric immortality since this couldn’t last forever, only extending you so far, and you can’t even be awake for it).
Sadly, there was also an improvement to send the hunter back to their past. There’s no way around that where they’d actually be in the past. Time just can’t be messed with like that.
The Expert just needed some edits to their haven to not be as explicitly high magic as it was. Not much.
The Hex, surprisingly, doesn’t really need many edits. They are explicitly magical, yes, but their magic doesn’t have to be entirely high magic. They can take on the aesthetic of high magic (and I’d hope so cause it’s fun looking), but most of their magic works in low magic setting, even apotheosis. Only big edit I made was to the “Cast the Bones” move so it wasn’t actual divination.
The Initiate is largely fine, just editing the Fortunes move to be guesses at the future and not divination.
The Mad Scientist had a lot of edits not because I needed to edit them, but because I was combining moves from its original playbook with the Action Scientist and The Science Guy playbooks because I thought that’d be more fun. Main edits I made against the playbook wasn’t even really much to do with fantasy but more the science fiction parts of it. We also have a technology limit and some of the tech was more iffy for a modern to near-future setting.
The Monstrous was an interesting one. Some things in there just couldn’t work. Incorporeal, for example, I couldn’t find a way for that to work as a low magic move. While we allow ghosts in RP (which are incorporeal), they work better under the concept of Stone Tape Theory where they’re more like a recording rather than conscious souls. Having a hunter be a ghost would assign too much personality to them + creates issues of how to be a ghost and also fight physical monsters. Also, I edited shapeshifting. I think that’s fine to have, but not instant shapeshifting. If your body is physically changing, that’s a lot of tissue trauma. Either you’re going to need to take it nice and slow or force it through with bad harm. Lastly, I changed the monster examples to ones I think work good in a low magic setting. Despite banshees being ghosts, I think it can work in the same way they used them in the show “Teen Wolf” where someone has banshee abilities rather than being a full on ghost. The boogeyman example I think works in someone being magically corrupted and now able to gain some kind of sustenance on fear, or maybe just having a strong addition to scaring people, and powers revolve around that.
With The Searcher, you’ll just need to be a bit careful with the “Higher Power” and “Cosmic Insight” parts. I think they can be worked with without going into high magic.
The Spell Slinger was an annoying one to work around. Most of the playbook was actually fine, but the combat magic was where the issue was. You can straight up shoot fireballs and the concept of entropy. That’s high magic. My solution was, instead, to turn the playbook into “The Enchanter”. The playbook is still overall the same but now lacks combat magic. In exchange, I gave the playbook the move “Enchantment”, which feels like a suitable substitute.
The Spooktacular needs mainly just to be careful with how you approach it. “An Infernal Power” can work, just careful how much magic the Big Bad has. With “A Negligible Price”, I think that move works best if, rather than the “world then arranges itself”, the move kinda acts like one big Rube Goldberg machine of a bunch of chain reactions going from small things affecting bigger things.
The Spooky didn’t need much edit either. I edited their Sight ability so that they couldn’t make deals with ghosts for reasons discussed in the Monstrous section above. Premonitions also needed to be edited for the usual reason of changing it from actual divination to guesses.
The Summoned is another playbook that, like The Divine, I just can't see as working. It's basically just the hell version of the Divine but also with an apocalypse. Reasonably, unless it's very isolated, an apocalypse would go against the DSA's RP Consent rules.
Mystery Creation
This might be the trickiest part for any of you that want to be the Keeper. You’ll have to remember that, for monsters, the same rules apply. If you got a high magic idea of a monster, think of ways to bring them under.
For example, instead of an actual demon that makes contracts, maybe turn them into some creepy person who just so happens to have amazing pattern recognition skills and knows a good combo of events to grant the contract request.
Instead of a revenant that actually resurrected, make it so that the person didn’t actually die but now has a last minute power boost where revenge is the only thing keeping them alive.
Instead of a lich that actually managed to come back to life with immense power, make the ritual fail to be successful and they’re now stuck in a decomposing body that’s getting worse and worse as it goes on (but you can give them power if you’d like)
You can create monsters that are just fully monsters, but I think a great way to approach a low magic monster is to have them be a corrupted human. They were once normal, but slowly began to be magically corrupted, changing more and more, becoming less and less human. This is a good route to think of because it has you think gradually, thinking of the smaller changes that started happening to them that built on top of each other until, when all together, they make the person seem like a total monster.
One example I had was of a rich woman who spent her time at a Purge-style fight arena where she killed poor people who were abducted and forced in the arena. She greatly enjoyed this horror and it began to warp her. She got a lot better at killing, eventually not even needing weapons, became more agile, faster, stronger, more deadly. She had a strong desire for killing and, soon, a physical taste for it. She was slowly transforming into a ghoul from all these dark events in her life. She became the 1st monster of my campaign, losing control of her urges and hunting people on the street, eventually killing her own husband by mistake. I could have gone with ghouls just being their own weird creature living in the world, but making it a corrupted person allowed me to think of all the nuances of the creature, which helped me identify which elements were high fantasy and which were low.
You also don’t have to make it a monster. Monster of the Week also has the option of phenomena (♫do-do do-do-do♫), of sources of weirdness rather than monsters. These, I think, would be easier to make than monsters. Make things that just radiate weirdness. One mystery I had had a locket with a photograph of someone dear to the locket owner in it. The locket owner felt less lonely when they held it and this devout energy corrupted the locket to be a weird object. Now, when the locket wasn’t being held, fog would roll in around the area and anyone caught in the fog would feel such loneliness, questioning their relationships, their self-worth, and, if there were multiple people in the fog, it made it exceptionally difficult to find or even hear each other, fully giving the impression you were alone. Only way to get rid of the fog was to hold the locket, assuming you could find it, of course.
Sounds like a weird phenomenon to me.
It’s a different style of mystery and magic in that it’s not a monster you can kill but more like a puzzle to solve, the weirdness not being a creature but an object or even a place. This is probably easier to do as it’s much easier to think of ways to make objects or places creepy and weird rather than people or animals and them being genuine threats.
I think that's just about it. Remember to keep things low in their magicalness and you should be okay!
This forum post is going to assume that you know how to run ttrpgs as a Game Master and is going to assume you do not need a tutorial as to how ttrpgs work or how MoTW works. That's not what this is for. This is for adapting the fun game to work canonically in DSA Role Play. I go into details that I think are going to be needed for people who know the actual game and not the DSA-version as there are things I think need to be done differently than how the actual games works, so all those details need to be explained.
Defining The Limits of DSA Fantasy
We allow fantasy in DSA RP. A lot of people have fun with it. However, there are limits to it. The words I think best work are “low magic” and “high magic”. Low Magic refers to more natural-based magic while High Magic refers to more divine, celestial, and otherworldly-based magic. I think you can start to see a difference there in how you imagine it, with nature seen as more realistic and celestials being more mythic. While, yes, both are unrealistic in that they’re both magical and magic doesn’t actually exist, I think it’s pretty understandable that one just feels more realistic than the other. Low Magic implies that the world isn’t as mundane as we think it is and there is a little weirdness to it. It’s magical, yes, but in a more grounded sense, like if there was a scale of “0=mundane, 10=eldritch incomprehensible fantasy”, low magic raises the scale up to a 1 or 2.
I’d see the former as having characters, settings, and story that are more realistic ideas of magic and not as mythic as we think of with magic in the latter. Some examples I can think of would be like this.
High Magic
-Angels
-Fireballs launching from your hand
-Summoning a storm
-A knife that can cut holes through space to create portals
Low magic
-Ghosts
-Controlling your body heat to burn people on touch
-Summoning fog
-A knife that, when held, drives you into a murderous rage to kill everyone around you and then yourself
One just feels more realistic, like if the world was just slightly weirder than you thought it was. Possiblities are expanded, but they aren't floodgates.
Realizing When The Limits Don't Matter
Just because there are limits on what the magic can canonically be does not mean that there is a limit as to what the character believe. People irl will see their toast came out a little funny and think it's literal evidence of divinity. You can get away with high magic if it's only high magic in imagination. The best way to approach this is through the power of illusion. Illusions would be a low magic and, since illusions are all abotu deception, you can have them be anything. Illusions allow you to get away with so much and trick the hunters into believing something that isn't true. Also, you can get away with the most highest of magics as long as, in the end, you can justify it as merely a low magic illusion.
Illusions also don't have to be just magical. The DSA world has some advanced tech and you can get away with disguising modern scientific technology as some kind of a natural and fantastic magic.
The Basic Moves of Monster of the Week
The Basic Moves
With this understanding of fantasy, I believe we can go on and talk about some of the integrated parts of the game. Each hunter has a series of basic moves available to them. Most of these are fine. The issue, however, comes from the moves that involve the +Weird stat. This directly concerns our interest in limiting the fantasy of the game. Some of the alternative moves are fine. Moves like No Limits, Trust Your Gut, Sensitive, Empath, Telekinesis, and Weird Science are alright as they easily work in a low magic setting.
However, there are 3 moves that are more questionable, those being Illuminated, Past Lives, and Use Magic.
Past Lives is an issue because it involves incarnations. While ghosts are allowed to a certain extent, I feel that incarnation goes beyond that and goes into high magic territory. The best way I can think around this is if, rather than incarnations guiding the player, if it was rather instead other people who are connected to the hunter. This could apply in multiple ways, with my go-to concept being something akin to Frankenstein’s Monster (which works in the Constructed playbook). I believe it could fit in the limits that someone could surgically connect together different body parts to create an artificial being. How I think Past Lives could apply here is that, when trying to channel your previous “incarnations” to discover something, you are rather channeling memories that are still connected to the body parts you are made from. You’re not actually talking with your right shoulder, but your right shoulder does still contain the memories of the fast-food manager who died and whose shoulder is now yours, so you can search their memories for assistance. Other things could possibly work. If you have ever seen the show Sense8, where 8 individuals around the world share an almost magical mental connection with one another, I think that might also possibly work within the fantasy limits. It is a reworking of the mechanics, but reworkings are required to make any of this work.
Next is Illuminated. Straight up, I don’t know way around this. You’re basically asking for divine knowledge from gods. The best idea I can think of as a reworking is, maybe, you having access to some object or totem with a consciousness to it that could answer questions, but the consciousness being hardly a person and more like random knowledge radiating from it in a way where, if you squint, maybe it can feel like a person. This is a tricky one to work in my opinion.
Lastly, there is Use Magic. This one is perhaps both the easiest and hardest to rework. “Use Magic” can basically be used to do anything. There are some effects in the list that work, like observing another place or doing something beyond human limitation, but then there’s much more iffy ones like summoning a monster into the world. Depending on how you work these, they could work. I could probably see everything on the list working depending on how you explain it could work in a low magic setting, like maybe instead of “Summon a monster into the world”, it's more like “Receive aid from the local animals/cryptids”. In my Basic Moves document, I swapped out some for others I thought might work better, but I also included the option for more depending on how you make the argument. As long as you can justify it working in a low magic setting, I think it should be fine.
There’s also a move called “Big Magic”, which is basically how to bring high magic into the game. I ran my campaign not even offering that as an option. However, the game also says that “Big Magic” could also be when non-magic hunters attempt magic, so it could work in that way depending on how you run the story.
The Playbooks, aka “No Divination”
The Playbooks
Most of the playbooks work perfectly well in a low magic MoTW. Some, however, have some issues while others just can’t work, no matter how you rework it. I’ll go through some I think need to be brought up.
The Chosen’s main thing is that they’re a chosen one. That trope usually has some kind of high magic assigned to it, especially when it comes to prophecy. In DSA RP, we do not allow people to actually see into the future. Regardless of your view of the Free Will vs Determinism debate, our RP policy is that the future cannot actually be known and, thus, prophecy isn’t allowed. That doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t make prophecies, just that they can’t actually be the magic ability to see into the future. People could, also, make predictions about the future. One work around I think can happen is people having very strong pattern recognition abilities and, through that, can make pretty accurate guesses as to what will happen, but this getting weaker and weaker the further into the future you’re guessing. None of these are guaranteed, too, just very good guesses. That is the edit I made for “Destiny’s Plaything”, that the hunter isn’t receiving future vision, but getting some boost in pattern recognition where they can guess what might happen. This advice will apply to all other playbooks that involve future vision.
Regarding that, the idea of “Destiny” would seem like that couldn’t happen, either, and you’re right. I think, however, keeping the wording around is fun flavor, and the “heroic” and “doom” tags can be fun things you’re allowed to use against the Chosen, regardless of if they were actually destined for it or not.
There are some additional playbooks that are not within the original edition of MoTW, and I think some work good and I include those. Some, however, need reworkings, and so I reworked some. The Constructed was one of those. I think the biggest issue there was with this playbook was the “Animating Force” part, and I think the solution is just altering which energy sources can be there. “Aether” is an option in the original version, but that just doesn’t seem to work in low fantasy, so I didn’t use that.
The Crooked only has a few things I changed. The move “Deal with the Devil” implies the existence of a real devil, so I swapped that out with “devil” in quotes, so just perceived as one and not an actual one. Maybe it’s a person, a monster, or just your recklessness personified. As for their “soul”, could just be their death or could be a metaphor, like sacrificing your goodness. Lastly, the Crooked has the “Underworld” section. I just removed the examples because those give worldbuilding I’d want to reserve for myself rather than have the game do for me. Also, some of those options are high magic, like gods.
The Divine just doesn’t work. I tried, I really did, but I can’t think of how to rework it while keeping the theming solid. You’re straight up a celestial answering to gods and you can teleport. I couldn’t think of any moves to substitute those that wouldn’t be basically creating a whole other playbook that isn’t even the Divine anymore.
The Exile is a tricky one. The moves weren’t that difficult to rework into low magic. The main issue is that this character is from the past and time travelled. I think it’d be obvious that time travel just wouldn’t fit, but there are ways around it. I think there could be low magic that can reduce the speed of time. Actual time can be slowed irl, so I don’t think it’s that much a stretch to have it be able to slow in some other ways. Perhaps the Exile was in a coffin or tomb made of some magic material that slows them down exceptionally so that, when they are pulled out of it, it’s much further in the future now. Or maybe some ritual had the Exile in a coma and was being fed the life force of others in the meanwhile (I’d see that as different than vampiric immortality since this couldn’t last forever, only extending you so far, and you can’t even be awake for it).
Sadly, there was also an improvement to send the hunter back to their past. There’s no way around that where they’d actually be in the past. Time just can’t be messed with like that.
The Expert just needed some edits to their haven to not be as explicitly high magic as it was. Not much.
The Hex, surprisingly, doesn’t really need many edits. They are explicitly magical, yes, but their magic doesn’t have to be entirely high magic. They can take on the aesthetic of high magic (and I’d hope so cause it’s fun looking), but most of their magic works in low magic setting, even apotheosis. Only big edit I made was to the “Cast the Bones” move so it wasn’t actual divination.
The Initiate is largely fine, just editing the Fortunes move to be guesses at the future and not divination.
The Mad Scientist had a lot of edits not because I needed to edit them, but because I was combining moves from its original playbook with the Action Scientist and The Science Guy playbooks because I thought that’d be more fun. Main edits I made against the playbook wasn’t even really much to do with fantasy but more the science fiction parts of it. We also have a technology limit and some of the tech was more iffy for a modern to near-future setting.
The Monstrous was an interesting one. Some things in there just couldn’t work. Incorporeal, for example, I couldn’t find a way for that to work as a low magic move. While we allow ghosts in RP (which are incorporeal), they work better under the concept of Stone Tape Theory where they’re more like a recording rather than conscious souls. Having a hunter be a ghost would assign too much personality to them + creates issues of how to be a ghost and also fight physical monsters. Also, I edited shapeshifting. I think that’s fine to have, but not instant shapeshifting. If your body is physically changing, that’s a lot of tissue trauma. Either you’re going to need to take it nice and slow or force it through with bad harm. Lastly, I changed the monster examples to ones I think work good in a low magic setting. Despite banshees being ghosts, I think it can work in the same way they used them in the show “Teen Wolf” where someone has banshee abilities rather than being a full on ghost. The boogeyman example I think works in someone being magically corrupted and now able to gain some kind of sustenance on fear, or maybe just having a strong addition to scaring people, and powers revolve around that.
With The Searcher, you’ll just need to be a bit careful with the “Higher Power” and “Cosmic Insight” parts. I think they can be worked with without going into high magic.
The Spell Slinger was an annoying one to work around. Most of the playbook was actually fine, but the combat magic was where the issue was. You can straight up shoot fireballs and the concept of entropy. That’s high magic. My solution was, instead, to turn the playbook into “The Enchanter”. The playbook is still overall the same but now lacks combat magic. In exchange, I gave the playbook the move “Enchantment”, which feels like a suitable substitute.
The Spooktacular needs mainly just to be careful with how you approach it. “An Infernal Power” can work, just careful how much magic the Big Bad has. With “A Negligible Price”, I think that move works best if, rather than the “world then arranges itself”, the move kinda acts like one big Rube Goldberg machine of a bunch of chain reactions going from small things affecting bigger things.
The Spooky didn’t need much edit either. I edited their Sight ability so that they couldn’t make deals with ghosts for reasons discussed in the Monstrous section above. Premonitions also needed to be edited for the usual reason of changing it from actual divination to guesses.
The Summoned is another playbook that, like The Divine, I just can't see as working. It's basically just the hell version of the Divine but also with an apocalypse. Reasonably, unless it's very isolated, an apocalypse would go against the DSA's RP Consent rules.
Mystery Creation
This might be the trickiest part for any of you that want to be the Keeper. You’ll have to remember that, for monsters, the same rules apply. If you got a high magic idea of a monster, think of ways to bring them under.
For example, instead of an actual demon that makes contracts, maybe turn them into some creepy person who just so happens to have amazing pattern recognition skills and knows a good combo of events to grant the contract request.
Instead of a revenant that actually resurrected, make it so that the person didn’t actually die but now has a last minute power boost where revenge is the only thing keeping them alive.
Instead of a lich that actually managed to come back to life with immense power, make the ritual fail to be successful and they’re now stuck in a decomposing body that’s getting worse and worse as it goes on (but you can give them power if you’d like)
You can create monsters that are just fully monsters, but I think a great way to approach a low magic monster is to have them be a corrupted human. They were once normal, but slowly began to be magically corrupted, changing more and more, becoming less and less human. This is a good route to think of because it has you think gradually, thinking of the smaller changes that started happening to them that built on top of each other until, when all together, they make the person seem like a total monster.
One example I had was of a rich woman who spent her time at a Purge-style fight arena where she killed poor people who were abducted and forced in the arena. She greatly enjoyed this horror and it began to warp her. She got a lot better at killing, eventually not even needing weapons, became more agile, faster, stronger, more deadly. She had a strong desire for killing and, soon, a physical taste for it. She was slowly transforming into a ghoul from all these dark events in her life. She became the 1st monster of my campaign, losing control of her urges and hunting people on the street, eventually killing her own husband by mistake. I could have gone with ghouls just being their own weird creature living in the world, but making it a corrupted person allowed me to think of all the nuances of the creature, which helped me identify which elements were high fantasy and which were low.
You also don’t have to make it a monster. Monster of the Week also has the option of phenomena (♫do-do do-do-do♫), of sources of weirdness rather than monsters. These, I think, would be easier to make than monsters. Make things that just radiate weirdness. One mystery I had had a locket with a photograph of someone dear to the locket owner in it. The locket owner felt less lonely when they held it and this devout energy corrupted the locket to be a weird object. Now, when the locket wasn’t being held, fog would roll in around the area and anyone caught in the fog would feel such loneliness, questioning their relationships, their self-worth, and, if there were multiple people in the fog, it made it exceptionally difficult to find or even hear each other, fully giving the impression you were alone. Only way to get rid of the fog was to hold the locket, assuming you could find it, of course.
Sounds like a weird phenomenon to me.
It’s a different style of mystery and magic in that it’s not a monster you can kill but more like a puzzle to solve, the weirdness not being a creature but an object or even a place. This is probably easier to do as it’s much easier to think of ways to make objects or places creepy and weird rather than people or animals and them being genuine threats.
I think that's just about it. Remember to keep things low in their magicalness and you should be okay!
