You can find the system here. The game ran on March 1, 2025.
For starters, here is the pitch I sent my players: Welcome to Slade Corp, a monster hunting division out of Central Texas. Your jobs, as you understand them, is to track monsters and relocate them back to their natural habitats or a wildlife preserve suited for their care. This case however, is a doozy. A large radius of people have reported hauntings on a scale you've never seen before, and you're worried this is beyond your scope.
I thought the idea of a monster relocation service was interested and decided to expand from there. This storyline was constructed almost completely off the cuff. I decided on the monsters of the drekavac and La Llorona because of the German and Mexican populations in Central Texas. Yes, the drekavac is Slavic, but I couldn't find a good German ghost story in short notice, so we had to pivot slightly. The story ended up moving away from what I initially planned, but that was mostly because I left it incredibly open to my players to decide what they did and where they went. Instead of guiding them down the initial storyline I had in my head, I left the hook very open and followed them down the leads they took. Setting the story in Central Texas allowed me to introduce my brother and our family as characters in the game, much to the amusement of the players who knew my family. Ultimately our players managed to lure the drekavac children to a large aquarium filled with water from the San Saba river and lured La Llorona into the tank by promising her the children to take care of.
My players largely see MOTW as a system of ease; one that is open to interpretation and played mostly based on vibes. The game - for them - is one of designing their own adventures from the rules as written. Two of my players also run the MOTW system fairly frequently, so they like to play with the rules and bend them in fun ways. I usually acquiesce because I, as a GM, generally believe in the rule of cool, and don't typically fight my players on doing things they want to do.
That system of ease can leave a lot of things - including casting magic - up to interpretation, which can leave some players feeling like there's nothing they can do, while other players will seize upon the open-ended nature of the system and run hog wild. Truth be told, I try to work with my players to make sure everyone is doing things they want to, and help share the spotlight from one player to the next. This game ran with six players, so there was a bit of an uphill task to make sure everyone felt heard and seen equally throughout the game.
I like to think I have a decent rapport with my players; most of the players for this game have known me for upwards of 8 years or more, so I know they'd tell me if they were feeling left out or pushed aside. That said, everyone had a great time. The story was a little more slapdash than I originally intended, but I don't have to deal with the consequences of that because it was a one-shot. Even still, with a slightly rushed ended (for time constraints, we had been playing for six hours at that point), everyone got to participate equally in the ending of the story, and everyone's skills came together to save the day!
If you want a more "liveblog" experience, you can follow me over on Bluesky where I will be posting more often about my TTRPG experiences while on hiatus from actually streaming.
Thank you for reading!
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