Latest from the Creator
PROJECT UPDATE
Evil Hat Productions
CREATOR
4 days ago
Project Update: Design Diary: Playtesting The Abandoned
Design Diary: Playtesting The Abandoned
by Luke Green
I recently ran a series of one-shots to playtest the Abandoned playbook and get opinions from a few different players. All told we had sixteen players split across five one-shots resulting in five different takes on the Abandoned. Some mystery elements were based on player votes, and other elements came from the mystery inspiration tables Michael Sands is putting together. However, each one-shot had two elements in common. The first of these was that the problem for each mystery involved something or someone that had been abandoned. The second was that I incorporated the Phasmophobia music box, since I had a convenient replica on hand to use in the form of a Christmas gift from my nephew.
I recently ran a series of one-shots to playtest the Abandoned playbook and get opinions from a few different players. All told we had sixteen players split across five one-shots resulting in five different takes on the Abandoned. Some mystery elements were based on player votes, and other elements came from the mystery inspiration tables Michael Sands is putting together. However, each one-shot had two elements in common. The first of these was that the problem for each mystery involved something or someone that had been abandoned. The second was that I incorporated the Phasmophobia music box, since I had a convenient replica on hand to use in the form of a Christmas gift from my nephew.
The first group’s Abandoned was Carli, a 13 year old castaway who had been stranded in the wilderness after her father fell off a cliff turning their holiday into a fight for survival. They had just come off a bitter divorce, so when she got down from the wilderness she was still alone. They encountered a series of visions washing over a part of town due to the egg of a mothman which was stuck in an abandoned research facility. They freed the egg into the world, though they alerted the owners of the defunct lab in doing so and Carli herself was changed by the energies and took on some moth-like features, including some cute antenna, which she made permanent by taking the Premonitions move.
Jesse Stein was the Abandoned of the next group. A young adult with a tall frame and stitched flesh, Jesse’s family of monsters had been mistakenly identified as a threat by a group of monster hunters who killed them and “rescued” her, leaving her the sole survivor of her family. Her group was dealing with the appearances of giant centipedes around a poisoned lake, and they discovered an abandoned lab. The central computer of this lab was a pillar in which a discarded clone had been plugged in as a processing unit. As she lost control, containment was broken. Jesse used her hacking skills to safely disconnect the clone while her team handled the giant centipedes attacking them.
Meanwhile, out in the wilds, a boy named Ray between 13 and 15 years old, was the Abandoned of this group. He’d been lured into a portal under his bed and stolen away into a magical world. Now he and his team were investigating the appearances of black-eyed children whose presence caused despair and cancer. Tracking it to an observatory deep in the national park where the forest was dying, they discovered a bunch of amateurs, possibly influenced by the being that kidnapped Ray, had summoned something to this world and left it trapped here. The black-eyed children were its attempts to seek help.
In another place, a local mall had been experiencing a series of bizarre accidents, drawing the attention of Dani Walker and her team. Dani is a young adult who grew up lost in the system and now hunted monsters alongside a hunter who may know something about her mother. As they arrived at the mall, another incident occurred and the mall management tried to stop witnesses reaching out to the police or any other official authority. Dani called them out on the duplicity and started a worker-revolt when she inadvertently exposed salary issues. It turns out a young man whose family had been scammed and forced off their land to build the mall had been making summoning bombs that called gremlins to the mall to wreak havoc.
The last group was tracking strange weather patterns, with deep snow dropping in the middle of summer around a small cabin up the mountain. A team of multiversal explorers, all yeti, had had an accident leaving only one intern left. His attempts to get out of the pocket dimension was causing the weather issues. The team that came to investigate this included a robot named Maxxx Vex. He was the Abandoned, an exploited heir whose creators failed to recognize him as sapient and exploited his abilities. Within the dimensional fluctuations as they solved the main problem, they had a vision of their creators making a new robot to exploit.
Each hunter came across as a very different sort of Abandoned and I ended up with many useful opinions on the playbook. This resulted in a few changes to the original draft of the playbook as well as inspiring some ideas for the Abandoned hunter stories. It certainly inspired confidence that I had made something fun.
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If you'd like to get an early look at Luke's Abandoned playbook, you can find the working files here.
If you'd like to get an early look at Luke's Abandoned playbook, you can find the working files here.
I know i will need to settle up soon and finalize my pledge. I was wondering if the premium dice and tokens will be available after this kickstarter. If not, this will inform my pledge.
PROJECT UPDATE
Evil Hat Productions
CREATOR
3 months ago
Project Update: Smoke Tests & Surveys
Hey friends,
We're gearing up to shift the campaign into pledge management mode!
What this means for you:
We're gearing up to shift the campaign into pledge management mode!
What this means for you:
- Within the next week we'll be sending out pledge fulfillment surveys. A small percentage of you will be in our "smoke test" group and receive your survey tomorrow.
- Your backer survey will enable you to enter your address, update and confirm your pledge, and add-on any items you didn't include in your initial pledge.
- Some of the premium add-on items will have limited quantities. Once we reach that limit, we won't be bumping it up. So take a look at any add-ons you might want and reserve them.
- We are not close to fulfillment. (We're still waiting on art.)
- We will not be locking orders for a couple months. So if you're moving soon, do not sweat it.
- We are not ready to charge you for shipping. That will happen down the road when the printer has the finished producing the books. We'll give you a heads-up.
In terms of production, we're still cruising along with our project plan. We've got artwork for the Slayer's Survival Kit finished. The art for the Hunter's Journal is still underway. We recently completed another full editing pass. We don't have any deliverables to share at this time because the text is not fully finalized.
This step mostly enables us to take pre-orders from people who missed the crowdfunding portion of the campaign, so if you have any friends who want to get in on it, let them know.
That's the update. We're moving forward!
PROJECT UPDATE
Evil Hat Productions
CREATOR
3 months ago
Project Update: Check-in PLUS: Playtesting opportunity
Hey friends, short update here.
First, Luke Green has completed a first pass on one of our stretch goals! The Abandoned is a new hunter playbook. Like Newt from Aliens, this character was left alone through tragedy, neglect, or other circumstance.
You can check out this first draft of the Abandoned by clicking here.
Luke would like to hear how this PC plays at the table so if you have have a chance, please feel free to playtest the Abandoned. You can leave feedback directly on the linked google doc in the form of comments.
Second, progress continues behind the scenes. Art has been commissioned, roughly a third of it is in but these are two big books. We're waiting for all the pieces to come in so we can drop them in and finalize the layout.
Work on our other stretch goals continues, we're happy with where we're at with our project plan. We'll have another update for you when we hit the next milestone.
Happy New Year from all of us at Evil Hat.
First, Luke Green has completed a first pass on one of our stretch goals! The Abandoned is a new hunter playbook. Like Newt from Aliens, this character was left alone through tragedy, neglect, or other circumstance.
You can check out this first draft of the Abandoned by clicking here.
Luke would like to hear how this PC plays at the table so if you have have a chance, please feel free to playtest the Abandoned. You can leave feedback directly on the linked google doc in the form of comments.
Second, progress continues behind the scenes. Art has been commissioned, roughly a third of it is in but these are two big books. We're waiting for all the pieces to come in so we can drop them in and finalize the layout.
Work on our other stretch goals continues, we're happy with where we're at with our project plan. We'll have another update for you when we hit the next milestone.
Happy New Year from all of us at Evil Hat.
PROJECT UPDATE
Evil Hat Productions
CREATOR
5 months ago
Project Update: Thank you! Here's the next steps...
Hey friends,
Thank you so much for supporting this major expansion to Monster of the Week! Over 2,000 of you helped bring this project to life and we added over $17,000 on the final day to unlock our seventh stretch goal: Rollable Mystery tables and Zoom In/Zoom Out combat moves!
The next couple weeks will be fairly quiet in terms of updates. BackerKit needs to collect and distribute your funds to us. We are in the process of commissioning art and revising the layout, and once that's finished we'll fire off the order for the print books. We'll also be working with Campaign Coins and our print shop to get the premium gear into production.
We'll keep you apprised as we hit milestones, but for the near future we're going to keep our heads down. We take pride in delivering our crowdfunder rewards ahead of schedule and we're going to make every effort to do that here.
On a related note: in order to get you the books as quickly as possible, we choose to put the bonus material of the stretch goals on a separate production timeline. We'll deliver them digitally, as they are completed.
We don't make a habit of commissioning stretch goals until we know that the goal has actually funded. And, if you've backed projects from other companies, you've likely seen how the work of delivering stretch goals can dramatically delay delivery when they're folded into the final rewards. We want to get the goods that are finished out the door first rather than make you wait for the main deliverables.
Finally, if you have an issue with your pledge, your payment, or anything else you need our customer service team to tackle, please email us at [email protected]. We do our best to monitor the comments here, but emailing us directly is the most efficient way to get eyes on your issue.
On behalf of the whole team, once again: thank you again for being part of this project! Monster of the Week is a steadfast bestseller in our bullpen of games, and your passion for playing it is a big reason for its success.
