Hey friends, throughout the campaign we'll check in with the designers behind both the Slayer's Survival Kit and the Hunter's Journal to share their thoughts about the inspiration and intent behind the new elements you'll find in the books.

Today Luke Green takes a look at guidelines: when to respect them and when to push them. Here's Luke!

Greetings, Hunter, I’m Luke Green, though you’ll find me by the name Thrythlind in most places on the internet. I wrote many of the new playbook options and a fair amount of the advice articles you’ll find in the two supplements. And my primary goal for this project was to take things outside the box. Don’t get me wrong, definitions and expectations are useful, guidelines to direct you, but those guidelines are sometimes needless barriers.

My background in roleplaying games started with checking the 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons books out of the library but my first actual character and game session was Champions which would later become Hero System. Starting with Hero System gave me the benefit of learning that the same mechanics can be used to represent many different narratives. As such, when I finally did play Dungeons & Dragons the skill of re-skinning options was already well ingrained and I spent a lot of years adjusting existing mechanics to create the precise character I wanted even when the systems didn’t include that specific option.

The necessity of examining and reskinning mechanics became less necessary whenever I dealt with a point-based system like Hero and even less so once I started playing narrative games like Fate where doing that is a basic assumption of the rules. Finding Monster of the Week was a curious case for me because I had become a bit wary of games that used class-level systems. But I loved the game as soon as I read it because while this also used set templates, playbooks were very different from classes in many ways. Chief among those was that playbooks use mechanics to tell a story rather than to describe capabilities.

This was a game that scratched my itch to both create character builds and to tell compelling stories with my characters… and it made those two things work together.

So, when I sat down to start this project, my main goal was to both make the box bigger and to encourage people to go outside of it. For example, the Chosen is predominantly played along the line of the front-line warrior with superhuman abilities taking the fight directly to the monsters. But there are at least as many stories out there with a Chosen who is meant to be protected rather than do the protecting. One of my past players specifically wanted a tool for their Chosen weapon because they wanted to be about building and fixing rather than destroying or hurting things. So I decided to work on expanding the options available to a Chosen for their tool.

That’s not the only case of a player who decided to take things in a different direction than expected. In the same series, set in a college, I had a Crooked who decided that his criminal background was the fact that he was a member of a college fraternity, and this led to the idea that the team’s Professional was part of the campus security. In the series before that, featuring a team that would have been Agents in Black if team playbooks existed in 2015, the team basically had a mobile haven in the form of a massive RV converted to a traveling lab. These inspired me to expand the tags available to havens, agencies, and sects.

I also wanted to give advice about homebrewing your own playbooks, gear, and weird moves, but I also felt it was important to create more of those things myself, both as examples and to put some stories I wanted to tell in a manner that encouraged people to expand on and make them their own. When someone takes something which you developed and tells stories with it, that feels a bit like those old round-robin story games some of us did in elementary school.

I love telling stories because the more stories you encounter, the more stories you can tell. The “box” never completely goes away, but we have an unfortunate tendency to think it’s much smaller than it really is. Every time we either look past the box or add something to it, we erode those limits. In the end, instead of boundaries that are hard to pass, you have a box full of tools to give shape to your thoughts.