Greetings cryptid hunters! Eight days left in the campaign and we've pushed past the $120k mark which means we'll be creating two new hunter playbooks for you:

At $140k, Marek Golonka will create new Ensemble Team Rules and an accompanying Team Playbook so you can pair that fresh-faced Hunter with a haggard veteran counting down the days to retirement!

With just over a week left, this goal is firmly within our sights so please keep sharing the project with your friends on social media!

Marek also has this week's Design Diary on hunter stories and RPG scenarios. Over to Marek:

Scenarios - A Love/Hate Affair

Hello friends! My main contribution to this project is the "hunter story" concept, as well as most of the stories you can find in the Hunter’s Journal—although Luke and Michael contributed some very fine ones, too! I’m quite happy with how hunter stories turned out, and even more importantly, I’m extremely happy with the playtest games I've run with them. Those games were both very personal for the hunters and required very little preparation on my part.

When reflecting on the core intent behind the design of hunter stories, I realized they’re the finest expression of my decades-long love/hate affair with RPG scenarios.

I started out with games that tend to use classic, rather rigidly structured scenarios, whether event- or location-based, a lot.

The first games I ran were D&D 3E, Savage Worlds, and a Polish steampulp game named Wolsung. All of them used scenarios with heavily-suggested (or scripted!) events, narrow lists of suggested actions and their requisite rolls, etc. I appreciated the fact that they presented strong ideas about what could happen during a game, but I found them a tad too constraining, and they often assumed player choices that honestly didn’t seem all that certain to me.

I became frustrated with traditional scenario structures, and held the (not uncommon) belief that “players will always do something else anyway.”  So I largely abandoned their approach and ran totally improvised games and campaigns.

When I hit upon Monster of the Week, I was amazed by how elastic and freeform the mystery formula was. MotW’s mysteries invited me to a world where I could prepare some cool things for the players, but leave room for the players to create a story that developed in ways none of us could predict.

In designing the structure of a hunter story, I wanted to take the mystery formula a step further. I wanted to invite the players to co-create the mysteries happening at the table to an even greater extent than a typical mystery allows.

The format of hunter stories allows the players to craft the stories they want to explore but still offers up the chance for new twists and surprises - the players never know exactly how the Keeper will develop the ideas they choose or invent.

Designing hunter stories came from my stubborn wish to have my cake and eat it, too - to write materials that will help people shape and improvise their games without constraining them in any way.

I wouldn’t call hunter stories “adventure scenarios”, but at the same time, if anyone asks which collection of RPG scenarios I’m most proud of, I'd easily point to the Hunter's Journal. I hope you enjoy using them as much as I have enjoyed creating them.