The Medieval Monster of the Week hack is out there now and I feel like rambling about how I made it

Medieval Monster of the Week was born out of seeing someone ask once again "can't I play this in a sort of classic fantasy-ish setting though?" in a facebook group, after also kind of asking myself the same. In the end I didn't exactly land on "classic fantasy" since this game really wants mundanity vs supernatural. So instead I went for "historical fiction mundanity" vs supernatural, which actually places it in a fairly unusual spot. There aren't that many stories out there about people fighting magical monsters in the non-magical middle ages.

Now, when it comes to pbta, the first answer to mind to a question like "can't I play this some other way?" is always "no, each game is supposed to be for its specific genre and setting". But on the other hand: the point is that you should follow the rules for what they are designed (and optimised), not that you can't adjust the design. And so I adjusted the design for a different requirement.

However, I did want to maintain most of the assumptions of the original game, so I kept things the same when it comes to Keeper Principles and any world specifics that weren't tied to modernity.  There were some principles that seemed to be at odds with the world, so I decided to spend some time in the booklet explaining how to keep them in place. I decided to have a somewhat assertive tone, even though I kind of expect people to take all these explanations as suggestions.

Once I ironed out all the high level problems, the fun started with the nitty gritty of changing the playbooks.

I kept the combat gear last and scoured for all references to anything that may feel even remotely modern and swapped it up or re-wrote it to have a more era-appropriate feel: moves, look, improvements, descriptions, luck specials, histories, anything. Unsurprisingly, the Professional required the most work in that regard. Some moves have to do with combat gear, so I marked them for later adjustment.

I also decided to adjust a couple of things that always bugged me which were technically out of scope: the ratings of the Mundane now all have -1 Weird (the magic stat, essentially the... not-mundane stat), the Divine's Smite got "nerfed" because it essentially destroys an interesting part of the narrative and also assumes that all monster weaknesses are combat (which is a boring assumption that the game doesn't otherwise seem to make).

Then combat gear is when things really got interesting. I actually ended up making a spreadsheet because I can't seem to be able to do anything without spreadsheets. I'll show you the spreadsheet because I'm not afraid to show messy parts of my process, but know that the sheet is basically just as messy as any notes can be:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PaCk-yEEILVHlhU5nYTggXvABFApLAV3uTt8EdvD...

I put every single piece of gear that appears in any playbook of the original game in a table, counting its presence in the game and marking which playbooks have it when 3 or less have it.

Then I made another table where I check how many pieces of gear they get and what "kind" or sort of how "good" they more or less seem to be. Also what kind of theme seems to be behind the selection. 

Initially I thought I would make a substitution version of each weapon, so I would make a weapon, then assign it to an original and swap things. After trying this for a while and finding it confusing, I decided against it in the end and went for a full rework approach instead. I also really felt like the basic mechanic weren't allowing me for some decent variation between melee weapons.

I looked at the tags, especially the range tags and decided they needed more melee spice. I made a sheet with all the original tags listed (anything that appeared at least once), but then I started modifying the list to fit what I was going to actually use. I also noticed I had no clue how to have shields in the game and I really wanted them in there because they are a classic in a medieval setting. Armor wasn't gonna fit the bill.

So in order for shields to make any sense, I decided I needed to create a block mechanic. And in order for the ol' "holding a shield while holding a weapon" to make sense without making everyone feel like they have to hold a shield, I had to introduce some kind of "two handed, one handed, dual wield" mechanic. And so I kind of slowly fell into some unfortunately d&d-ish classics that I was trying to avoid, although I've tried to handle them a bit differently (and I hope, in a way that's a bit simpler).

Once I had those mechanics sorted out I then decided to give each tag a value indicating how good it is for a weapon to have it (or how bad, if it's negative). Which then meant I could do something I really enjoy: create things by assigning tags/values and getting a formula to tell me the total value of the thing I create. This is obviously a better process to use if you are making a list of things for a strategy focused boardgame or videogame (I used this method for my unfinished ffta and pokemon balance-difficulty hacks), but it works here too (especially to jog the mind), and I can be more loose because the important is that things "feel sorta balanced" as opposed to "are absolutely and truly balanced".

I have to admit though, that I couldn't get out of my own head and started trying to keep thins balanced a little too much. I admit I sometimes gave way too many tags, but I couldn't bring myself to remove them because I really felt like they were needed to give some weapons a different vibe compared to others. I'm sure not everyone will be happy with having a halberd that is "4-harm 2-block two-handed reach heavy wood iron bulky".

Another decision I made which may be seen as controversial is that for each gear choice I present a list of equivalent weapons that can use the same tags. So instead of just saying "Sword", I give a list of things that would have identical stats, like "Sword, rapier, scimitar, iron war hammer, iron mace, morning star". This is to hopefully inspire the idea that the stat-blocks are fairly fluid and you can use them to describe things not listed if needed. Also I think it's nice to see a variety of "fluff" options with no mechanical difference, otherwise the list of available weapons would be quite small.

In the end, counting shields, I had 13 "simple" weapons, 11 "advanced" weapons, 8 "very advanced" weapons which I could distribute around and modify slightly with "fluff" tags or just minor tags like "innocuous". Different playbooks get different "levels" of gear. For example the Eerie (the Spooky) gets simple weapons, but the Wronged gets advanced weapons and a signature weapon (from a list made with some of the options from the "very advanced" list).

Once the actual gear choices were finished it was clear that the weapons were now using a completely different balance compared to the original game. Harm is slightly higher, it's easy to have quite a bit of block, the range tags are different, so I had to also use the same sheet to re-adjust the Monstrous natural weapons, the Spell-slinger's combat magic and the Chosen's special weapon.

Then, with all the changes decided, the tedious part was left: make the actual booklet, make the playbooks document. 

I wanted to use the right fonts, so I had to make the booklet in Office (LibreOffice really). And for the playbook sheets thankfully Michael Sands provided some nice InDesign files. I hadn't used InDesign in a while, so that was a surprisingly finicky process.

[edit about the below text: the cover was made before AI art became a very touchy subject in relation to using art assets without permission, and with algorithms older than Stable Diffusion or public Dalle2 access. Older algorithms tended to create images that were more abstract/messy and less obviously based on the images in their sets. Regardless, I will not be using AI art in any of my future ttrpg projects]

The cover art was made with the NightCafe AI. This actually wasn't a spur of the moment "write two words in an AI and wow cool, so good it could be a cover". I've been experimenting with AI art for months with the intention to learn how to bend it to specific styles I might want to use for ttrpg art, and it took me about 8 hours of iterations, drawing between iterations, and final photoshopping to get the exact type of image I wanted. I plan on maybe releasing illustrated playbooks in the future, but I've been having trouble with creating character images on white background with both consistent style and consistently ...let's say... human looking. You can have humans with the right face and amount of limbs if you let go of style specifics, or you can have the right style but then the people aren't exactly peopley. Not an impossible task, mind you, I would just need more time. Or Dalle2 maybe.

And that's how Medieval Monster of the Week was made :D This is probably a really boring read, but it felt nice to write it down.