Ideas for a monster of the week campaign?

[Rfkannen]

Howdy! So I was talking with my players, and after some clarifying and pitching, they all decided that the kind of campaign they wanted was a monster of the week game, where they wander from town to town, and deal with small 1 to 2 session adventures, fighting a new monster of the week as it were.

And for where to set it, I am going to use my hex crawl map I made for a different campaign, which is a dark spooky Forrest filled with cults and monsters.

Now I am looking for some fun monsters and encounters to fill the Forrest with, to have some options for where pcs go, any ideas?

ps. Not sure if relevant, but specifically for monster of the week they brought up scooby doo, sailor moon, super sentai, and power rangers.

Pps. Intended level range is from 1 to 9

[JNAProductions]

Check Volo's. That has a lot of lower-level gribblies.

Is there anything specific you wanted?

[BurgerBeast]

The old Minotaur in a labyrinth is a good one IMHO.

[Rfkannen]

Check Volo's. That has a lot of lower-level gribblies.

Is there anything specific you wanted?

I'll reread it!

Just any ideas for mini encounters or scenarios. I want to fill the map with fun little adventures and stuff, and I want ad many as I can do! For example the ones I have ready so far are: a town that is actually 3 changeling trying to keep strangers away while they find a hidden treasure, a troll demanding a toll for crossing its bridge, and a local noble who has been turned into a wereboarx and can only be turned back if he does something truly nice.

[Zhorn]

I love these for the travel sections of the game. Need to get players from one location to the next with it being 3-4 towns away but don't want to just handwave the journey? Throw a movie plot at them. Pick a film with a simple plot and play it out at the very next town.

Example: re-skin Jaws.
Farm comunity has been having trouble with cattle going missing.
One day a child is taken, bloody hole (collapsed) and a severed limb is found at the scene.
Villagers in an uproar send out a hunting party to find and kill the beast.
Return with a slain bulette, much cheering and fanfare at having solved the problem.
... But things don't add up for the PC's. The hole size was too big for the bulette, with no claw marks around the dig site. Cutting open the bulette reveals a mix of bone from its prey, but none of them are human (if the PC's don't find this, say an npc discovered this trying to retire the child's remains for proper burial). And to top it all off, more holes are discovered and more cattle go missing.
Monster of the week: Purple Worm

For your dark forest version, scale it down. Village is not just a couple of huts in a grove with just a pair of families? Swap the monsters around (Have a bulette as the reveal monster, have the blame based on some gricks)

[Lord Vukodlak]

I’m actually planning something similar to this. The first thing to do is the villagers it don’t know what the monster is. Maybe there a few survivors of its attacks but largely should just be body is or lack of bodies.

And even if someone did see it they probably can’t give a good description seeing as they only survived by hiding from it. Make finding out what they’re fighting part of the adventure. They find clues make, Perception checks, investigation checks, nature, arcana and religion.

Once they know what they’re dealing with they still have to find it lair. As maybe this monster is clever enough to avoid heavily armed adventures.

I’ve taken more than one episode of supernatural and turned it into a d&d adventure. Such as the ghost that you can only see of drunk. FYI If you don’t wanna fight in invisible creature in the town square. Best to tell the guard ahead of time so you aren’t arrested for drunken disorderly.

In another example the party is trying to find the monster attacking Travelers on the road between two towns. So they travel back-and-forth on the road for a week and nothing happens.
The creature can smell the oil they use to polish and maintain weapons and armor. A gun powder used by the gunslinger (This was in pathfinder). It intentionally avoided anyone it’s perceived could be a threat. So then the party finally went to great lengths to cover their scents and look vulnerable. It worked the giant hell hound and it’s pack attacked. But once they proved they could handle themselves the pack retreats and the party had to track them to their lair.

[Son of A Lich!]

So, if I'm understanding correctly, a Monsters of Legends kind of deal? like Van Helsing - The party goes to a new town in the trusty Mystery Machine, hears about something strange in the neighborhood and tracks it down?

Blur your eyes on the monsters fluff - An Owlbear is hard for a party of 1st level characters, but the players knowing it is an owlbear will give them a sense of familiarity. Having a mage punk scuba mech lurch out from the swamp with a Deep Gnome nestled in on the inside... which happens to use the Owlbear stats... will make for a much more remember-able encounter. You could even pull directly from Bioshock and have it be a big daddy (Owlbear)/lil sister (Deep Gnome warlock?) combo and it should work just fine. The fact that the players don't know the specifics of the rules for this creature can make something pretty bland really cool. Also, don't be afraid to give a monster class levels (or the abilities from class levels), without calling them out as that class. A bipedal Crocodile that swings it's massive jaws with snaps in succession may be fitting, but it's really just flurry of blows from a mechanical perspective. Or a Ettin corpse with a power generator in the inside that gives off arcs of electricity is really just a Tempest Barbarian pulling rules where it needed them most.

The locations are more important then the Monster - A big pull to the Scooby Doo formula specifically is that it is heavily formulaic, but the setting is always interesting to look at. The monsters were unique each episode, even though they're motivations were largely identical. If you frame your party as being after the 12 rune bearers of McGuffin or what have you, then the monster's motivations aren't important at all - The players have to go find the runes, and the monsters have the Runes. To keep the story interesting, each location should be largely self contained and the players have to learn about what each location entails and what it means for the hunt. Fighting in a crumbling castle that is slowly falling apart against a Thunder Crown Screamer means that the wizard is going to want Feather Fall prepared, right?

The monster is going to need Lair/Legendary actions - Solo monsters are a beast to balance correctly in D&D (You may want to do Toughness saves instead of hit points specifically for the beast, actually. If you have access to Mutants and Masterminds, just port the system over and work with it a bit for Damage rolls). However, a single monster of appropriate CR against 4 players is always going to have a distinct disadvantage in the action economy. They simply cannot do enough in the time frame to be a proper threat. It doesn't help that the players are always a little above par on the power curve compared to the typical monster. However, it's really really easy for a monster to be above the power curve if it can 1 shot or 2 shot players (By rule of thumb, in my opinion at least). At that point, it can start a death spiral very quickly with little effort. Lair actions (Actions that only happen at initiative count 20) and Legendary Actions (actions the monster can take inbetween player turns) can help balance it out, and makes the monster feel more important or special then before.

Don't Hide the monster - This is something that took me an embarrassingly long time for me to learn. If you have a safe state for the monster (Phase spiders come to mind, for example) and the party has no way to engage with the fight, the tension you are trying to build just feels cheap. Basically, the monster is wasting the players turns and occasionally, their buffs. The players may do this to your monster instead (Banishment and Maze come to mind), but it allows them to have a breather to patch each other up or take care of other pressing issues. This is especially true for monsters that play peek-a-boo and hide in shadows with stealth checks way to high for the players perception. It's bad to not get to attack when you want or need to attack, it's worse to be told that you don't get to attack because "You didn't do well enough". You can always give the players a way to break it's safe spot, like a Candle whose light pulls it out of the ethereal plane, for example, but it's important to make sure that it's the players agency and not something up to a die roll.

That's my advice for a Legendary Monsters style game.

[Aett_Thorn]

After arriving in town, while the party gets their evening beer/food ingestion on, an old man comes barging into the tavern, yelling and screaming about how some terrible monster has taken his daughter.

While the old man first goes up to some local hunter for assistance, the hunter ignores him completely, and the old man eventually comes over to your party looking for help. He says that the monster took his daughter to the old castle outside of town, and begs you to help him get her back.

If the party accepts, they can go to the castle and explore around. Almost every room has some sort of Animate Objects cast on it, or some sort of Animated Armor/Cloaker/Mimic in it. The party is attacked by clocks, wardrobes, and candelabras. When they finally defeat the main enemy (a werewolf or similar), the woman they were supposed to rescue comes in and begs the party not to kill him. This is the point where the party should realize that they are the bad guys in the “Beauty and the Beast” movie.

[NRSASD]

I ran a similar style monster of the week campaign recently. Here's the highlights of that campaign:


A golem powered by a wraith (instead of an elemental spirit) loose in an apartment block, slaughtering commoners and raising them as specters.
A fancy ball in a yuan-ti embassy. Nobody knew the ambassadorial staff were yuan-ti, and the party were hired as bodyguards.... for the person who assassinated the diplomat.
Retrieving an artifact from a crypt, except that by moving it they unleashed great uncle Flameskull.
Clearing out a haunted building dedicated to "the preservation of all life". The PCs thought it was a hospital. It was a taxidermist's shop.
A giant spider that hunts magic users and absorbs their personalities/spellcasting abilities. It fed on a troupe of bards and became obsessed with Phantom of the Opera (it wore a top hat and cape, sang lines from the play at the PCs)

[Unoriginal]

You could go the Inuyasha road: fragments of an artifact has been scattered all around the land, and it's transforming people/empowering monsters.

That way you can start with different villages and town and places (ex: a Monk dojo), establish how it usually is, and then pick up a fitting monster (ex: the dojo's master has been turned into a super-Oni by the artifact's fragment) to establish the disturbance.