Monster Extermination

I'm a big fan of things like Troll Hunter, Mononoke, Mushishi, Ghostbusters, The Witcher and similar stories. Stories about dedicated monster hunters (for lack of a better term) where the entire goal is to hunt and remove monsters. And not the normal monster extermination you'll get in RPGs; in these stories the entire focus is that act and that monster. A lot more effort is put into building up that encounter: hunter preperation, lore of the monster, particular weaknesses and strengths, and so on.

I've been thinking of running a game like this but something is bothering me. In most of these sorts of stories the monsters have a particular weakness or there is emphasis put on identifying the monster because the source of the terror isn't known. Gathering that knowledge while the beast is free and causing havok is a big part of the conflict in the story. But in these stories the resolution to that almost always relies on the characters having secret knowledge that is only revealed at the right moment. Take Mushishi for instance: Ginko knows all the Mushi, he just has to gather information before he can guess what the problem is. The knowledge is already in his head. In Troll Hunter, the students are the proxy of the audience and everything is simply told to them by Hans, who already knows those secret things.

My question is this: how do you translate into an RPG? Especially if you're not following well known or established lore like silver bullets with werewolves? How do I get my players go gather that info organically?

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Not especially well, if I'm understanding what you're wanting to do. The issue is that there's no practical reason for hiding that info. It's very dramatic, which is why the shows do it, but PCs tend to be brutally practical. It's like hiding your power level; in other media, it can be really awesome when a character reveals they were holding back and now they're SERIOUS (it's overused as fuck, but I maintain this still has dramatic appeal), but there's no real reason for PCs to operate at anything below 100% strength.

There are a few systems that do that info gathering/investigation stuff fairly well, but if you're focusing entirely on those dramatic reveals where the music amps up and everything, I'm at a loss for recommendations.

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The problem is this: Imagine I confront your party with a creature that is only weak to one specific thing. Werewolf and silver, that sort of deal. How should players come to know what that weakness is? By your reasoning, I should literally just tell them out of character because they should know it. But that rather undermines the whole idea and turns it into a generic Kill monster quest.

well it depends how savvy your players are. for a more experienced group i would give them free access to all the monster manuals and have them make knowledge checks so i could give them clues based on how well they do, things like it appears to move on four legs, is almost certainly an aberration, avoids certain things. then just let them put the pieces together themselves

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No, there are plenty of ways to do info gathering and investigations. Is that all you're looking for?

Yes, anything like that would be helpful. I have no experience with it personally and never played a system where it was a major part.

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for the investigation/ tracking part:
>provide many different clues for the players to find
>have them make knowledge/skill checks to find something/realize they recognize something that could be used to identify the monster
>have the players bring all the information they collected together to a library/knowledgeable expert/other repository of knowledge, have that repository give them several possible answers for what the monster could be, and then make them use the clues they found to correctly identify the monster (and if they don't have enough clues, have them go back for more)

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GURPS: Monster Hunters pits defenders of humanity against demons, vampires, and other creatures of the night; think WoD: Hunter or Supernatural. A lot of the focus is on the intel gathering part of The Hunt--the final encounter is the climax, obviously, but the majority of the session is investigating and pursuing the monster(s)--to the point that a party arguably needs a Sage more than they need a Witch, Commando, or Warrior. Has a very robust set of investigation rules I use for most all of my mystery adventures.

GUMSHOE, while not a monster-hunting game, has a good clue and investigation system.

In general, OSR games tend to have a very simple but straightforward way of finding clues, and that is say you're checking the right thing and you get a clue, and it's up to you to piece them together. Word of warning, though: done poorly, this grinds games to a halt, makes the game more like those horrible point-and-click adventure games on the PC, and at worst makes the game stop being an RPG and makes it instead a game of "Guess What the GM Is Thinking."

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I feel like you could go a couple of different routes.

One would be that while the players know the weakness, getting the weakness itself isn't easy. Maybe a monster needs poisoned by an herb that only exists in the murder woods or a demon can be slain only by someone who has a blood relation to the man that made a pact with it. In this scenario the PCs might have the knowledge that gives them the hook.

If you want something really out there and are using non-standard monsters, you could actually use a system where the PCs inflict a weakness on a monster every time they learn something about it up to a certain limit. So for an example of what I'm thinking of, let's say the PCs have tracked down a monster. After using some investigation and tactics on it the PCs determine it's a spirit monster, so then they choose to inflict the weakness Aversion: Objects of a Specific Faith. They continue to investigate and test its limits until they can add another weakness: Harmful Substance: Blessed Steel. Now that they have those two things, some of the PCs can use the first weakness to keep as many villagers safe as possible while the others prepare a weapon to slay the beast for good. You could also add in a failure system so that the GM could muddle with the weaknesses, so instead of Blessed Steel, the weakness is actually Blessed Silver, which might add some fun complications.

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Hmm I'll need to look harder for the GURPS one; the archive doesn't have it.

I'll look into gumshoe.
The way that I was considering doing it, and you can tell what you think of it, is by creating a set of universal rules that monsters follow and effectively creating info for each one of the rules.

For instance: "A monster's Weakness is always connected to their creation or origin". So then players have an idea of where to start; they want to know how these monsters are made or where they come from. It would essentially act like an investigation checklist they would try to fill out and by doing so expose the nature of the beast.

/gurpsgen/ has all the GURPS books. Lite is the quick-start rules that will help you understand the majority of what Monster Hunters 2: The Mission is talking about. If you plan on actually running GURPS and not just lifting the investigation rules, then the Basic Set and the other Monster Hunter books will be nice additions. Swing by the general if/when you have any questions.

>you will never slay monsters with your wisecracking skeleton sidekick

Literally Monster of the Week.

Just posting this on my way out to get MILK and maybe some subway, so this'll be a little rushed:

I have basically the following phases which I at times "hand-hold" my players into doing, in the event that they don't know what they're doing or they're just too...I wanna say imprinted on video games to follow their own instructions:

-Phase 1. Gather Witness Information.
-Phase 1.5. Physical Evidence Or "The Crime Scene".

-Phase 2. Best-Guessing Identity Of The Monster.

-Phase 3. Tracking The Monster.

-Phase 4. Maiming/Fighting The Monster

-Phase 5. Killing/Finishing Off The Monster.

The basic idea, though, is that they should widdle down possible suspects, animals, monsters, etc.. By me either asking them questions or us together compiling information n' so forth before finally going out into the bush or wherever and: cornering the creature, preventing it's escape, fighting it to exhaustion, and then coupe de gracing it to death.
This is just what I've been using and it's helped players prepare for the difference between an Ogre and a Troll or knowing they'll fight a Cockatrice vs a Wyvern and how best to deal with either, etc.

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Here's hoping you find a system you like OP, but regardless, these pictures are baller and I thank you for posting them.