How I prep and run a weekly Monster of the Week campaign set in Kansas City—what’s working at the table, what I’m stealing next, and why the players are doing most of the heavy lifting.

Real places speed decisions. If one person knows the city, locations pick themselves, and descriptions stay grounded.Tools that generate prompts (face cards, location pads) beat “big prep.” They give you just enough friction to spark play.I scribble during the session and drop it into Obsidian afterward.That’s my whole workflow.

I didn’t chase “perfect tone” so much as “gameable fiction” directly through playbook selection and character history. But this is a strong trait of most PBTA games. With a brand-new group and system, I showed up with a loose first-mystery shape and waited to see which playbooks hit the table. I had a vague Fringe+Dandadan-inspired notion and a plan to blame anything truly weird on Jack Parsons ( another post being drafted!) I was absolutely faking it until we made it.Then the players made choices.

We ended up with The Flake, The Mundane, and The Curse Eater. PbtA games that retain Apocalypse World–style Hx (or variants) continue to be my favorite because character histories did a ton of work for us immediately. Out of those picks, we got:

I used all of it.

Let those answers set your agendas, fronts, goals... If it’s a picked character option, it deserves table time within two sessions.

The first mystery centered on a stalled city bus blocking traffic. It was being handled by very efficient, very official (but not actually official) first responders—including a black fire truck acting as a mobile command center.Twelve passengers vanished mid-route. One man—a blind passenger—was left behind.

The PCs were on their way to a support group meeting when they got caught in the traffic. Perfect timing.

For this first case, I took it easy as MC. We were learning how to talk to each other at the table, how moves trigger, how fiction flows into mechanics. For the first session or two, I always let players retcon choices, tweak stats, swap moves—whatever helps everyone get comfortable.

My friend Jeremiah is the best. We’ve played a ton of games together over the years, and we both hit a point where we needed some IRL gaming again. He’s my ringer. I’ll often ask him to go first—not to spotlight him, but to model how moves work, how to deliver character intros, how PbtA history questions shape play. Everyone should have a Jeremiah at their table.

What the table discovered

They fought a cockatrice and everyone leveled a move.

Session three kicked off a new mystery, and Monster of the Week says it best: the game isn’t really about fighting monsters. It’s about who the hunters are.So then: Who is Bennie?

The hook was immediate. Footage hit the KC Cryptozoological site showing a couple of KC Metro police getting overwhelmed by a massive frog-like humanoid near the river. One officer was injured and hospitalized.

By this point, the group was firing on all cylinders. Opening moves. Multiple investigation angles. Leads stacked fast. Then—bang!!

It was Bennie.The group discovered that Bennie had turned two street toughs into one massive frog monster. The players didn’t jump to violence. They talked it out, made a plan, and figured out how to restore the frogman instead of destroying him.

They pulled it off.

Then—bang!! A cliffhanger ending: the injured officer from the video is starting to turn into a frog monster, too!!

This session leaned harder into magic and Big Magic. The Curse Eater discovered some limits. Everyone started eyeing future level-up picks and thinking about long-term arcs. And just like that, we’re playing this game.

The frog creatures are minions—easy to stat straight out of the core book. Contagious brutes, whip tongues, aquatic...you know, frog monsters.

Bennie, though? No stats, I’m still running him off a Lil’ Kim mantra: “Money, power, respect.” Drives every choice, no numbers needed—until the hunters corner him. Statting Bennie will be my prep for the next session, because I’m fairly sure the hunters are going to try to catch up with him. I don’t have a plan for how that goes. I wrote earlier this week about growing Bennie. We’ll play to find out.

That’s where I am right now. I get the game up and moving around the core mechanics first, get some inertia. Then I try to add in another mechanic every session until we can carry the whole load.