This is how I think, 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.

The cast in Occulted KC has expanded, adding a Curse-eater mentor and an occultist librarian to the roster, an exorcist who consults with the local PD, and his muscle.

The Disciples,a local gang, are squabbling, and they now have a pet frog monster.

And no one has seen Bennie in a minute.

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 start each session with a recap done by the players.I scribble during the session and drop it into Obsidian afterward.That’s my whole workflow.

Case #2 ran about four sessions and ended… unresolved. We hit Midnight on the countdown clock. The hard part for me, the MC/Keeper, is indicating the end of a mystery and the start of the next, because the moves depend on it. Here, we went a couple of sessions without any interaction with Bennie, an NPC bystander and a burned contact of Eleanor (PC). Bennie is a big lead. He gets his agenda fulfilled, as does The Monster. Because I expect these players to continue to meddle in Bennie’s business, there’s no denouement. He’s just gone, but as players, we know he’ll be back!

The Hunters:

No failures here. All consequences.

We’ve now implemented the custom move for when a player misses a session: What Were You Up To? [link]

It’s working out pretty nicely.

Through that move, we:

The unchosen options create friction. Trouble follows. Allies slip. Leverage is lost. It makes the city feel like it keeps moving even when a player can’t make it.

The Hook: There’s been a beef cooking amoung members of the Disciples. One night a meet happens. One side brings their new weaponized “make-a-frog-monster” juice, the other side brings a janky teapot. When it all goes south, a warehouse in South Grandview goes up in flames.Tracey gets grabbed by the cops for the arson and the three charred corpses. He makes his one phone call...to Eleanor.

This came together too easy. My initial thought was if the occult is unlicensed, black market tech, what happens when a normie gets a hold of something they don’t fully get? The Disciples were already a strong part of fiction, and the hunters have met and saved Jr and Tracey. Making this hook a very smooth transition from the previous case going cold.

I’m a big fan of the original X-Files and Fringe. I love the parts that blur the episodes together. I’m enjoying weaving that ‘blur’ as we move between cases; this is part of my GM prep.

I still use Ron Edwards’ outline method from Champions Now. It works extremely well for me. When the situation changes enough, I start a new file copied from the current one. This lets me “go back” and see previous ‘game states’ and what’s fallen off. Perfect for how I run games.

I still don’t know how this season ends. I’ve begun creation of an Arc as defined in Monster of the Week. Think long-form Mystery. I’m calling it ‘The Parson’s Project’.We’ll create a Team next session. Teams are playbooks that players pick, and they add theme, mechanics, and moves, and rationalize the why of hunters. I feel like both Arcs and Teams are good to bring online after a few sessions; you’ll have game fiction to anchor to.

I’ve got a small zine project live called Play Fearless: Greatest Crits — my third Zine Month project. It’s a curated collection of essays and practical tools pulled from a few years of writing Play Fearless on Substack, focused on running better sessions and building stronger table culture.

Inside you’ll find things like:

It’s a small print run (PDF + print). I’m also running a few limited online game sessions as reward tiers — a fast CBR+PNK heist setup and a short The One Ring: Moria — because I like putting the ideas into practice.

37 hours and $600 to go.