Just an FYI, I use Obsidian Notes for my campaign note taking. I don’t know if I could manage this campaign without a robust database like it.
I've spoken about how to build a satisfying monster hunt before. The P.E.G style I've described was developed over the better part of a decade through trial and error. Because hunting down a dangerous monstrosity isn't usually the focus of an entire campaign though, I was never able to test it as extensively as I had wanted. But the better part of a decade made me confident in sharing P.E.G hunts as actionable advice. Since the beginning of 2023 however, I've been building and running a monster hunting campaign that has let me run my advice through the ringer. So far, I am extremely satisfied and want to share how I built it, how it is going thus far, and new lessons I've learned along the way. (This campaign is being run in 5e D&D but most of the advice is game neutral)
Initially, the campaign started with the death of a previous one. A group of friends, who will be referred to as the Pochinki Group moving forward (Day Z Reference), had the inevitable schedule shifts that made scheduling very difficult. Our original game was dependent on everyone making sessions, a mistake on my part, and we wanted to play something that would circumvent that. Thus Adventures of Adventure Point was born. A monthly game in the world of Spiritus where the players would be members in a monster hunting guild, going on a hunt each session, slowly climbing the ranks, and building their personal bestiary as they go.
When building the game I knew there were some specific points I needed to address for it to work. It needed to;
An easy way for players to skip sessions to accommodate schedules
Allow my players to accomplish goals outside of the session
Sessions to be solely focused on the hunt
Incentivize players to hunt
Plenty of choices for my players without burning me out in with prep
For scheduling, I structured each session around a singular monster hunt. The players would take a hunt from the quest board, research & prepare for the hunt, actually do the hunt, and get back to Adventure Point successfully or not by the end of the session. A sort of self-contained session akin to a West Marches campaign. My friend, Andrew, showed me how well campaigns like that can work so I adopted the style here. For the Pochinki Group, I put up a poll of days I can run a session at the beginning of each month. They throw a vote in for each day they can make and I choose the one with the most votes. Makes it easy and keeps people from being left out too much. First point addressed!
Next, was accomplishing goals. With session time being limited I knew there wouldn't be enough time to do all the roleplay, shopping, research, etc players would want to do AND finish a hunt. So, with inspiration taken from Andrew once again, I had time pass in-game between sessions. Andrew's OSE game runs on a 1:1 calendar model. So if there is a month between sessions then a month would have passed in-game when we got back to playing. For many reasons, I opted to have a static 20 days pass between sessions. It works with the calendar of Spiritus, gives players time to work on extended downtime activities, and allows me to work on other tools to make downtime easier to manage for me. So win win all around.
Making a session focused on just hunting isn't too difficult. All that was needed was to structure a P.E.G hunt into a 3 act session. Players preparing for a hunt can take a lot of session time though, so I streamlined information gathering with a "mystery adventure" trick of mine. I set a research DC for each monster hunt so when my players talk to the tavern goers to gather rumors or pour over tomes in the Grand Bestiary, I just have them make an appropriate roll for research. Depending on how they roll they can ask me, the GM, questions about the hunt and I will give them a truthful & helpful answer themed with where they got it. So the tavern crawler will hear rumors about the dragon's scales deflecting arrow fire and the bestiary researcher will read about the density of dragon scales. But both will tell the player the dragon's AC is 20. The number of questions they get to ask depends on how high above the DC they roll. For every 2 above the DC they roll, they can ask a question. They are guaranteed a minimum of 1 question, so if they roll a 9 on a DC 10 they would get 1 question. If they rolled a 12 it would be 2 questions, and so on. For every day they spend researching I also lower the DC by 1. This rewards their prep time and makes it impossible to research more obscure monsters without spending time. Execution and Gathering are self-explanatory, have them fight the monster and get its loot. So far this three act session has worked seamlessly.
One thing of note, to save session time I have been just letting the party know where the monster is within the deep dark forest they are "hiding" in. Narrowing it down so they don't have to crawl through the forest looking for some hint of their target. I've thought about making some hunts focused on finding the creature, but I need to do some more research about how I could effectively do that while also making it feasible to complete a session within our time limits. I've made some hunts where the party needs to chase down the monster after finding it. Monsters don't want to die either so of course some run. But honestly, chase mechanics are still rough and I've had mixed success in sessions. Still working on a better version of tracking and chasing.
I knew the Pochinki Group would already be interested in hunting big dangerous monsters. But I wanted to incorporate the focus of the campaign with the game loop while also preventing my players from leveling up too fast from fighting dangerous monsters each session. So I shifted leveling into a milestone-like model instead of XP. I made a ranking system within the guild that spans all 20 PC levels. Starting in copper and ending with obsidian, there are 4 ranks in each tier and each rank equals a level. So a Copper 1 adventurer would be level 1, a Copper 4 would be level 4, and a Silver 1 would be level 5. So on and so forth. To rank up, the players need to go on a hunt ranked at least one higher than they are currently. If they succeed on two hunts like this, they level/rank up. I didn't completely throw away XP, but instead used it to calculate their gold payout. I convert whatever XP they would have earned from killing a monster into their gold reward for a hunt (-20ish% for guild costs). This has worked very very well in keeping attention and rewarding them reasonably.
The last thing needing to be addressed is how to make it easy on me while allowing my players to choose which hunt they want to go on. It was tough but I knew it would be mostly pre-campaign prep work. I needed to create a backlog of monster hunts and make them easy to reference. So I created about 40 quests that filled out all the ranks of Copper. 5 normal quests, 2 quests secretly ranked one rank higher, 1 secretly two ranks higher, 1 secretly three ranks higher, and 1 ABOMINATION quest for each tier (Copper 1, Copper 2, Copper 3, and Copper 4). The normal quests are what they say on the tin, no surprises. The secretly higher-ranked quests are to add some spice and keep players on their toes. It also simulates misinformation from the quest board, highlighting the need for research. For example, a goblin assassin in the swamps would be listed as a Copper 1 (C1) quest because the goblin was the only one seen. But if the goblin was luring adventurers into the swamp to be attacked by trained crocodiles it would probably be a Copper 3 (C3) quest instead. They are rewarded appropriately no matter what.
The ABOMINATION quests are special. Any extremely dangerous monster is labeled as an abomination by the guild. They have less information on them, they are sometimes mutations of existing monsters, and they are designed TO KILL PCs if they don't take the fight carefully. They pay triple reward gold and usually have some rare special item/ingredient that can be gained from killing it. So the draw to take them on is pretty high, but so is the risk. To give them a variety of things to face, I populate the job board with 5 quests each session. 1 ranked at their rank, 3 that are ranked 1d4 higher, and 1 ABOMINATION quest. It is a little complicated I know, but the beauty of it is once the heavy lifting was done I didn't have to do much between sessions. I still need to fill out the higher-tiered quests as they level up. But the system has worked very well so far.
What's even better is making these quests isn't too difficult. I have a single sheet of information for each quest. The top half is all about the information the party has starting out. What rank the quest is, who offered it, how much it pays, and what the actual quest text says. If it is secretly a higher-ranked quest then I include the actual rank & reward in parentheses next to the public info, for easy reference. Below that I list down the actual threat, what monsters are there, any adjustments I've made to their stat blocks, and what their motivation is. Below that is where I have the quest research DC and record how and what they learn about the monster hunt they are going on. Any information they learn I add to the monster's information page in my notes for later reference. This is so I can keep things consistent if I change anything on the fly. After that is a record of the quest history. This is important because aside from the players possibly succeeding and failing quests, I have other random NPC guild parties take on quests as well. For any quest my players don’t accept during a session, I roll to see if a random guild party manages to complete or fail a quest. If they succeed then the quest gets moved out of rotation, but it gets fun if they fail. I've established that monsters evolve rapidly, so if an NPC or PC hunt goes badly, the monster will be more difficult the next time it’s hunted. There is this one simple quest that started with a single scouting worg that has evolved into a full-on Abomination because of repeated NPC & PC failures. So the players will have to deal with it soon enough.
I do have a section for monster loot at the very bottom, but to be honest I've been pretty bad at making it up beforehand. Opting to go on the fly or spin-off ideas my players have in the moment. In the future, I want to have something to fall back on if I blank or my players don't have an idea. But so far I have yet to be punished for the lack of prep here so it keeps getting kicked down the road. I need to stop procrastinating on that. But that is the core of the campaign, and sure there are other things I prepared beforehand. Like some neat local shops and gear to grab, some details about the world they are in, and interesting NPCs for them to latch onto. But those are set dressing, the hunts are the focus.
So far it has been going great, but there are some things to note. My players just got to Copper 4 so they are about to level up into Silver tier and are just as eager to jump in as they were from the start. Over the course of several months, research is starting to feel a tiny bit repetitive to me. The players don't seem to care but I've begun looking at ways to spice things up in case it gets worse. It could just be a me thing. I have noticed at lower levels it is difficult to make solo monsters feel threatening because of the action economy. To remedy this I am experimenting with giving them a single Legendary Action to either move or attack to see if that helps. Increasing HP would only turn it into a slog and damage would make the monsters one-shot my players. Not a problem if it was an ABOMINATION quest, but not for the normal ones. I’ve already spoken about my want to make a better tracking & chase system. The players haven’t been put off by the lack of one but having it ready will help make higher level hunts more interesting. Lastly, coming up with terrain on the fly for the combat to happen in is surprisingly draining for me. So I am looking into making some sort of behind-the-screen map of the forest so I can reference it, or maybe just make a random terrain generator. Regardless it is something I need to take off my plate while running the game.
I am excited about the future of this campaign. Especially now that I feel comfortable enough to start running in person at the local game store. That will be starting this month and I am excited to see who shows up. There was quite a bit of chatter when I posted about this game. Most of that is thanks to Andrew and his work at building a TTRPG community at the place, but it still is awesome to see random people take an interest. I'll give an update sometime next month but until my next thought...