Monster of the Week
Although we didn't have a session today, I do want to make a post talking about our Monster of the Week campaign so far so that when I make posts about it later, they will make sense!
Our MOTW game is being run by my friend Toby, who is doing a great job GMing it so far! The party members are, from left to right in the attached image, Irene, Nate, Marie, Filonyn (my character), Francis, and Sebastian. The dog is Nate's pet, Princess Monster Truck. Since we've had so many sessions already, a full recap would take way too long to write and be way longer than most people would want to read! However, I'll write about the basics here, and if you want to read more you can read Filonyn's in-character bestiary, which is a biased and incomplete account of events but still gets across the basics pretty well.
The campaign takes place in the town of Newhaven, in Canada. Although it was founded as a safe place for supernatural creatures to live, most humans in Newhaven still don't know about the supernatural, and supernatural creatures that don't follow the Council regulations intended to keep it that way lose protection and are fair game for hunters to take down. Mainly, hunters target monsters that actually harm people, although technically anyone too conspicuous loses Council protection.
Our hunting party is a group of individuals who have varying levels of experience in hunting - some are professionals, while others had never been involved with hunting before. They were brought together after all being contacted by the same mysterious person to do a hunting job - not all of them willingly. Filonyn was threatened. Ever since, they've been working together to take on various jobs and working with the current devil, Lucien, to prevent a potential disaster - there is an election in Hell right now, and Lucien's opponent is running on a promise to open the gates and start the apocalypse. As everyone in our party lives on Earth, that's something it's in all of their best interests to avoid.
One of the most significant and funniest events to happen in the campaign so far is that, unhappy with how Lucien was treating them, the party decided to unionize. They all got together to write demands, Filonyn informally acting as the group's lawyer since, as former court fae, they're well-versed in the art of finding loopholes and deciding whether to close or exploit them, and then set up a meeting with Lucien to negotiate. Unfortunately for Lucien, he thought he could tilt negotiations in his favor by bringing in Irene's girlfriend as a hostage. This instead resulted in Irene pinning him against the wall, all concessions to him being removed from the contract, and him being forced to sign all contracts as-written in exchange for permission to leave the room. As a result, the party has now more or less got the actual devil in their pocket. Everyone made fun of him about it for a significant length of time.
Everybody in the party has got pretty significant personal issues, and mostly, they're kind of jerks about it. For this reason, the party dynamic is often tense, and not everyone likes each other. Recently, Filonyn has managed to alienate almost everyone by attempting to save a rampaging dryad's life instead of killing her, even attempting to sacrifice themself in the process. This may sound nice, but she was doing a lot of damage and was actively trying to kill the whole party at the time, so it was a problem.
In our current game, we're fighting a group of vampires who run a fraternity in Toronto. It's been split into a multi-part session, so it isn't over yet!