Monster of the week

CoFa does Pen&Paper RPGs!

You might have heard of pen and paper or table-top role-playing games – Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, Shadowrun and Call of Cthulhu are just some of the many different rule systems out there. If those still don’t ring a bell – imagine improvisational theatre, where everyone role-plays a certain character in a make-believe world and creates a story together as a group. The rule-systems mentioned before are just rough guidelines to the setting and what dice to roll to determine the outcome of certain actions, but the main principles stay the same.

It's a neat little hobby that is great to escape our mundane reality for approximately 3 hours and get to interact with colleagues outside of our regular teams. The play sessions are kept flexible regarding the number of players, so people don’t have to commit to joining every time. Both newcomers and experienced players are welcome to join.

Currently we’ve decided on a system called Monster of The Week and is described as “…a standalone action-horror RPG for 3-5 people. Hunt high school beasties a la Buffy the Vampire Slayer, travel the country to bring down unnatural creatures like the Winchester brothers of Supernatural, or head up the government investigation like Mulder and Scully.” We will be chronicling our sessions like episodes of a TV show, so everyone knows where we’ve left off last session. And so, without further ado, here’s a recap of our last session.

written by Roman Uglovskij, Junior Software Developer

Village of Handfast: Episode 1 (premiered 14.02.2023)

Debbie Winters (a seemingly ordinary 17-year-old), Timothy Hamilton (a practitioner of the strange art of spell-craft), Irina (a conspiracy theorist and cryptozoologist) and a person who the others know only as “Dave” (they own a car).

Each of them had peered beyond the veil and know of dangerous things lurking in the dark most people would consider “myth” or “fairy-tale”. It is up to them to protect the innocent from things they don’t believe in but are as real as they can be. They are hunters.

Their most recent finding is a newspaper article from the village called Handfast. It and its surrounding farmland have had their fair share of strange occurrences:

• One unusual weather event after another: a summer heatwave, a tornado, flooding.
• A spate of attacks in which a person alone, at night, has been beaten. This has happened four times over the past week.
• Accounts from a number of homes in town of food spoiling overnight, knives being blunted, objects being thrown about, and appliances failing.

Perhaps it’s nothing. And yet the hunters know better than to ignore such signs. Swiftly they made their way to the village in Dave’s car and began doing some detective work, mainly looking around and questioning witnesses, including Handfast’s entire police force in the shape of officer Edward Turner. They’ve learned that in addition to the beatings, the victims suffered a single cut to the forearm and can remember nothing about the event or their attacker. Suspecting supernatural involvement, the hunters decided to head to the local archives to investigate the town’s history. On their way there they were intercepted by a woman introducing herself as Jane Howland – the newspaper editor who wrote the article that led them here.