Monster of the Week: The Chosen Class Guide

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Monster of the Week is a fantastic tabletop RPG system that our Sunday game table has absolutely fallen in love with. The character creation is outstanding, the setup to make the team have pre-existing relationships with one another is fantastic, and being able to switch gears week to week or have “mini-adventures” makes it an incredible change of pace system.

There are 11 base classes in Monster of the Week with multiple more added in the expansion. Today we’re starting by reviewing one of those awesome base classes: The Chosen.

We’ll take a look at the themes, the class-specific bonuses of The Chosen, ways you could play this class, and figure out if it’s the right one for you.

Monster of the Week The Chosen Playbook
The Chosen, as illustrated from Monster of the Week.

Reviewing The Chosen Class from Monster of The Week

The Chosen is a child of prophesy. In fact, the first line of The Chosen is “Your birth was prophesied.” No pressure or anything. What’s interesting is that this doesn’t necessarily force you to be a Lawful Good Paladin-style of character. It simply means that you are not an ordinary person. Your special abilities don’t come from being a Monster, being ancient, or just being spooky weird.

You were the child of prophecy and therefore, well, you are what you are. You might embrace this, a modern knight looking to fulfill the promises spoken upon you. You could be a “Butters in Imaginationland” style of Chosen: “Aw, I’m the Chosen One? Do I have to be the Chosen One?” Or maybe a very jaded type, like Keanu Reeves’ Constantine.

The description of The Chosen class in Monster of the Week is simple and to the point:

Your birth was prophesied. You are the Chosen One, and with your abilities you can save the world. If you fail, all will be destroyed. It all rests on you. Only you.

“The Chosen” Monster of the Week, p.30

After picking from a list of general descriptions that help others get an idea of what you look like and the appearance you give off. Next are the starting ratings which shows some general starting builds and as with all MOTW classes there are plusses and minuses with each build. The very general summary of starting builds for The Chosen are:

  • Tough & Charming (Charm +2, Tough +2, Sharp +1, Cool & Weird -1)
  • Tough & Cool (Cool +2, Tough +2, Sharp +1, Charm & Weird -1)
  • Weird & Sharp (Weird +2, Sharp +2, Cool +1, Tough & Charm -1)
  • Cool & Weird (Cool +2, Weird +2, Charm +1, Sharp & Tough -1)
  • Cool and Balanced (Cool +2, Weird -1, all other stats +1)

Weird builds give you the ability to rely on more supernatural and spell-like abilities or have an understanding of these things while the Tough options build you for Combat. Cool makes sense appearing quite a bit as The Chosen needs to have some ability to react under pressure, which is why the Charming starting block is the only one that has a negative mark to Cool.

Chosen Are All About the Prophecy

Since Chosen is so strongly tied to Prophecy, you actually get to choose your Fate. No – that doesn’t mean you get to make yourself invincible versus the DM’s schemes, but it does let you put together pieces of your prophecy in a really cool way.

This not only fills out your backstory but can help the DM formulate various in-game issues or challenges that can come up as a result. The Fate is determine from attaching two tags from a list of Heroic and Doom features. This prophecy can line up or even be contradictory.

Nothing like a prophecy that is pulling you in two or more different directions. This prophecy not only can help determine more about your character, how you want to build and play them, but also gives the DM information so that when you mark off a point of Luck, the DM draws upon your prophecy to determine what happens, pulling from either the Good Fates or the Bad Fates.

Example of Chosen Fates a player could select from the options in the book include:

  1. Visions of the end of monsters, but sympathy with the enemy leads to the end of days.
  2. Secret training unlocks a mystical inheritance, but loss of loved ones leads to doubt that will undue it all.
  3. True love will be impossible love, and the resulting nemesis may not only do untold evil but make a normal life impossible.
  4. You can save the world but you can’t save everyone, and without carefully locating the right hidden allies, hosts of monsters will overrun everything you cared about.

These are just barebone prophecies that combine the two Heroic parts of Fate along with two parts of Doom parts. Mix and match whichever ones you want and you can play it as having broken up pieces or you can play it as having an in-depth understanding of why you are chosen.

You even get to choose how you found out about it whether it was from fighting off monsters, nightmares, or Bob the Hobo told you (weirdo). This leads to an awesome array of options when it comes to creating a backstory, a hero, and winding it together in a very interesting way. The Chosen from one campaign can roleplay completely differently from one in another.

The Chosen Build Their Unique Weapon

You can’t be a prophesized hero without a unique weapon, right? If you go with the Chosen you can choose your special weapon picking one “Form” and Three “Business-End.” This allows you to create some pretty gnarly weapon combinations as you can have a handle, a staff, or a chain for the form of the weapon while the business end can combine blade, spikes, and artifact or you can go long and heavy with a chain.

Whatever you choose, this gives your weapons its bonuses whether it’s additional harm, an area effect, a messy tag, or even making it magic.

So What Makes A Chosen Unique?

The first place to look is at the moves. There are going to be 2 Moves that every single Chosen is going to have that works as the backbone for this class:

Destiny’s Plaything: Basically, at the beginning of every mystery a Chosen gets to roll Weird to see what is revealed about their immediate future. Depending on the score they get a useful detail about the upcoming mystery or a vague hint. On a failure/miss, something bad will happen to you.

Oh those fickle hands of fate!

I’m Here for a Reason: Since you are Chosen and destined to do something, you work out details with the Keeper on what you must do based on your fate. You can’t die until this comes to pass, and if you die in play, you must spend a Luck point and then somehow recover or return to life. Once the task is done, you’re back to being mortal…and possibly down some of those all-important luck points.

These are the background of all Chosen who then get to choose one other “Move” that is associated with their class. Once they start leveling up they will have the opportunity to take up to two more moves.

Grading The Chosen’s Moves

Some classes have more than one clear path (see Spooky who can easily go spell damage slinger, or heavily clairvoyant) but no matter how you go with The Chosen it’s some degree of “Capable in Combat.”

The Big Entrance

This is a great flavor move and completely made for the player who wants a showy, superhero-esque character. You get a chance to play up the Cool, forcing those to watch and listen to your opening speech, potentially freezing an entire room of baddies as your team works into better position. Of course if you fail every enemy sees you as the biggest threat and comes after you so…live dangerously?

Great move for a Cool build of The Chosen and fun for roleplay, probably one of the least mechanically effective options.

Devastating

When you inflict harm of any kind you add +1 harm on top of that. In other words, you hit hard, like the Chosen Champion you are!

It’s a simple move, but for a Keeper running dangerous games or ones where you’re facing off against supernatural foes in combat a lot, it’s good to be able to put a lot of damage out fast.

Dutiful

Dutiful is attached to your Fate. When your fate shows up in any form and you act in accordance with any of your fate tags (heroic or doom) you get experience. Heroic tags allow you +1 forward, as well.

Definitely need to talk to you keeper about how “Fate rearing its head” would be interpreted, if that’s a most supernatural confrontation or ONLY when you specific storyline comes up because that affects how often this would go off. However, if it’s the “most supernatural confrontations” then I would say always take this. Getting all that extra experience to level up is huge.

Invincible

You always have +2 armor. That’s actually remarkably good for this game.

Invincible doesn’t stack, but not a lot is going to give you +2 armor so if you are going to wade into the middle of things having Invincible + Devastating isn’t a bad way to go at all.

Resilience

You heal faster than normal. Basically it’s like Devastating, but for healing yourself. When you get healing, you get to heal an extra point. Added bonus: your wounds count as being 1 less harm when the Keeper is evaluating the Harm Moves that are coming into play.

This can be good, or it can be weak, depending on what your team is made up of and how often you need (or can even get) healing in battle. If you have some magic users in the group willing to heal, it’s worth talking to them to see if this one is worth the take.

The Chosen MOTW: In Conclusion

The Chosen is an interesting class, as frankly are all of them I’ve looked at in Monster of the Week, and I’m especially keen on how they make this class one that is open and can go several different directions. You can be the courageous paladin, the worn out grunt who has seen too much, the innocent character who just wants a normal life but…there’s all that stuff.

The Chosen is a fun take on the “Prophesized One” so many RPGs rely on and is a great choice if you love to play classes that get into the middle of things.

You can check out the free PDF Monster of the Week Character Sheets to learn more about The Chosen and other classes

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