One common complaint about Vampire: The Masquerade is that many people played it as a "super-hero with fangs" game, instead of a horror-themed one. I think I may be guilty of that, but the point is that I started to wonder what a campaign like that would look like.

This seed is about that — having monsters as metahuman agents. It is also partially inspired by the TV show Supernatural, with its alternative takes on monsters, and some of H.P. Lovecraft's mythos.

I apologize for the thematic similarity between this seed and the Todkinder installments, but I don't really control my muse. Also, although this seed's default take is told from an American perspective, it doesn't mean you can't use it for your own country. In fact, the setting assumes several countries use monster-soldiers.

This first installment will set up the... err... setting, with the actual monster-soldiers being described next month.

Pitch

Super-soldiers with powers of monstrous origins secretly work for the government fighting mundane and mystical threats.

Premise

Ever since life appeared on Earth, there have been things that go bump in the night. A few perceptive (and/or unlucky) humans noticed that and decided to fight and/or exploit these creatures, but throughout history these attempts have been isolated and uncoordinated, save for rare exceptions.

This changed during the Second World War, when Allied troops were surprised by Nazi monster-powered troops — zombies, vampires and werewolves. Although these monstrous soldiers were never massively deployed, the few encounters in the battlefield proved that given time, the Nazis would be unstoppable.

Several secret missions were commissioned by the Allies to stop the production of these dark soldiers and they succeeded in destroying the Nazi monster program, which was just getting off the ground. Of course, despite the gruesomeness of the "technology", the Allied nations were very interested in having super-human troops.

After gaining access to the Munster Papers, the Nazi bible detailing the tactical use of supernatural creatures (more about it below), each country started their own secret program. After a few years of government scientists and thaumaturgists harvesting the abilities of every arcanotype they could lay their hands on, the first monster-soldiers were created.

Today, there are revenants, dhampires, werewolves, hybrid fishmen and patchwork people doing black ops for many of the superpowers of the world. Their existence is a closed guarded secret — no nation wants to rock the boat exposing the awful truth, because they have their own monster-soldiers or they plan on having.

But is it safe to play with magic? Is there something else out there ready to take advantage of all these mystical beings loose in the world? There seems to be...

Who are the PCs?

Monster-soldiers, of course. The default assumption is that the party is a rapid-response team (RRT) comprised of different arcanotypes that is on call to handle emergencies or is sent on missions in which having a variety of "talents" is an asset.

If he wants, the GM can run a ëone monster type' campaign, but that might limit the options for adventures and will probably prevent exploration of the PC dynamics involved in having different types of monster-soldiers working together.

One of the characters should be the thaumaturgical officer (TO, also knows as OO, for occult officer) of the party. The TO is a mix of doctor, wizard and occult expert that provides "medical" assistance, magical support and information management to the group. He might not have superpowers of his own, but he's no punching bag.

The Munster Papers

Not much is known about Helmut Munster except that he was a German man of some means that was obsessed with the occult. He joined the Thule Society in Munich in 1918, but realizing its members were more interested in racial purity than the occult left soon after.

Munster uses his resources to travel the world unearthing supernatural secrets and learning how to exploit them. A methodical and systematic person, Munster recorded all his findings, which included magical creatures, ancient texts and long-forgotten rituals.

Nobody knows what happened to Munster, but in 1937 Heinrich Himmler received through the mail a leather-bound book with the collected work of the German expeditionary occultist. Sent anonymously, the book was titled Die Munster Papiere.

Himmler was fascinated by the material and used the Ahnenerbe organization as the main instrument to collect and study Munster's lore. The expeditions funded by the Ahnenerbe were successful and the research on the "samples" collected was based on a vacated Bavarian castle.

Progress was hard and success was only achieved late in 1944. Himmler's Munstersoldaten (Munster-soldiers, which became monster-soldiers) did make good on the battlefield, but a joint strike of the American, British and Soviet intelligence agencies (plus a few other Allied assets) took out the whole operation and personnel before they could mass produce the monsters.

The original Munster Papers was divided in three, with the United States, England and the Soviet Union getting a piece each, although copies were made of the other two parts for all of them. Some of the Allied nations had access to these documents through one of the Big Three.

These texts seeded the development of the monster-soldiers worldwide and were extensively added to during the following years. Today, the collected body of work is known unofficially as the Munsterpedia.

Section W

In 1928, the Bureau of Investigation (later the FBI) raided a town on the coast of Massachusetts. That's when the American authorities first caught a glimpse of the shadows that existed beneath the thin veneer of normalcy that passes for reality.

Suspecting they had just scratched the tip of the iceberg, J. Edgar Hoover created a special division within the BOI that would be responsible for investigating cases that seemed "abnormal". It had no official name, but it was informally known as Section W (for ëweird').

At first, Section W had only two agents, but by the 1940s that number had grown to six. They investigated many cases, with most being revealed as hoaxes, though a few turned out to be the real thing. Eventually, these agents became de facto specialists in investigating occult- and supernatural-related matters.

After the Second World War blew the lid, at least to the Allied brass, on magic and monsters, the American government decided to create an agency that would handle the inevitable supernatural arms race. Hoover, not one to miss an opportunity of increasing his reach, offered Section W as the seed of that agency.

Section W broke off from the FBI and gained its own budget and structure to concentrate research, experimentation and training of the new breed of troops. Today, it still does that, but also coordinates the use of monster-soldiers by other government agencies and institutions.

The nature of magic

In the monster-soldiers setting magic cannot be understood by science. Its effects can be measured, but magic is not a yet-to-be-discovered part of the Standard Model — it's a different beast altogether. It can be recorded and codified, but it has its own set of rules.

So, despite endless tries by government scientists, there's no way to back-engineer a scientific solution for a problem out of a magical effect. For example, werewolves in human form have a higher than normal healing ability, not only for wounds, but also for diseases.

Researchers spent years trying to measure how this was accomplished. Maybe magic boosted the immune system to overdrive or induced the production of a different and superefficient type of antibody or changed lymphocytes into new types of cells.

They found nothing; no physical, measurable sign of this healing factor. If they cut a lycanthrope, they can see the wound knitting itself back together, but they can't see what is causing it. They only know it's magic.

That's why decades after the government mastered the creation of monster-soldiers and the use of magic, there's no appreciable impact on the world in terms of technological progress: no cancer cures, cold fusion devices or teleportation booths.

There are spells, but they are not the "quick cast" sort. They are involved rituals that take at least 10 minutes, but more commonly one or more hours.

Material links to the target can help a lot when casting a spell (sometimes, they are a requirement), so some monster-soldier missions might be as simple as getting a tissue sample from a target, like hair fibers or nail clippings.

But there are certain mundane things that have magical properties, usually warding ones that require no preparation, like salt lines that prevent spirits from passing or silver weapons that hurt werewolves.

Given that most warding and protective magic works mainly against mystical energy and immaterial or overtly supernatural beings, monster-soldiers, due to their physical nature, can eschew most of these defenses, making them perfect operatives for the high-tech and mystically-aware world of 21st-century warfare.

That's it for this installment. Next month, the notorious monster-soldiers!

I hope you liked it. Feel free to share any comments, suggestion and criticisms on the forum.