"Monster of the Week" by Michael Sands

This is basically Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The TTRPG. Or so I'm told (by the cover blurb), having never actually watched Buffy. It describes itself as an "action-horror RPG".

 

Its proportion of number-crunching to narrative runs to about 10%:90% (as opposed to Dungeons & Dragons which has about 90%:10%, and Lancer with approximately 50%:50%). It relies heavily on the collaborative storytelling element of TTRPGs; the only thing keeping either players or Keeper (who runs the non-player elements of the story) in check is a mutual agreement that if they play fair with each other, it makes for a better story. Basically, it's putting a lot of weight on everyone's appreciation for narrative.

This is a horror game (at least it's meant to be, though the actual level of scariness is up to the Keeper). As such, I have even less chance of getting my family to play it with me than I have of getting them to play Lancer. Also I actually own the Lancer rulebook, unlike this one, which I just borrowed from the library.

That aside, it does look like it would be fun to play if the players and Keeper knew and liked each other. The classes (called "playbooks" in this) are innovative, and fit well with the highly narrative style of play, and there are some gentlemen's-agreement-style restrictions on what the Keeper is allowed to do. (They mostly boil down to "play fair and don't drop things on people out of the blue.")

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for swearing, violence, and gore. And spookiness. It's already a game, though it relies so much on the players and Keeper collaborating to tell the story (necessitating a human Keeper) that making it into a videogame would be very hard. The best I can think of would be making a virtual tabletop thing like D&D Beyond for it.

4 stars, though if you scare easily or just don't like horror, you would probably dislike this. I have a relatively high tolerance for that sort of thing, in print at least.

(Endnote: This is the first multiplayer TTRPG I've encountered that doesn't require more than a d6. Lancer needs a d6 and a d20, and D&D and Pathfinder both use d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and d20. The singleplayer game Four Against Darkness also uses only d6s, but that one's just for one person.)