The official tumblr page for The Agency of Narrative Intrigue and Mystery, bringing you as much TTRPG material as you're authorized to see, including promoting the work of other creators and essays/discussion on TTRPG design. A five-person team comprised of lgbt and disabled individuals trying to make it in an industry dominated by D&D5e. Authors of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy.
Welcome to tumblr page of The Agency of Narrative Intrigue and Mystery (A.N.I.M.)!
We are a small independent team of LGBT and disabled individuals who make innovative and well-polished tabletop roleplaying games that have a lot to say, best known for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy.
Combined, our team has over 20 years of experience.
Continue reading for more information about us, our games, and more!
Our Games
Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy
A TTRPG for deep character roleplay, realistic combat, player deduction, and secret monster antics!
Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is a groundbreaking TTRPG that revolutionizes mystery investigation of all kinds!
Leave behind the days of "We walk into the room and roll Investigate." Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is a TTRPG all about investigation, and its purpose-driven mechanics let players take initiative, use their characters' unique strengths to find clues, and deduce conclusions themselves. We post about it in-depth a lot, so check out our blog for more info, or just read it yourself! Payment is optional!
We plan to support Eureka for many years to come through supplements and adventure modules. It comes with a short adventure module made specifically for teaching you, your players, and their characters the ropes, but you can also find the first set of higher-stakes adventures right here!
The Eye of Neptune and FORIVA: The Angel Game
Two brilliant mysteries for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy
Two adventure modules for use with Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy!
Eureka: The Fanservice Files
A comical expansion for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy.
A mini-expansion originally intended to just be an April Fools thing, but then turned into a real expansion! This features several new character Traits and powers!
Eureka: The XXX-Files
Erotic Traits for you urban fantasy adventures!
Another mini-expansion, featuring several new character Traits and optional rules!
"Eureka: Cold Open"
A short story set in the world of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy.
Not actually a game, rather a short-story set in the world of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy.
Silk & Dagger: A Sensible Drow RPG
Navigate a deadly social gauntlet in this satirical TTRPG about Drow and their underlings.
An asymmetric comedy game of drama and drow. Players either take the role of a brutal mistress whom everything she says goes, whether she understands what she’s talking about or not, and whose position of dominance is maintained by the respect of her peers, respect that hinges on how brutal and controlling she is to her subordinates; or an array of pathetic servants who are helpless without their mistress’s “leadership,” (and maybe even be more so with it).
Edge Hedge Arena
A party game where your name is tied to an edgy hedgehog OC of immense power. Fight.
This goofy omage to the Sonic the Hedgehog fanbase of the 2000s and 2010s is more of a party game than a conventional TTRPG, but that’s just means it’s fast to play and play again. The game will pair you with a real Sonic OC, so you can stat them out and battle them against others in the ultimate blood sport.
Our Mission Statements
1. To provide a source of income for those of our team who cannot support themselves by any regular means through disability.
To this end, we ask for your support as fans, if you want us to be able to continue to create more of the work you love. We put our games up in beta for feedback and extra publicity/support while we work diligently on finishing them, and as a completely independent and unsponsored studio, we are entirely dependent on word-of-mouth from fans like you to bring our projects in front of new eyes and keep us afloat through sales and patreon subscriptions.
What you can do to ensure that we can support ourselves and continue operations:
Follow us on tumblr and bluesky
Reblogging/retweeting/whatever our posts on these sites, even if you don't have many followers, makes a huge difference and is actually how we get most of our new fans and patreon subscribers.
Talk about us!
Play our games, tell your friends about them, make posts about your adventures or characters from our games, make homebrew stuff, etc. Like with the social media posts, this is the only way the word gets out about who we are and what we do! Without word-of-mouth, we're dead in the water.
Subscribe to our Patreon!
You get monthly rewards such as Eureka updates, adventure modules, short stories, previews of new games, etc. It also gets you into our patron-exclusive discord server!
Buy, or just download, our games on Itch.io
Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy
Eureka Adventure Modules Vol. 1
Edge Hedge Arena
Money helps a lot, but even just downloading them for free gives us a boost in the algorithm and gets more eyes on us!
Donate on Ko-fi
How this helps is pretty obvious.
Buy our snoop merchandise
We only get a small cut of this, but the stuff is pretty cool, and they're good conversation starters!
2. To fight back against the overwhelming hegemonic monopoly held over the TTRPG artform by Wizards of the Coast. This goes deeper than you think.
We don’t just promote our own games, we promote the games of others, and healthy play habits as well through the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club!
Check out the A.N.I.M. RPG BOOK CLUB community on Discord - hang out with 443 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.
This is a welcoming and diverse space for fans of TTRPGs to discuss and play them. Plenty of different games will be running at any given time, but the main “book club” aspect of it is that people nominate RPGs they’d like to play, then the nominations are voted on regularly. Whatever wins, we all read and play. People are sorted into play groups based on schedule compatibility, so it’s very flexible.
Players are strongly encouraged to buy the RPG themselves to support the authors, but if you cannot for any reason, a PDF will always be provided for you. We have raised hundreds of dollars for indie and small press RPGs this way, and the community just keeps growing! If you’re a TTRPG designer, feel free to come in and nominate your own game!
Contact Us
Come talk to us in the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club or our patreon-exclusive discord server, or send us an email at [email protected]!
LONG MOSTLY UNEDITED POST AHEAD! tl;dr Eureka’s devs made the unconventional choice to create an imbalanced, volatile, and deadly tabletop combat system, and it helps make the game really good at telling detective stories. If you’re ever making a game that’s inspired by genre fiction, you shouldn’t be afraid to copy tropes that other games don’t normally use. Also, check out Eureka! It’s incredibly fun to read and play, and a master class in thoughtful game design. Full write up below.
One underrated aspect of @anim-ttrpgs’s Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy that I think tabletop designers should look to for inspiration is the fact that it doesn’t shy away from the conventions of its genre, even if they conflict with the conventional wisdom of how TTRPGs usually work. Eureka wants to be a toolkit for mystery stories in the vein of Agatha Christie-style mystery novels, film noir, or detective TV shows like Columbo and Kolchak, and it’s willing to bend tabletop gaming tradition to do that in a way that seems limiting, but actually increases the potential for compelling and appropriate stories.
The example that made this observation come up for me is the choice to create a crunchy, tactical combat system where guns and explosives absolutely break the power curve. Usually, in games that are heavily opinionated about combat and dangerous situations, the goal is for the player characters to fight with finesse and skill, often growing in power over time, and to that end there are many viable strategies that all scale massively as the players upgrade them. This is a great way to allow for fights that feel balanced, larger than life, and satisfyingly heroic. It’s also not remotely what Eureka does.
Eureka’s combat isn’t meant to emulate a modern action film, a high fantasy adventure, or a shonen anime. It aims to emulate the deadly, fast paced, environmentally driven heightened realism of action scenes in classic film noir, and to do that, it’s brave enough to ask its players to change their expectations about what a crunchy combat system looks like. Combat moves quickly, it’s physically and mentally taxing on the people involved, it’s character driven, and it is supremely dangerous. That’s abstract, but it’s pretty clear from the rules about weaponry: any bullet can incapacitate an average person in one shot, and explosives instantly kill people within their blast radius.
That’s of course not the only thing driving the danger of Eureka’s combat — another fun figure is that it only takes ten good punches or kicks to incapacitate or kill someone — but I think it’s a good way to get at the core of what Eureka tries to do: it forces you to consider what options actually make sense and create opportunities for interesting stories.
Eureka doesn’t want investigators valiantly charging across a battlefield to push up against their assailants or anything, because the stories it tries to produce are very grounded in depicting how unlikely that is to work. (If a character in a vintage noir film gets shot anywhere in their torso or head, they aren’t likely to survive without intensive medical attention, and Eureka is faithful to that!) Eureka wants people to scope out the location to improve their strategy, make smart use of ambushes and weaponry to get an advantage on people who threaten them, and run away or avoid combat if they come across someone they can’t handle.
This extreme volatility massively limits the reliability of characters’ abilities and ensures that far fewer options are available in combat, which seems like it would be less fun, but it’s quite the opposite. The action sequences that Eureka produces are incredibly engaging and fun to play out, because it makes smart use of tried and true tropes to make fights in mystery stories feel compelling and relevant. Heightened realism, danger, and desperation are important to mystery genre fiction, and Eureka seeks to put the players in that headspace. Fights are swift, violent, and often primarily decided by who had better plans and supplies. That’s by design.
There are a lot of great interactions that are enabled by this design philosophy — if a mafia goon pulls aside his jacket to reveal a handgun in his waistband, Eureka encourages the players and characters to take it seriously, because using a gun is seriously raising the stakes! That’s a trope that’s commonly used in all sorts of media, but if guns were easy to deal with, it would make no sense to worry about it. Creating a system that reflects how threatening guns can be in mystery stories and real life is a great way to avoid ludonarrative dissonance and encourage genuine character interactions, and Eureka is oozing with other design tidbits that accomplish similar things. (Hell, half the trait list is basically just there to allow investigators to embody classic genre tropes, and it’s awesome.)
(Deadly weapons in Eureka are balanced by the fact that they and the training needed to use them effectively are often challenging and expensive to get, especially by legal means — which also allows for some interesting social commentary on how violence is exceedingly easily enacted by the wealthy and powerful, while the self defense of marginalized people is criminalized and villainized — but there’s enough there for a whole other post, and this one is long enough as is.)
All that to say, if Eureka had blindly gone with the prevailing approaches taken by popular RPGs in this area (and many others), it would not be half as good at what it does — it would just feel like a reskin of some other game, but marketed as investigative urban fantasy. Instead, it’s a wholly original toolkit that lets writers, GMs, and players create their own spins on a classic plot structure in a fun and engaging way. Taking risks, thinking about incentive structures, and comparing the stories you want to tell with other media that creates a similar vibe is what takes an RPG from being just good to being great. If you’re designing a game, you can accomplish a lot by knowing what stories you want to create and honing in on why you enjoy them. And don’t be afraid to adapt ideas wholesale, either. Eureka cites multiple full pages of inspirations for the vibes, stories, and mechanics that make up its identities, and it’s a better game for it.
And, I must add, if you’re looking for a game that’s fun, good at telling stories about people investigating mysteries, has a friendly and active community, and doesn’t funnel money to Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary of Hasbro, then absolutely consider taking Eureka out for a spin! It’s a brilliant take on the mystery genre that gives players and GMs the tools to explore deep, realistic, and sometimes supernatural situations in an easy and character driven package.
It Feels Like We Shouldn’t Be Here - Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy OST
Another song from the modest Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy OST, this one actually composed specifically for it by @imsobadatnicknames. I uploaded this to YouTube early to compensate for not being able to release the first episode of the Muted Swallow actual play on February 2nd like we wanted to. It is available on patreon for subscribers, though.
This song has an actual use case for your Eureka sessions, in the same vein as this list and this list.
Try listening to this on loop during tense investigation scenes in creepy isolated locations with no one around, or places that feel like maybe they ought to be left as they are out of respect.
Staying at my gorgon friend’s place and she is walking around the house completely bare-eye naked (full length ruffled skirt that matches her scales, modest pastel blouse, no fucking eyewear)
In Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, every investigator has their secrets. Now you can discover them with your very own Transforming Monster Richard Laperches Wolfman plushie!
What looks like an ordinary human is so much more. Turn him inside out for a fluffy surprise. With monsters this cute, you're sure to regain composure!
A review for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy. You can leave a 5-star review for Eureka by going to the top-right of the store page. Just note that this is one of the rating systems where anything below a 5-star counts as negative.
Vampire: The Masquerade Episode 6: From Dusk till Dawn
Smallest Salutations and welcome to the finale of Vampire: the Masquerade! Our trio is running out of time to find Mary Brighton before the sun rises and the trail runs cold. This investigation brings them places they’d never dare go…Brooklyn. Anastasia plans a trip. Damien is in his element. Evelyn meets her match.
We have a Patreon! Check it out if you want to support us and this podcast! https://www.patreon.com/TinyTablePodcast
As always, if you have any TTRPGs you want us to try out, please email us at [email protected]
Just saw some dimwit dungeontuber claim that old-school D&D is crunchier than 5e because you track torches and rations and I think sometimes homicide is justified.
I'm gonna level with you all here. I fucking love being a commission artist. I've grown so much over these three short months and feel like I'm improving with every finished piece. However, it's become apparent that I am significantly underselling my work, considering the time and care I am dedicating to it. I want to be fair to everyone so I am going to wait until August 14th, 2026 to roll out the price change. This will allow anyone who has not had the opportunity to work with me at my current rate a chance before the increase goes into effect. I would also be willing to negotiate lower prices for simple cartoony designs in busts or portraits. You can reach out to me here, on kofi, or my business email listed on my pinned post.
A big thank you to everyone who has supported my work in ways both big and small. I cannot express how much joy I get out of doing art on a regular basis and I am so grateful to you all for this opportunity. Stay safe out there xoxo
Whatttt is with the tendency of Tumblr users to seek absolution from every single person who offhandedly posts about disagreeing with something they do
I say this not unkindly, but firmly: to function as a member of a social species, you have to get comfortable with the idea that not everyone will like you
I’m just throwing this out here because God knows our team won’t have time any time soon to make something like this. Anyone can take this idea for a Eureka mystery module and run with it. Don’t worry if you think someone else is already doing it, two people taking this same idea are still gonna turn out with two very different modules. And, that’s two modules. Players can play both.
In this post im gonna lay out all the concepts and ideas that this hypothetical module may entail. I’m making this a regular type of post where I pitch Eureka adventure modules to the fanbase in a sorta stream-of-consciousness kinda way and offer as much scaffolding as I can in the hopes that somebody will make it, because the A.N.I.M. Team is at project capacity, but more mystery modules are always needed, and if we want to play our own game then the modules we play have to be written by somebody else anyway.
Anyone with ideas they think they can contribute on this concept, please feel free to comment and discuss them.
If any of these mystery module pitches im doing inspire you to take the concept in a very different direction than outlined, that's also okay as long as it, like, follows the setting guidelines and stuff.
SPOILER WARNING: This pitch contains minor spoilers for the Eureka adventure modules The Eye of Neptune and FORIVA: The Angel Game.
Hook
A friend of the investigators invites them on a week-long camping trip somewhere really remote, and mentions something about wanting someone to “watch out for him,” but doesn’t elaborate.
When the investigators get out there, they can’t put their finger on it, but something isn’t right.
Setting the Stage
Since this guy is the investigators’ friend, they need to know some stuff about him and have a history with him. You will need to provide a pretty detailed idea of his personality in the Setting the Stage section and some ways the investigators could’ve met him and some stuff they could’ve done with him before, as well as plenty of stuff they could know about his life.
This might not be entirely necessary, but you could also do the same for every other NPC that will be on the trip. In fact this would make for some great clues when one or more of them are not acting like themselves.
A good thing to do might be to create a 1D6 table for each NPC and roll once or even twice on it for each investigator to provide some extra facts they know about the NPC in addition to the given stuff in their Setting the Stage info.
As for the specific friend that invited them and said that cryptic shit, I can tell you that he is an engineer or has some other relatively high paying job in construction or manufacturing.
Truth
Their friend is aware that the company that he works as an engineer for is cutting some serious corners on their manufacturing, and are nowhere near government regulation standards. He has threatened to blow the whistle, and was given a cryptic warning. Now he’s afraid for his life and went out on this remote camping trip to make himself hard to find while he thinks about his options and decides if he’s really going to go through with it. He will divulge all of this to the investigators and other characters present while they are on the camping trip.
Unfortunately, and unbeknownst to him, the company has already made moves to silence him before he blows the whistle. They’ve hired a hitwoman who never fails to make her targets disappear without a trace under circumstances that don’t look too obviously like murder. No one who employs her knows how she does it, but it’s probably best not to ask too many questions that could incriminate them both.
The Assassin
When I come up with Eureka module ideas, I normally don’t like to go with monsters that have a Monster Trait in the rulebook for a number of reasons. Firstly because I like to imagine investigators, especially folkloric paranormal investigators, going up against stuff that is much more “Lovecraftian” in concept (and by that I mean things that evoke the same kind of mysterious horror/dread as original Lovecraft short stories, not specific entities from “The Cthulhu Mythos,” which was compiled and powerscaled into one big canon much later). I consider both The Eye of Neptune and FORIVA: The Angel Game to fit into this category. The paranormal threats in those modules can have their motivations discerned, their actions discovered, and their plans thwarted all through investigation, but what exactly they are and where they come from can only be speculated. And that’s scary to me.
In a lot of ways TFBs and vampires do at least partially fit that bill, but the other reason I prefer to stay away from Monster Trait monsters for mystery modules is, well, their Monster Trait is fully explained in the rulebook. While Eureka doesn’t consider reading these traits to be “cheating” or anything, it does potentially introduce some situations where the player will recognize the full extent of what the monster is long before the investigator. This probably won’t ruin the entire experience, but it’s something I’d prefer to avoid dealing with.
Anyway, it isnt a hard rule for module writers to avoid making Monster Trait monsters the villains, and here I think that this idea is too cool to pass up.
The assassin is a TFB. She can easily consume and digest her targets without leaving a trace behind, and if that alone isn’t enough to sell the disappearance, she can disguise herself as them after and carry out their life long enough to convincingly portray them randomly deciding to cut all contact with their social circles and move to another country or something.
She doesn’t strictly need a “true” appearance, but I like to think that her “default human persona” looks a lot like this early concept art for the female version of the Spy from TF2, including the sense of style.
Anyway, she has already infiltrated the group by posing as one of the other NPC friends that the whistleblower friend invited. She didn’t devour this person she is taking the place of, she studied them, disguised herself as them, and did something that would make them unable to make it to the camping trip but also unable to immediately let anyone know they can’t make it to the camping trip. It would have to be something where they wouldn’t be able to contact the friend group right away about canceling and the friend group wouldn’t think anything is wrong because the TFB assassin showed up disguised as them right on time.
After maybe about a day of seemingly regular camping, the whistleblower friend sits everyone down and tells them absolutely everything about the whistleblowing stuff. This complicates everything for the TFB assassin, because now not only does she have to eliminate the whistleblower, she has to eliminate everyone here. It’ll be a lot to stomach, but she’s up to the task.
Her goal will be to eliminate every other character there before they have a chance to leave with the knowledge they have.
Also a good clue to have would be that there’s no cellphone service wherever they’re camping, but if they get to a tall hill or something they can maybe get like 1 bar and if they try to look into the friend they the TFB assassin first disguised as, the investigators may find like a tweet or something lamenting that they had to miss the camping trip with their friends.. even though.. they’re right here..
Also because the TFB assassin didn’t devour the first friend, her disguise and knowledge of this character’s personality will not be perfect. This will provide clues if the investigators get suspicious enough to think to scrutinize this friend.
However, other characters that the TFB assassin devours she will be able to use the information she absorbs from them to do a much more realistic impersonation.
The Post-Timeline
This adventure module will need a pretty extensive post-timeline, meaning things that are going to happen at certain Ticks on the Ticking Clock barring investigator intervention.
Im thinking gameplay starts when the party gets picked up by their friend and everyone drives out in one vehicle to get to the camp site. This will allow everyone to get introduced to everyone.
They get to the campsite, and everyone can get settled in.
Through some circumstances that would be elucidated in the post-timeline, the TFB assassin does not get a chance to eliminate the whistleblower that night.
Then, the next morning, the whistleblower tells everyone the information at breakfast. The TFB assassin has to change plans fast.
The first thing she needs to do is sabotage the car. In case anything goes wrong or anyone tries to flee, that will prevent their escape or at least make it harder. However, she needs to be able to drive the car back herself, so however she’s going to sabotage it it needs to be in a way that she can easily repair. This could be removing a small but vital piece, like the spark plugs, which she could hide somewhere for when she needs to put them back in and use the car.
Maybe there’s a bit of an itinerary and everyone is scheduled to go fishing mid-morning. While everyone is at the lake or river or whatever, the TFB assassin says she forgot something and has to go back for it. This will give her an excuse to go back to the cabin alone and sabotage the car.
No other NPC will offer to go with her. If a single investigator tries to go with her, she may try to devour them if she gets a chance while their back is turned or something, and then take the spark plugs. If multiple investigators go with her, she won’t try to get them both, but will try to get a short moment alone so she can send out her ancilliary and have the ancilliary steal and hide the spark plugs. If anyone tries to start the car and fails because the spark plugs are missing, a Driving skill check could probably diagnose the problem. Full Success would do it right way, Partial Success might take a Tick. A Driving skill check on the idea of why anyone might steal the spark plugs specifically could tell them that it’s a part of the car that could be put back in easily, perhaps implying that whoever stole them intends to use the car again.
The post-timeline will consist of events like this, where the TFB assassin secretly works to cut off the group’s escape routes and then pick them off one by one.
It’ll probably be innocuous camping things for a day or so until the post-timeline puts the TFB assassin in a position to devour an NPC. Unless the investigators do literally like nothing, the post-timeline probably won’t happen exactly as written, so try to write it kinda flexibly. If she sees an opportunity to devour an isolated investigator and get away with it, she will do so.
She will disguise as multiple people back and forth to keep an illusion of normalcy for as long as possible before it becomes obvious that at least one person has vanished. Like for example, if the TFB assassin is disguised as Bob, and she devours Jill, she may then disguise as Jill. But then where is Bob? Bob must be missing. While everyone searches for Bob she might disguise as Bob again and come back acting like he just took a walk. Jill went looking for him but they must have missed each other on the trail. She’ll probably come back soon. Then “Bob” goes to bed early. The TFB assassin slips out the window, disguises as Jill, and comes back after failing to find Bob out there. She’s so relieved to hear that Bob is back safe but she won’t go wake him up. They won’t see Bob and Jill in the same place from then on for as long as the TFB assassin can juggle these identities. When it becomes too much, she may just let one of the identities fully go missing, which will make everyone on-edge and alert, but by that point she may have eaten like 3 or more people even though the other characters are only aware of 1 disappearance.
Gameplay Concepts
This will probably use a kolchakian-style map and Ticking Clock even though it isn’t really otherwise kolchakian at all.
I was first thinking they are like camping in tents as stuff, but maybe their whistleblower friend has like a really remote cabin and stuff out there. Having a place that has distinct rooms and walls instead of an open campsite would help the TFB assassin isolate people.
This module may benefit from the The Elements optional rule from Extreme Conditions, and may benefit from Rations though probably less so. What it would definitely benefit from from Extreme Conditions would be the bathroom rules because it would provide in-world reasons for characters to go off alone.
Banned Traits
Normally I don’t ban traits just because they could defeat the monster, because finding the monster and how to defeat it is supposed to be the challenge, but since this module will deal with such an extensive post-timeline with relatively little pre-post-timeline evidence in the Truth, and the monster is right next to the investigators from the very beginning, it needs the monster not to be defeated too soon in order to work at all. So im banning Vampire, Wolfman, Fairy, Witch, Gorgon, TFB, Succubus, Living Doll, Changeling, and anyone with the Teleportation Mage Power.
Players Might Play Their Own Dead Characters
This is going to be a deadly module even for a pac-manian Eureka adventure, because the monster is right there with the party the whole time. She won’t discriminate between NPC and PC, if she has an opportunity she’ll take it. However, if the TFB assassin disguises as a devoured investigator, players are going to be wise to it immediately if the GM starts controlling that character. So I think this module should come with a copy-pastable set of instructions to quietly send to any player whose PC gets eaten that explains the situation and that it is now their duty to play the TFB assassin whenever the TFB assassin disguises as their dead PC, and try to keep up the charade. This is basically a co-GM role now which is what they’d be doing anyway after the death of their PC.
Hell, if you have a player you think would be up for this, you could make the TFB assassin herself an optional pregen PC, and have a player play her from the very start. This would also be a co-GM role really, but the other players would think that that player is just another regular player bringing their own investigator to the table. Just tell GMs to keep in mind that if they aren’t completely sure a particular player will say yes to this role, then asking that player will spoil at least part of the mystery for them.
All of this would take a ton of party splitting and texting beneath the table and stuff, but it only needs to work for so long.
NPC Eureka! Points
Normally, it takes a TFB about a week to process an entire adult human body, but that won’t be near fast enough for this premise to work. The TFB Trait does however have a Eureka! Point ability that allows them to digest extremely fast. For this purpose we will allow the TFB assassin, whether PC or NPC, to have Eureka! Points for the purpose of using this ability to devour and digest victims hastily.
It isn’t normal for NPCs to have Eureka! Points, but it isn’t against the rules as long as it’s done very sparingly and with a specific intent, like this. She should have like 5 or 6 Eureka! Points, or however many it would take her to rapidly digest each of the other characters in the module. NPC Eureka! Points don’t need an explanation, they aren’t exactly a dietetic in-world thing, but maybe she got them from investigating the whistleblower friend and the friend she first disguised as.
This is not currently looking very good for us this month considering how only a very small percentage of this is coming from sales. We still need at least $500 more in sales or donations if we are going to make the minimum income needed for all the team to pay their bills.
You can help by subscribing to the patreon, buying our games on itchio, or just donating on ko-fi. Even if you can't afford to give money, just talking about our games like Eureka helps a lot, as does downloading and playing them (you can get them for free on itchio).
How to Navigate the Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy Rulebook (or any large PDF) More Efficiently
It came to my attention that possibly a lot of the people who don’t know that there’s an easier way to navigate the Eureka rulebook PDF than just scrolling.
This will probably help many of you who have woes about the page count (even though I must also remind everyone that the Eureka rulebook is shorter than every WotC edition of D&D by word count. The page count just looks higher because we use big font.)
If you are using Foxit PDF Reader, click here.
It will open up a table of contents on the side that you can quickly and easily use to jump around and make navigating the rulebook a lot faster.
If you’re using Firefox to open the PDF, click here.
Then click here
This will do the same thing and open up the table of contents on the side. I have never come across a PDF reader that didn't have some feature similar to this although it might not always be in the same spot.
I don’t know what’s more detrimental to the health of TTRPGs as a medium, D&D5e players who think that TTRPGs are “collaborative storytelling” and that D&D5e does this great if you just ignore all the rules that make it not do that, or non-D&D players who realize that no edition of D&D5e is good for “collaborative storytelling” but still think that the primary purpose of all TTRPGs is to be “collaborative storytelling” and that not being good for “collaborative storytelling” a satisfying narrative is what makes D&D bad. D&D5e is bad for other reasons but you’re complaining that a cheap toothbrush doesn’t keep you warm at night.
An expectation is being placed on all pieces in this artform to do something that the majority of them were never meant to do in the first place.
Ok. Genuinely, though. What would you say the purpose of D&D5e is? What are the majority of TTRPGs made for?
Because like, a dungeon crawl is a story. So is a complex political negotiation. So is a heist. So is playing out a battle tactically. All of these things are stories, and insofar as each player contributes the actions of their characters and (in a good group) an equal stake in the enjoyment of everyone in the group, it is collaborative.
I don’t see how it isn’t for “collaborative storytelling”, and I don’t even play D&D5e. The relationship between the GM and the players isn’t adversarial. All of them are players trying to have fun, and crucially in a healthy group that doesn’t come at the cost of someone else’s fun.
Collaboratively telling a story, in some form playing make believe with rules to simulate and constrain the ways we are playing, that’s. Just what a TTRPG is. Like. Categorically.
The thing is you’re pretty much right, but I think it would be more accurate to say all of those things are collaborative, and they produce stories, which I’ll explain in a minute. This is a case of the two of us agreeing about 90% but defining terms differently and in different context. What you’re saying is true, but isn’t what most people mean when they say “TTRPGs are collaborative storytelling.”
The issue is that when people begin to define all TTRPGs as the buzzword “collaborate storytelling,” particularly coming into the hobby from watching big budget “actual play” podcasts that are more invested in producing an entertaining story for an audience than playing the game by its rules, they begin to consider the purpose of TTRPGs to be the telling of a conventionally satisfying narrative story by the standards of a book or movie, rather than the playing of a game which produces (as a byproduct) a series of actions and events which can be strung together and told as a story ad-hoc. Such a story may or may not fit marks of “good storytelling” by the standards of other mediums such as books or movies by having things like “a good plot” or “character arcs.”
By only valuing the stories produced, and by grading those stories by the storytelling standards of a different medium, you get to a mindset where a dungeon crawl is not “a good story,” nor is playing out a fight tactically, because those things, by the rules of most TTRPGs that involve them, do not produce conventionally satisfying narratives and character arcs, and often actively resist them. If you think that the only point of a TTRPG is to “collaboratively tell a good story,” then TTRPGs where characters can just make a mistake and die randomly and unceremoniously to a trap or goblin before they finish the plot or their character arc are therefore fundamentally broken and bad TTRPGs. This leads to the player base writing off like 80% of TTRPGs as complete failures, and either never touching them, or trying to “fix” them by making the GM responsible for overriding the rules every time something is about to happen that wouldn’t fit the mold of a good story by the standard of a novel or movie. I won’t get too into it here because I’ve made a million posts about it but putting this responsibility on a GM burns them out. At best, assuming the GM doesn’t burn out from this misplaced responsibility, it results in a group completely missing out on the kind of fun experiences they could be having by going with the game instead of against it. They never experience a TTRPG, they experience an improv storytelling session while the TTRPG itself constantly gets in the way like a housecat trying to climb on the table at supper time. They experience “the rules getting in the way of the story,” because the story they came for is not one the rules were ever meant to produce.
The kind of events/situations-that-become-stories produced by TTRPGs that have any D&D DNA in them(which is the majority of TTRPGs, even if the designers don’t realize it) is kinda similar to the kind of events/situations-that-become-stories in a match of Team Fortress 2, even if they do not necessarily involve violence (though of course most D&D DNA games do involve violence).
Here’s a short TF2 clip where I sneak behind a Sniper as Spy and kill him, then get scared by a ghost which renders me helpless to another Sniper who comes around the corner to kill me, but he also gets scared by the same ghost just in time for me to come out of the scared stun and kill him.
Here’s a TF2 clip where I’m playing Medic and me and a bunch of other Medics are healing one Heavy, but then he and one of the Medics get killed by a Spy right when we run into the enemy. Through a little luck and seizing the initiative in the fight though, I, as Medic with only a crappy melee weapon, overcome the odds to kill all three enemies.
Here’s a short TF2 clip why I’m playing as Spy and sneak behind a Sniper to backstab him, but he keeps moving even though he doesn’t know I’m there so I keep comedicly missing.
Here’s a short TF2 clip where I join a match to play Spy and turn invisible to sneak behind the enemy team only to get immediately killed in one hit by an enemy rocket that hit me completely by accident.
All of these are fun little stories, but they don’t have a plot or character arcs or anything like that, and all the other events of the matches they took place in, while very fun in the moment, aren’t really anything worth telling a story about after the fact, so I didn’t save the footage.
This is the kind of story that most TTRPGs produce. Here’s a similar one that’s actually from a TTRPG, where the party had to somehow get a dog down a sheer cliff at the top of a mountain.
(And TF2 players are collaborating, even if they’re on different teams. Cooperating or competing, they’ve all agreed to participate in a game where the rules of TF2 apply.)
This kind of TTRPG also can natively produce plots and character arcs and stuff that are very satisfying in the same way a well-written book or movie would be, I can think of several that happened over the course of AD&D and Eureka adventures, but this isn’t the norm nor the point. It’s a rare occurrence and not something they should be expected to do because it isn’t what they’re built for. If I logged on to TF2 with the expectation that I would experience the plot and character arcs of an action war movie on Upward, or even for the sole purpose of getting those clips to show my friends, I would come away very disappointed from most matches and probably tell you that TF2 is a bad game. This is the situation with TTRPGs and the phrase “collaborative storytelling.”
So you are saying, in order to get the best experience, we should view TTRPGs as mechanics-driven games. Even though most adventures are built up the same way a story would.
Yes, TTRPGs are mechanics-driven games, even the ones where the mechanics are actually intended and properly geared towards producing a conventionally satisfying narrative. But most TTRPGs which take after D&D in any capacity at all do not have mechanics geared towards conventional storytelling.
The reason "most adventures are built up the same way a story would" is because of the rise of the treating TTRPGs as "collaborative storytelling" foremost instead of being games which may produce a story has increasingly encouraged a playerbase who does what I described above, and that playerbase is making the adventures that are plots rather than situations, and having the "linear story with a plot" style of adventure marketed to them by WotC, whose marketing pervades every inch of the space even outside of D&D itself. When you play the kind of adventure that a particular game's rules are in sync with, it will click and you will have a fun time going with the flow of the rules. In D&D's case, its -and all descendants of it - rules are most geared towards "sandbox" adventure modules* with preset environments and situations not plots.
"The PCs will defeat the evil wizard by going to the six temples and having specific interactions with NPCs at certain times and places in a certain order and develop particular planned relationships with them" is a plot. "The PCs are in the town of Bumbleshire. There are two abandoned castles to the north and south, and some NPCs who can give XYZ information are located here, here, and here. The layout of each castle is this and this and the traps and monsters can be found in these rooms" is a situation.
*and I always have to clarify, an "adventure module" does not necessarily mean "linear scripted plot," WotC has just been putting out linear scripted plot adventure modules for 20 years because they want to keep tricking the "collaborative storytelling" people into playing their game even though it does nothing that they desire, which has unfortunately tanked the reputation of "adventure modules" because these kind of adventure modules just do not work with D&D.
I have a couple of posts where I explain these concepts further.
💬 7 🔁 241 ❤️ 275 · Different Design Frameworks of TTRPGs · A lot of the ineffective discourse surrounding TTRPGs, and way more importantly
💬 29 🔁 2230 ❤️ 2900 · Yeah many people just plain do not know that an adventure module can be something other than a completely linear scr
and just as a disclaimer, in the second post, because I didn't expect it to go anywhere, I made the mistake of saying "TTRPGs" when I should have said specifically "traditional challenge-based TTRPGs which share any DNA* with D&D."
*sharing DNA with D&D here doesn't just mean being a fantasy dungeon crawler, as will be explained in the first post I linked. Call of Cthulhu, Cyberpunk, Delta Green, Shadowrun, Mothership, Eureka, Laner, etc. just off the top of my head all have huge amounts of D&D DNA in them even though none of them are fantasy dungeon crawlers (though Call of Cthuhlu is still pretty dungeon-crawler-y).
My followers will probably remember me complaining about the time my character died in my most recent D&D game (which was a while ago now). The thing is, the way that my character died (getting comboed by unfortunate monster synergy) was frustrating, but not to the point that I should still be thinking about it over a year later. What actually made the character death so hard to stomach was that the DM had set my character up as the primary protagonist of the story he wanted to tell, about an ancient sorcerer king who was reborn to the opposing faction. If we were just playing D&D as a fun game that happened to generate a story, then that session would have been a story about a dragon-man who got in over his head and paid for it. But because the DM wanted the story to come first instead of the game, it meant we had a major problem and needed to figure out how to resolve it so that the story could continue.
