Eureka by @anim-ttrpgs is such a fun TTRPG genuinely.
Im not the best at expressing myself in writing like this but i just wanna gush for a moment about how good this game is for character building and playing.
Eureka lets you make a blorbo, a real strange little guy or a weird woman, the trait system letting you pick between 3-6 gives you so much freedom to create a very specific character you want while also providing you with a great framework for their behaviour, wo even if you struggle to make characters usually the traits help you get a grasp of who you are playing.
Talking about traits i absolutely ADORE the traits themselves, as i said they inform.what your character is all about very well without forcing a particular behaviour, ive been in a game where everyone shared the same trait but everyone played it out in different ways and on top of that everyone had at least 2 more traits that also coloured their characters actions wich made for a very diverse group despite everyone sharing a trait!
The truths and fears also help with this by giving you a mechanical reason to keep in mind how your character would act in certain situations.
I could gush more, especially about misc and monster traits and how they play into character motivations but i feel likdle ive already rambled enough.
Go play eureka, look at it on itch.io, maybe join the book club!
Adding onto this, in one game I ran I found that even when two investigators have the exact same traits, their characters can still feel very different from each other.
When I ran a Call of Cthulhu module in Eureka in the A.N.I.M. RPG Book Club server (go check it out the community is great), two of the investigators had the exact same traits (My Glasses!, Perfectionist, and Skeptic), and no extra traits that were any different. But even still, when we actually all played the game the two characters had very different and interesting ways they handled the situations they found themselves in.
Dave (played by @in-a-lilac-rain) was a stoic, very practical guy who knew what he was good at (Technology) and was ready to put it to good use. He wasn't the best at talking to people and while he didn't cause problems for the other investigators, he was sometimes kinda dismissive of them, especially the resident Believer who was convinced she knew what was going on. He didn't believe in the supernatural of course, but the whole module was very unsubtle about there being fucked up paranormal nonsense happening in this town. So when he couldn't deny the truth anymore, he locked the fuck in and did his best to get out of this situation alive.
Neil (played by @ghoulfield) was a lot more nervous and unsure of himself in comparison. He got a lot of early encounters with the module's resident antagonist, and was much more quick to admit there was something paranormal happening here. He was also much more openly caring towards the other investigators, treating their wounds immediately after getting into a car accident and eventually getting somewhat peer pressured, by all his friends jumping into the spooky hell dimension, to go jump in himself.
Because of these differences, it took like 3-4 sessions for the players to realize their characters had the same traits. It was a really fun reveal and I loved seeing those two interact. Even though they had the same trait abilities as each other, each of used them in very different ways so it never felt samey. Part of the difference between these characters was likely because they were played by two different people, but I think most of the differences were due to the other parts of the character creation process (like their skills, truths, and tiers of fears) helping to separate them further. Because of this, no two investigators are going to be exactly alike. So whenever you play a game, you'll have no way of knowing what they'll do next...
Our children have become empty, worn-out bodies that are unable to even speak. Hunger has begun to kill their intestines. Their bodies are no longer able to stand up and play. Famine and a real crisis are taking the lives of our children. The UN reports came late, as there are children who have been clinically dying of hunger for weeks. Unfortunately, the world is unable to do anything. Save our children from dying of hunger.
In 48 hours, you will see our children on television screens as we bid them farewell, victims of famine and victims of the international silence on the crimes of the Zionist occupation.
Why You Should Try Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy Part 12: It Loves Game Masters and Teaches You How to Be One
This is part 12 of a multi-part series of posts about the awesome features of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, in no particular order.
Find the earlier parts here:
Part 1 Link: We Worked Hard on It!
Part 2 Link: It's Easy to Learn!
Part 3 Link: It's Easy to GM!
Part 4 Link: It's Easy to GM and Supports Narrative and Roleplay!
Part 5 Link: It Revolutionizes Investigation and Mystery Solving in TTRPGs
Part 6 Link: PCs are Not Just Mystery Solving Automatons
Part 7 Link: Excellent Time-Keeping Mechanics Keep the Pressure On
Part 8 Link: Fun and Easy Character Creation
Part 9 Link: Themes of Disability
Part 10 Link: It Has Intense Action
Part 11 Link: Oh By the Way We Made Turn Order Fast and Snappy Too
I know I already talked about how itâs easy to GM in an earlier part of this series, but Iâm bringing that up again and going into more detail. You already know if youâve read earlier parts that Eureka treats the GM as a player and insists that they should be having fun too, not just being an entertainer.
Even if a game has something called a â[game master]âs Guide,â weâve found that these âguidesâ donât really guide or teach you how to game master, they just tell you a bunch more rules. Eureka doesnât have a separate book called the â[game master]â Guide,â but it does go out of its way to teach you how it wants to be GMed every step of the way.
Eureka also has a whole chapter in the back full of additional GM resources such as optional rules, how to handle edge cases, game running advice, and homebrewing guidelines, guidelines for how to convert adventure modules from games such as Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green for Eureka, and more!
Thereâs even a whole step-by-step guide on how to write and publish your own Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy adventure modules. Writing mysteries is really hard, but thereâs no reason it has to be a mystery itself!
This, combined with how the rules themselves are presented with their intent made clear, means you will learn a lot about game design and game mastering just from reading the Eureka rulebook, whether you end up playing it or not.
The way that Eureka wants to be played and GMed may not work for every other RPG, but the truth is that every RPG has particular ways it wants to be played or GMed, but the designers rarely write this into the rules text. Simply seeing a game spell it out like Eureka does will teach you that, and teach you to look for the signs in other games of how they want to be approached. Like I said, people tell us all the time âEureka changed the way [they] think about RPGs.â
I think I can confidently say, having been a Narrator for a few different Eureka games at this point, that my experience running Eureka has made me a better GM. Not only did it show that there are other ways to run a TTRPG and that running it can be fun and exciting and not feel like a chore, but it also had quite a lot of notes and sidebars to help explain why certain features were the way they were and helped me make my own module for this system.
The way that Eureka explains all of its rules is that it is very explicit, and leaves almost no room for doubt or for misunderstandings. It also argues its points about why mechanics are the way they are and about how TTRPGs as a medium can or should be run very strongly. Even if there were things I was hesitant about at first, just having that explanation there made it feel like the designers knew what they were doing and cared about making sure the people reading it were as prepared as possible. It also made me think more about game design in general, and the creators effectively giving a peek behind the curtain made it feel less like arcane knowledge and more approachable, even for someone like me who had very little experience.
The game is also very thorough with its mechanics, which helps a lot whenever I had to consider how certain things should be run in a session or in a module. It feels like almost any time I had a question about how I should handle something, the book had an answer (or at the very least, a similar enough mechanic that I could base it off of that.) It also has a lot of explanation when it comes to things like how bonuses or penalties can effect roll probabilities (its in Expect to Fail Rolls, where there's an entire part that shows the probability of a roll's results based on the modifiers), or what skill ratings actually meant in terms of a character's experience and general knowledge of things.
Announcing a Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy Game Jam!
We're hosting a game jam over on itch.io! Submissions open in March, 2025 and will remain open until April, 2025!
Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is a groundbreaking TTRPG that revolutionizes mystery investigation of all kinds! The rulebook is available at this link for free! This community event gives long-time fans and newcomers alike a chance to flex their mystery-writing muscles.Â
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. This game jam will bring the community together to write more mysteries for their characters to solve, put together in adventure module form. You can find a helpful guide to writing Eureka mystery modules in Chapter 7 of the Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy rulebook linked above.
This game jam is non-competitive, but the developers' favorites will be linked on the Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy store page so everyone can play through your creation! You can work alone or in a team, as long as you follow these basic rules.
While you're working, and especially if you have questions, join us on the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club Discord Server. It's a club for discussing and playing all kinds of RPGs, not just Eureka, run by the creators of Eureka. You can also join our "Top Secret" Patreon Discord server and further support the A.N.I.M. team by subscribing for any amount to our patreon. We'll be happy to answer your questions about this game jam or Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy either way.
(Full submission rules below the Read More)
Rules
Submissions Must Be Adventure Modules and Be Compatible with Eureka: This game jam is for mystery adventure modules to be run with Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy. If you're unfamiliar, an adventure module is a guide for game masters to running a specific scenario for their gaming group. You can find an example of one made for Eureka alongside the rulebook linked above.
Follow the Theme: The theme/prompt picked out by our patreon subscribers is "The Call."Â By design, this prompt is flexible and leaves room for interpretation - are the characters beset by mysterious phone calls? answering a mysterious call for help in the forest? or something far stranger? (Just remember not to make it about mind-control - Eureka doesn't have that.) Your submission can be about any sort of mystery, as long as it is obviously inspired by this prompt in some way, however you interpret it. Just also make sure to follow the rest of the rules below.
Third-person Verbiage: Avoid saying "you" when referring to player-characters.
Separation of Player and Character: Ensure that your module says "investigators" when it is referring to the player-characters, and "players" when it is referring to the real people sitting around the table, and don't get them mixed up.
Characters Can Be Bigoted, but We'd Rather You Weren't: NPCs in your module may express hateful attitudes, but we do not approve of hateful attitudes from submitters themselves.Â
Stay Grounded in Eureka's Lore: Please keep your module roughly within the bounds of what the world of Eureka offers. You can read more about this within the first half of Chapter 8 in the rulebook linked above. (And remember, your submission doesn't have to be a paranormal mystery!)
Submissions Must be 5,000 Words Minimum: There is no upper limit, so be careful not to overdo it, as long as your submission has at least 5,000 words. This is the bare minimum size. Most good Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy adventure modules are about 50-100 pages, as Eureka really stresses providing detailed information to the GM and players alike.
No Generative AI: Do not submit anything that has been created in whole or in part through the use of generative "AI."
We Don't Own Your Submission: Your submission is still your property. You can even sell it after the game jam is concluded if you want. Though if you do, we recommend you keep working on it a bit to polish it up, since one month is plenty of time to get a first draft out, but even the best submissions will benefit from some critique and further refinement and editing!
These will include a further updated and more finished version of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, three short stories you may have heard me mention regarding the character Yvette Preux, the adventure modules, and, perhaps most excitingly, a sorta-playable preview of our upcoming new game, Silk&Dagger: A Sensible Drow RPG.
The best way to describe Silk&Dagger in a few sentences might be that it is a unique take on drow that explores what kind of society would actually result in the common tropes associated with them in fiction, and a game about slice-of-life in an oppressive underground society with strictly enforced social hierarchy and behavioral expectations for each social class. Most players will play servants, with one player playing a mistress, all trying to accomplish household tasks while each is weighed down by their own strict class expectations. Another player, a sort of co-GM representing the expectations of society at large, deducts and awards metacurrency based on how well each PC is sticking to what is expected of them. It is a black comedy, with a lot of the humor coming from just how overwhelmingly shitty this strict hierarchy-based society makes life for everyone, and the awkward hoops everyone has to jump through to keep up appearances.
The preview of Silk&Dagger coming to the patreon this month is not finished enough for me to call it fully playable, it doesn't even have proper character creation rules yet, but it does have enough rules and lore that you can get a good idea of how the game is supposed to play. Playtesters who have played this version with the help of me filling in the blanks verbally as we go have all said they really enjoyed it, though.
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January 30th: Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy Itchio Beta Update & Adventure Modules Release
January 2025 is when Eureka was originally supposed to be fully finished, but due to delays and, we will admit, an overambitious timeframe, Eureka just isn't fully finished this month. We will, however, be releasing what we have as an update to the free public beta on itchio. Work will still continue on Eureka as it has done, and we plan to have it fully finished by the end of this year at the absolute latest.
Along with this beta update of the rulebook, we are also releasing the beta for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy Mystery Modules Vol 1., which will include the two other Eureka adventure modules that are finished enough to be fully playable: The Eye of Neptune and FORIVA: The Angel Game, both previously only available through our patreon.
And finally,
Make at Least $1,360.82
We need to make at least $1,360.82 in January to keep the studio afloat and for me to continue supporting myself primarily through A.N.I.M. At the time of writing this (January 7th, 2025), we are at $175.30/$1,360.82.
To this end, we are really banking on the Silk&Dagger preview to draw people to the patreon, and getting a lot of itchio sales for both the Eureka beta and the never-before-fully-public adventure modules in the last couple days of the month. If you want to support us and more sure we reach this goal, reblog this post and our other posts and talk about Eureka (we live-and-die on word-of-mouth), and if you want to financially support us directly, here are some links. Thank you for all of your wonderful support thus far.
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A TTRPG for deep character roleplay, realistic combat, player deduction, and secret monster antics!
A party game where your name is tied to an edgy hedgehog OC of immense power. Fight.
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i need to get one more drawing out before 2024 ends. throwing my hat in the ring one more time...
(sketches & brief ramble and the ref image i used (!!! i used one!) under the cut. okay im tired right now thats all i got)
i could say.some other stuff but i do not feel like adding it in right now. my last hurrah. if estuary naamah of the harvest has 0 fans somebody shot and killed me
Decided to make a random traits table for you guys to roll and make a character from! Its pretty simple, all you need is 3d6. Just for fun, reblog with what traits you got and try to make a character out of them.
[Note: This table will likely change as more traits are added in, so I will be reblogging any changes made to the final list.]
So firstly, roll 3d6 dice. Each dice represents a trait and the number you roll on it will determine which of the two tables you will be rolling that trait on. If its odd, you roll on Table 1. If its even, you roll on Table 2. Then, take 2d6 and roll it for each trait to get your final results.
Table 1
1 1. Roll the table again twice to get two new results, then chose which one you prefer out of the two. If you get this one again on the reroll, roll it again
1 2. Ambidextrous
1 3. Arithmomaniac
1 4. The Ascot
1 5. Ask Questions Later
1 6. Believer
2 1. Blissfully Ignorant
2 2. Custom trait
2 3. Bottled Up
2 4. Bumbling Detective
2 5. Burnout
2 6. Cheerleader
3 1. Comfort Item
3 2. Dangerprone Damsel
3 3. This investigator gets an additional trait, reroll
3 4. Death Wish
3 5. Did You KnowâŚ
3 6. Elementary!
4 1. Empathetic
4 2. Femme Fatale
4 3. Final Girl
4 4. Custom trait
4 5. Frugal
4 6. Fueled by Obsession
5 1. Gang Way!
5 2. Go With Your Gut
5 3. Hard-Boiled
5 4. Hardened Hearts
5 5. This investigator gets an additional trait, reroll
5 6. Hard Under Pressure
6 1. Hardy
6 2. Its for a Book
6 3. I'm Okay, You're Okay
6 4. Just Built Different
6 5. Just One More Thing
6 6. Roll the table again twice to get two new results, then chose which one you prefer out of the two. If you get this one again on the reroll, roll it again
Table 2
1 1. Roll the table again twice to get two new results, then chose which one you prefer out of the two. If you get this one again on the reroll, roll it again
1 2. Kleptomaniac
1 3. Little Grey Cells
1 4. Lovecraft Protagonist
1 5. Lover
1 6. Master of Disguise
2 1. Moneybags
2 2. Custom trait
2 3. My Glasses!
2 4. Night Owl
2 5. Nightstalker
2 6. Ninja
3 1. None of My BusinessâŚ
3 2. Not Finished Yet
3 3. This investigator gets an additional trait, reroll
3 4. The Other
3 5. Perfectionist
3 6. Push It
4 1. Predictable
4 2. Quick Draw
4 3. Real Capybara Hours
4 4. Poseur
4 5. Renaissance Man
4 6. Rumbler
5 1. Showboater
5 2. Skeptic
5 3. Sleep on It
5 4. Smalls
5 5. The Truth Comes Out
5 6. TechnicallyâŚ
6 1. Therapist
6 2. Unpredictable
6 3. Wicked
6 4. Wizened
6 5. Woo-Woo
6 6. Roll the table again twice to get two new results, then chose which one you prefer out of the two. If you get this one again on the reroll, roll it again
I do appreciate the mild bait and switch that Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy has going on whereby the front half of the book repeatedly insists that this is a game about playing as ordinary people in extraordinary situations, periodically alluding to the existence of rules for playing as supernatural beings but emphasising that these are strictly optional and should usually be limited to no more than one supernatural player character per group â then you actually get to that part, and not only are the aforementioned strictly optional rules for supernatural player characters like two hundred pages long, fully a third of the playable supernatural archetypes have an explicitly vore-based resource loop (and to be clear, I mean the "there are mechanics for concealing the fact that you have a whole-ass adult human in your stomach" kind of vore), and a further third offer vore as an option.
....are the rules good? Like i'm not personally interested in Ereka because, I'd rather play monster of the week or CoC but, this has peaked my interest.
It has some really interesting ideas, a few of which I'm probably going to lift for some of my own proects. Desperately in need of at least one more comprehensive editing pass, of course, but given that it's a game in active development this is not surprising.
Editor for the project here, really appreciate the feedback! Yeah the document absolutely needs as much editing attention as we can afford to give it, which we are all keenly aware of. Another couple hundred hours of tune-ups ought to do it lol.
Also worth noting that aforementioned 200+ pages of monster rules have the least editing attention put on them thus far, so that section should get trimmed down significantly if all goes well.
#the messy logistics of the daily life of a people eating monster makes for a very compelling metaphor about life as a disabled person with#difficult to accomodate needs#it's not eureka's fault that the messy logistics of the life of people eating monsters also gives some people boners
Legit one of the best games and nicest devs I've ever interacted with in the TTRPG space. Indie or not. Please pick it up if you can, it's truly amazing.
"She has but a moment to cry out and imprint the face of fear into the Quiets memory, before she is torn from his arms and whisked away by the wind to places unknown."
Drew a little fanart for @imafuckingnerdineveryway's fic, A Quiet Journey Through Fear. Combining two of my hyperfixations into one AU was a quick recipe to get me to do art, who knew.
If we're still in pre-production... what else needs to be done before the show can get started?
| âWell for starters, Comedy and I havenât finished reorganizing the sets yet!â|
| âThe last thing anyone wants is for props or costumes or old set pieces from previous plays to be lying around where they shouldnât. Itâd be such a hassle!â|
<| You nod. You donât really get it- but it sounds important and you donât want to mess anything up.|>
<| âWe donât really reuse things unless we have to.. and the producers made sure to give us a lot to work with so that the story is exciting for you all.â|>
| âExactly! We have all the time in the world so donât worry your pretty little heads about it! I can understand why youâre excited but patience is a virtue as they say~!â|
| âNot only that but you all sent in a lot of letters! It would be quite rude to ignore them in favor of the show now wouldnât it?â|
<| âWe should be done soon⌠but in the mean time feel free to check on the other actors until then.â |>
(ISAT SPOILERS) Decided to draw fanart for @coffeewolf54 ISAT fic âClinging To Dying Embersâ thatâs on ao3. Yâall should go read itâs very good! Sketch / Lineart Process of the drawing will be under the read more:
Coffee Wolf Art Blog @coffeewolfart - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
izzy806
ellievsbear
pixelskylines
areudirty
baratheonpilled
dailybridgerton
