just finished GMing the final session of @anim-ttrpgs adventure module FORIVA The Angel Game. I have to say. Without question, FORIVA is my favorite adventure module in any ttrpg maybe ever! It's such a blast. I'm really proud of some of the work I did to try to convey the psychological horror aspects of FORIVA, and I'm really happy it turned out good! Though... two of the player-characters died horribly. Sad!
spoilers for FORIVA below. And if you're not worried about that, you should be! it's an absolute joy to play and you should absolutely give it a try sometime if you haven't already
Unfortunately. two of the characters died in the confrontation with Selene (they had low composure already, and Selene's crazy composure attack killed the both of them after she shrugged off a gutshot from Solomon Young's shotgun!), and afterward, the only surviving character, Elaine, @rebel-sqrrl's character, murdered Amber because she was convinced Amber wasn't going to recover. (she was a serial killer after all!)
Some of the stuff I was super proud of was how I did the Angel stuff! @scattered-storyteller's character, Khalil Furrows, was the one who played the FORIVA cabinet and he was the one who was infected with The Angel. However, due to his confrontational nature, he pissed off the Angel really quick, and she started tormenting him at all waking hours. I was really proud in how I managed to convey this, by recording like 50 voicelines into a soundboard, and playing them in a discord call that only scattered-storyteller could hear! Additionally, I went through the discord server we were playing FORIVA on, and changed a bunch of the server elements (server roles, channel names, user nicknames) to incorporate the phrase "Give Up" which the angel was constantly saying to Cal! One of the things I'm most proud of (which sadly the players didn't notice) was that I reworked the eureka logo subtitle to say "give up! give up! give up!" instead of "investigative urban fantasy"
Also. I fuckin loved the FOR IVA thing it was so cool!!!
just read foriva (the angel game), to gm it. holy shit. incredible design and writing. this is so good.
Thank you so so much. :)
FORIVA is definitely not without its flaws - which we are aware of and plan to take another pass at ironing out in the future - but of all of our publicly available adventure modules it’s the one I’m most proud of and feel best represents what a Eureka module should be. We aren’t quite there yet to the ideal Eureka module, but we kind of have to finish the actual Eureka rulebook before we can worry about that any more.
Pioneering new ground in the artform of TTRPGs is hard.
Also FORIVA: The Angel Game has some of my favorite villains ever.
Two brilliant mysteries for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy
I am so incredibly hyperfixated on my own character but in the way that I want him to explode violently. I hope he explodes. I hope he is sad. But also I want him to succeed. I want him to get out of his little town
It was very fun and the players were really engaged, even though most of them were new to the system and with it even being the very first ttrpg experience for two of them!
Obviously we didn't finish the whole mystery.
Late into my prep I saw the tumblr post estimating the lenght of FORIVA as 2-6 Sessions. I would have loved to have this information as part of the module itself.
To add a bit of (unreliable) data to your playtesting information:
6 mostly new players took roughly 4,5-5 hours to gather information, arrive at the "first" pivotal location and interact with the object described in appendix A. The ensuing consequences made for a nice cliff hanger end point, when sleepyness and having to catch the last bus necessitated an end to the session.
First of all this is so great to hear :)
I’m answering this like a week or so late because of other obligations and a super full inbox, but after we got this message, I immediately went and added an estimated number of sessions to all official Eureka adventure modules. That’s part of the updates that were released for them recently, along with the stuff I private messaged you about when you said you were going to start playing. Those changes I suggested when running it are now officially part of the module.
(I’m censoring part of this because it’s a spoiler for FORIVA, but most people who have played FORIVA will probably be able to figure it out)
Thank you!
We get “why hasn’t anyone else thought of that” a lot, and my answer is the same. The “trad” and “neotrad” TTRPG is both a young artform and a super stagnate artform because it’s mostly the domain of big corporations or indie developers who have only played games by those artistically stagnate corporations, and TTRPGs and related types of game outside of that category are so young of an artform there’s not even that much to build off of even when the developers are trying. That, and a lot of people’s assessment of what TTRPGs are good or bad is entirely “vibes based” with most of that burden of making any game fun unfairly thrust upon the GM rather than the rulebook, and all the air is sucked out of the room by D&D5e and Pathfinder, so also it’s entirely possible that plenty of games or adventure modules have done this before, we just haven’t heard of them.
Also, anyone interested can get the Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy adventure module this ask is referencing by subscribing to our Patreon.
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