my name kiki, she/her (hän tai se suomeksi), 18+ years old. I like posting on the internet, it's full of fun people. Maoist struggle session enjoyer. silly Rolemaster girlblogger. my interests include RPGs (both of the Japanese and Tabletop variety) and languages. sometimes I cause problems on purpose.
I really really really really didn’t want to go back to doing this as regularly, but A.N.I.M. really needs money. The past few months for us have been pretty bad, and I’ve been making less than minimum wage with my cut of the profits for a while.
We make sure not to paywall the majority of our project so as not to bar them from people who can’t afford them, but that means we’re reliant on the good will of those who can afford them to choose to pay.
If you like what we do, want us to keep doing it, an want to keep a disabled game designer who can’t do other work able to pay their medical and food bills, please consider paying for one of our games on itchio, and/or subscribing to our patreon for more regularly updated versions of all our projects.
Patreon is empowering a new generation of creators. Support and engage with artists and creators as they live out their passions!
If you can’t do that, rating them 5-stars on itchio, downloading them, and playing them/talking about them/sharing them is a huge help too. Like, it really can’t be overstated how reliant we are on word-of-mouth.
I am going to have to reinstate the Income Goals to make sure we make an income of at least $2,000 every month across both itchio and patreon, gradually increasing that goal probably until we are making at least $3,000 every month.
I am personally biased in favor of A.N.I.M. on account of liking their games, including Eureka, Silk and Dagger, and Death Bed, but their RPG work is also the primary source of income for one of them and they have bills to pay.
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)
that post about “you get bandits when you cut soldiers loose without pay” reminds me of the Thirty Years War, because one could say that beneath all the religious schisms and diplomatic jockeying, the heart of the thirty years war was “what happens when you have a state with just enough capacity to raise massive armies but without enough financial capacity to actually pay those armies” and the answer is that the line between professional armies and roving gangs of bandits disappears and every time you try to raise an army it just becomes another independently acting wildfire devouring the countryside. No matter how bad things get, every day I wake up and thank my lucky stars that I do not live in 17th century Europe. Or 17th century China. Or the 17th century Americas. Or basically anywhere in the 17th century.
One thing that makes me kinda sad is seeing people who feel like TTRPGs just aren't for them because they bounced off of some element that is clearly just a symptom of them trying out D&D5e. Like people who have had a hard time with learning the rules would probably do well with any system where the rule formatting and play culture around learning them aren't a mess. One friend of mine didn't like waiting a long time for turns to come up in combat, not even knowing that many games don't even use a turn-based structure.
A lot of D&D5e defenders on here like to claim that asking someone to learn a new system is "gatekeeping" somehow, but I'd argue that acting like one game is emblematic of the entire medium to the exclusion of people who don't click with that one game is way more meaningfully a form of gatekeeping, even if it's fully unintentional.
I strongly believe that not all RPGs are gonna appeal to everyone, but there is an RPG out there for everyone, and I just hope that people who haven't clicked with the most common option to be introduced to can find something that works for them.
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.
its good when band names are things that are nice to think about. 'imagine dragons' well i am & its awesome. 'owl city' awww cute. 'barenaked ladies' hell yeah
whether they're Good Media™ or whatever aside, I think mainstream liveplay ttrpg shows have been a fucking disaster for the hobby. it's hard to imagine anything that could have fucked the expectations:results differential for people more than having celebrities do college improv with dice (and an entire media production team behind them) and telling a generation of new players that's what tabletop gaming is like
liveplay ttrpg shows are not 'professional gaming', that's the whole problem I'm talking about. they're entertainment products which make format, content and form choices that would be nonsensical or obstructive at an ordinary table. it's not just "oh if only 'hobbyist' gaming groups (🤮) could pay for all that kit and lighting and professional writers and voice actors".
liveplay production involves story meetings aimed at making the narrative maximally entertaining to a watching audience (not the players, who are also professionals who are there to entertain that audience!). It involves editing (trimming out downtime, uninteresting mistakes, technical issues, moments where the vibe is wrong or there's friction in the room). it involves a room full of production crew watching every move the GM and players make, sensitive to wastage of their time and effort if things don't go to plan. and not for nothing, it involves an entire team of people who need to keep game publishers happy by playing and displaying their products correctly and certainly never criticising them or openly adapting around their shortcomings for the sake of the group's enjoyment.
I've played at tables where we've been lucky enough to have fun props and miniatures and printed maps and sound systems and even a bit of lighting, and where everyone in the group was a seasoned player with writing and performance backgrounds, and the experience was still full of normal natural constructive frictions that are largely if not completely absent from entertainment liveplay shows. player disagreement is normal. stopping mid flow to argue about a rule and look it up and help each other with system technicalities is normal. the music just not working today is normal. the party choosing a direction the GM didn't prepare for and having to adjust their in-character choices a little and tolerate some hastily cobbled together fluff to meet them halfway is so normal it's a running joke. someone finding a scene a little too much and asking for a break or redirection is normal. someone saying something a little ill judged in the moment and having to walk it back with as much grace as possible is normal. storylines not going to plan and petering out without major dramatic resolution, or npcs being ignored and cast off with a shrug is normal. all this shit and more is normal because a normal table is structured around the organic decision-making of a bunch of players who are primarily in it for their own fun and sense of transport, not for an invisible imaginary fandom slash consumer market. which are all the things that make ttrpg play inherently a pretty bad vehicle for storytelling, incidentally!
someone else in the tags expressed their frustration at these shows 'professionalising' the hobby, and while I do recognise and sympathise with the feeling that these shows normalise a level of polish and commercial buy-in that's destructive to the diy culture of tabletop gaming, I still have to push back on the idea that these shows are representative of 'professionalised gaming'. they're not. they're sports anime.
A game jam from 2026-06-01 to 2026-07-01 hosted by Agency of Narrative Intrigue and Mystery. Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is an innov
Submissions open: June 1st 2026
Submissions close: June 30th 2026
(But do not wait until the submission window to sign up for the jam or start working on your submission!)
Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is an innovative investigative TTRPG about amateur detectives from all walks of life solving “fair play” mysteries with fixed truths, while also often dealing with interpersonal conflict.
The rulebook is available (for free) at this link.
Eureka needs more mysteries for parties to solve, and this game jam is a community event to encourage fans to come together and write mystery modules.
This game jam is non-competitive, but any submissions the developers like will likely receive free editing consultation from the Eureka developers themselves and may be “canonized” with a link within future versions of the Eureka rulebook itself.
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!
Here are the rules for submission:
1. It’s Okay to Submit Unfinished Work: Eureka mystery modules take a lot of work, and we don’t expect basically anyone to be 100% finished before the deadline. Submit your work, and then keep working on finishing it up even after the deadline is passed.
2. Working in Groups is Encouraged but Not Mandatory: This game jam is non-competitive and there is no monetary prize on the line. It’s perfectly okay to work solo or in groups. In fact, working in groups is recommended.
3. Follow the Guide in Chapter 5 of the Eureka Rulebook: Chapter 5 in the Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy rulebook contains extensive advice, guidelines, best practices, and rules for the creation of Eureka mystery modules. Do not start working before you read it.
4. Modern, Mundane, and “Kolchakian”: One thing the library of available Eureka mystery modules lacks right now is a strong foundation of “baseline” adventures to which weirder, more unconventional mysteries can be contrasted. One of the main purposes of this game jam is to help rectify that. To this end, every submission to this game jam must fulfill at least two out of the following three criteria.
4a. Be “Modern”: It is often recommended, but not required, that Eureka adventure modules not take place within a specific year unless necessary. Whether the module takes place in a specific time period such as a decade or a specific year, it must take place in the “present.” That is, the 2020s.
4b. Be “Mundane”: Investigating a mystery is in and of itself of course an extraordinary circumstance, but by “mundane” here we mean the mystery does not involve uncovering elements which would be considered “paranormal” or “supernatural.”
4c. Be “Kolchakian”: This is a specific Eureka rulebook term that you will find a better definition of in Chapter 5 of the Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy rulebook, but in short it means that the investigation will take the investigators across a relatively broad area with multiple distinct locations rather than all taking place within one location, and will typically utilize the Travel rules (found in Chapter 1 of the Eureka rulebook) for investigators moving between locations. Kolchakian mystery modules will always use the Ticking Clock rules found in Chapter 1.
5. Don’t Overdo It: Be careful of being too ambitious, especially if this is your first time writing a module like this! One murder or missing person already typically provides more than enough mystery solving to fill an entire multi-session adventure module. It is tempting to write about a serial killer or some other phenomenon with many victims, but if you do that then you’re looking at having to write multiple modules worth of information for just a single module. In the last game jam, many first-time mystery module writers started too big and burnt out before they were able to finish their work. Don’t bite off more than you can chew!
6. Consider Optional Rules and Expansions: You can consider this rule optional too, I just thought it would be a good idea to put it here and remind everyone that Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy has multiple optional rules and expansions. Consider utilizing the Heat rules if police are likely to be a factor for instance. Eureka: Extreme Conditions also provides rules for modules taking place outside of conventional civilization. You might also find inspiration by looking at Eureka: The Fanservice Files or Eureka: The XXX-Files.
7. 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.
8. Third-person Verbiage: Avoid saying "you" when referring to player-characters.
9. 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. More information on following rules 8 and 9 can be found in Chapter 1 of the rulebook.
10. 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.
11. Stay Grounded in Eureka's Lore: Please keep your module within the bounds of what the world of Eureka offers. You can read more about this within Chapter 5.
12. 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.
13. No Generative AI: Do not submit anything that has been created in whole or in part through the use of generative "AI."
14. 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!
Additional Advice and Inspiration: Here are links to a few resources that might help you find inspiration. First, here is a tumblr post containing links to a variety of “mystery module pitches” that include as much advice and scaffolding for writing a particular idea for a mystery module as possible. Second, here is a link to a YouTube playlist containing videos that might provide inspiration for writing Eureka mysteries.
If you are already in the process of writing a Eureka mystery module, and that module does not fit within the guidelines set for this particular jam, don't worry! There will be other mystery jams in the future, and it's not like you even need a mystery jam's permission to make a module. It is recommended that you finish your current module before you attempt to participate in this jam, as working on two at once just increases the likelihood that neither gets finished.
Finally, don't wait until June 1st to sign up for the jam or start working on your submission! You can, and probably should, start working now so you have something to submit for the jam. The submission window is just a formality, you should work on your module before it opens and still after it closes.
I’m not going to reblog the source because I don’t want to bring negative attention to someone but I just read that “the most important skill of a GM is pretending what happens is what you were planning all along.”
Absolutely not. This pressure to “be in control”, “‘maintain the illusion” and “be a magician” style advice is precisely why people are terrified to GM.
You have one job as a GM at the table. ONE. Play your NPCs and other situation elements with the same earnestness as the players play their PCs. That’s it.
The “plot” is what happens when your toys and their toys meet and uncertainties between them are resolved via the game at hand.
You are not responsible for anyone’s fun.
You are not responsible for anyone’s entertainment.
You are not there to stroke the players egos or service their fantasies or “story beats” or whatever self-insert wish fulfillment BS they have projected onto their characters.
Stop making GMing harder than it needs to be. Just play the damn game.
Updog jokes are actually kinda insensitive, cause the average updog is actually the result of a system that prioritizes the human desire for novelty over animal welfare :/
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