Wanted to make a lil post talking about my character for @anim-ttrpgs' RPG Eureka!
This is Leslie, everyone say hi Leslie :)
(Art is by a friend on discord, color is by 0bowl on here)
Leslie was a PC I originally designed YEARS ago for Monster of the Week, but decided to do a bit of a rework of her to fit Eureka's mechanics and lore a bit better, which honestly kinda improved the theming of the character in my mind!
Her basic backstory is that she's a runaway teenager who, a bit desperate to make some friends, ended up hanging around an anime convention in Lousiana and staying at the cheapest hotel she could find... Leading her into the Murder at the Belle Nuit module plot (highly recommend playing it if you can!). Not wanting the cops looking into her whole deal, she decided to help her fellow investigators solve the titular murder!
Now to get into her traits, which I'll hide here for secrecy's sake.
Alright so the first one here is "Technically..." which I had a LOT of fun with, essentially just a bonus to deceiving without lying, which I picked up to reflect that this girl spent a lot of time hiding things from her family in the past (She's a trans teenager after all), and that she had a bit of a knack for running small-scale scams to keep herself alive more recently. Also just a great trait to encourage roleplaying in a specific way.
Her second trait here is "The Other", which put a penalty on basically all of her social skills, but gave her a big mechanical reward for actually getting a solid read on someone. Overall, this trait proved to be a little rough to work with as she ended up making the majority of the social rolls in her group, but the reward was nice when it came up!
Will probably end up swapping it out for Perfectionist if I play her again, because Eureka is very much a game that lets you respec your character between adventures.
Now, Leslie's third and final trait is where things get real juicy. As it turns out, a big part of the reason why she'd ended up without a home is that she began to show signs of her true nature as a changeling, which exacerbated an already bad conversation with her parents. This trait is one of my favorites in the entire game, and breaks down into quite a few smaller mechanics.
Now, an investigator being a Changeling in Eureka does come with some benefits, which for Leslie came in the form of things like night vision, telekinesis, the ability to curse others and the ability to mess with the weather, a lot of which came in handy while investigating The Belle Nuit! That said, the stuff I really had fun with was the weaknesses.
For starters, Changelings in Eureka gain a physical weakness to Iron, which was a subtle, fun, thing to play around. Additionally, they get a small debuff to the "social cues" skill to reflect being socially somewhat alienated growing up, which I thought really fit. The final weakness they have is called "Unstable Magic", essentially triggering a random chaotic magical effect whenever they hit 0 Composure, sort of showing the character's loss of control in that moment. The magical effects used are all pretty thematically relevant to things changelings and fairies in setting can already do, so they all feel cohesive instead of just coming off as goofy.
That last one actually ties back into her backstory, as her storming out of the house as an emotional wreck after her parents refused to accept her didn't just emotionally damage their relationship, it literally made her childhood home disappear behind her (bit of a generous interpretation of the "Spiriting Away" result on that table), meaning that she couldn't go back if she wanted to, and her old name was the subject of one hell of a missing person's case.
Overall, getting to build Leslie in this system was a blast! Playing her was also a lot of fun, as in spite of being new to the system, I felt like the mechanics were very welcoming and I even with minimal knowledge of the plot of Murder at the Belle Nuit, I ended up with a character who had some strong thematic connections to the story, which were a lot of fun to see unfold.
Having seen some births now i can say that dog birth is amazing cos they just slip n slide out one after the other like a little conveyor belt. And theyre so little and unformed. And then UNGULATE BIRTHS ... are amazing for the opposite reason which is that 10mins after being born they are filing their taxes. Unless they are goats, in which case they are committing tax fraud instead
Goats are what is called a precocial species, which means that shortly after birth they are able to do many thimgs on their own, such as standing, walking, eating, and embezzlement
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