Pinned
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!
Last night I had a dream about designing a puzzle in a Eureka adventure where there’s like 20 people and a bunch of different paintings in a locked art gallery, and one of the only ways to progress (God knows what “progression” even means in this case.) is to imagine each of the occupants as what kind of dinosaur they would be, “accurately,” somehow convey this information, and somehow get a character to interact with another character from whom he would steal eggs if they were both dinosaurs, causing the latter to explode, killing everyone in the room. I spent almost the entire dream trying to make this work from a gameplay and plot perspective.
So, like, be glad I didn’t go with any shit like that for FORIVA: The Angel Game.
I can't wait to hear about a party implosion in Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy where a gorgon PC swallows or petrifies all the others after an argument about tumblr Greek myth retelling.
tumblr user: you've been blessed by Athena to protect you from.. 🤢men🤢
gorgon who hasn't been able to feel fully relaxed interacting in-person with anyone of any gender for years:
This is part 9 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
Eureka does not shy away from the difficulties of having a disability. I’ve talked about this extensively already in other posts but I’m still going to cover it here, along with the HP system.
Humans are fragile, and Eureka treats bodily harm with the gravitas it deserves.
Every human character has 5 Superficial HP and 5 Penetrative HP. Minor injuries such as bruises take away Superficial HP, deadly weapons like blades and bullets take away Penetrative HP. Superficial damage also starts to eat into Penetrative HP when there’s no more Superficial HP for it to take.
At 0 Penetrative HP, the PC dies, but there’s a whole bunch of other problems that can happen before that. At 1 or 0 Superficial HP, and at 1 Penetrative HP, the character is at risk of passing out, and/or sustaining a disabling injury we call a Grievous Wound. This stays with them and affects their stats and abilities. Grievous Wounds caused by Superficial Damage go away once Superficial HP is fully restored, which usually takes a few days, but Grievous Wounds caused by Penetrative Damage are permanent. Your character is disabled now.
This can happen extremely easily, as you’ll see later on in this series, but that doesn’t mean it’s the end for your character. They go on, like anyone else does in real life.
In fact, PCs can even start with Grievous Wounds. Maybe they were born that way, or maybe they had an accident before the story started. There’s no mechanical benefit to having a disabled PC, there’s not really any benefit to being disabled in real life, but it’s a thing that happens, so it’s a thing in Eureka.
I decided to redesign an old OC into an Investigator for @anim-ttrpgs's flagship TTRPG, Eureka. Lot's of the fun details are included in this image, but if you wanna know more about her look under the cut! (There will also be some blank copies of this character card template if you wanna make your own Eureka Character in it....)
As far as Investigator Concepts go, Briar DEFINITELY pushes at the edges of what is typically tonally acceptable for a game set in Eureka's assumed setting. But I had fun making her, regardless - and the catgirl character type comes from the tonally shifted Fanservice Files, anyhoot.
Ophelia for @anim-ttrpgs's new release, Silk & Dagger. A redraw of a very old piece. Ophelia is my character but I'm told she's the basis for drow fashion and aesthetic in Silk & Dagger, huge day for drow enjoyers if you ask me.
Original piece from 2019 under the cut
Gaslight Gatekeep Girlboss uwu
Being a relatively studied and knowledgeable Christian makes fantasy writing really hard, not because the idea of fictional wizards conflicts with my believes or some shit, but because soooooooooooooo much of modern tradition of how Christianity maps onto and/or influences fantasy writing is extremely Evangelical/American Civic Religion or Mormon, and really reactionary; it’s so engrained in our society and fantasy storytelling traditions that it takes conscious effort to diverge from.
And since I’m aware of the difference I can see it crawling everywhere.
Doing the sign of the cross and praying I don’t ever accidentally write something that reinforces or legitimizes the idea that “Heaven” and “Hell” are locked in an eternal war and if we don’t do some bullshit or another “The Devil” will win
I wholeheartedly agree with these tags, but this post is about intentionally writing with Christianity in mind and including Christianity in a fantasy setting (because like you said, trying to half-ass some “pantheon” in fantasy just results in a crappy ripoff of Christianity, or worse one of those “The Creator” fantasy religions written by an atheist raised Protestant to be like what he thinks Catholics are like) anyway you might as well just make it Christianity if you’re writing absolutely anything medieval-inspired because Christianity is inseparable from the middle ages.
What inspired this post is that I was doing just that, writing a medieval fantasy setting and game mechanics for Death Bed: A Souls-like RPG and deciding fuck it, this medieval fantasy setting has Christianity because you can’t take the Christianity out of the medieval.
Dark Souls the video game has “miracles” as a core mechanic, and so I was thinking on how to include “miracles” in this Dark Souls-inspired TTRPG, and ultimately landed on the fact that “miracles” absolutely do not work like that in Christianity, so instead of just being spells, I came up with this whole system by which good things just happen to the characters sometimes because good things can just happen. (“Good things just happening” are also not really considered “miracles” so this isn’t really that but sometimes art takes unexpected directions)
While game designing this I kept having to scrape off the societally learned “common sense” of “oh obviously characters who have a higher Faith stat or pray more or whatever should get more miracles,” because that’s Mormonism and prosperity gospel and heresy and witchcraft.
It really doesn’t make sense to separate the Christianity from the medieval. Why would you go through all the effort of basing a fantasy setting on a specific time and place and culture in history and excise one of the most important parts of it to the people living there? Like I know us in the modern industrial future see religion (and especially Christianity) as a distinct separate thing that some people do during their special religion time but that’s just not the function it served for most of history.
there is no minimum amount of suffering before you are allowed to want to alleviate it
If I were just one degree bolder as a designer and the Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy rulebook wasn’t already too big I would implement a rule where your investigator has to go to the bathroom once per 10 or 20 Ticks or else lose Composure or something.
What this would add to the game is something that occasionally separates one investigator at a time from the others thus making them vulnerable, and a plausibly-deniable-through-mechanics excuse for one investigator to separate from the others on purpose in case there’s some secret they have to keep, and it would start to be noticeably weird that certain investigators (like vampires) never use the bathroom; what it would also add to the game is pissing and shitting mechanics.
Play Silk & Dagger: A Sensible Drow RPG
It’s sexual, it’s unmarketable, it took me days just to come up with what the hell to put on the store page.
It’s very weird and bizarre as a game in every way, even down to the very structure and concepts in its mechanics and gameplay. “Experimental” might describe it if I did not in fact know exactly what I’m doing and that this would work.
It’s also really funny.
trans women: ugh i'm so tired of being seen as a disgusting worthless sex object
50% of people: aww don't worry i see you as a desireable sex object <3
other 50% of people: i just combed through your social media account and found out you have expressed sexuality several times before, even as recently as just last week. if you're not gonna be perfectly chaste and completely repress this emotion that most people have then you can't expect people not to see you as a sex object. you basically are one anyways
Had a dream a while ago about Warhammer 40K, where I learned that there was a meme in-universe among the Mechanicus where they would trick each other into opening a file that contained a picture of Vashtorr the Arkifane. Presumably, this would then require the victim to waste time scrubbing their minds of potential Chaos corruption. They referred to this meme as "getting Vashtorred."
