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Reading Weavers, Scribes and Kings at the same time as a long-form analysis of ASOIF really reemphasizing and cementing my contempt for fantasy world building that goes 'and then this specific dynasty ruled this specific kingdom in essential socio-economic stasis for [longer than the entire span of human history]'.

Like, cmon. Shave some zeros off the timeline. Please.

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So Fox News ran a story about how they think libraries are turning into drug-infested sex dens and I am shocked, shocked that I was never offered any drugs during my 15+ years working in libraries.

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Through the power of diarrhea we conquered!!

@umbraldame

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tumblr user sudokufaggot has nomitated herself to run for CEO, citing the advanced ability to count to 9

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Here's a wild concept: a TTRPG where the rules themselves produce outcomes that make for an enjoyable play experience without having to endlessly alter the rules

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Markings and side-markings rework. Have to do hands and legs too maybe... oh boy. Figured I'd put them together.

#tag

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Sittin' pretty

#tag

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I was interviewed on Storyteller Conclave!

You’ve probably seen several posts on here about how I’m going to be on Storyteller Conclave talking about Eureka. If you haven’t, you’re going to, because there’s still some in the queue and I’m not going to remove them.

But, that happened, and it was a great time! You can listen to the episode here, here, here, or here!

I wasn’t on my A-game the whole time unfortunately, I had some mic trouble for about the first 20 minutes, along with some other distractions on my end that kept me from focusing early on, but luckily I had team member @ashweather to support me and help me out.

If you can bear with the rocky start, there’s a lot of good insight into the design of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy in this podcast, and a lot of it goes into stuff that we haven’t really covered on this blog, especially the themes.

We talk about the realistic and simulationist nature of Eureka and how this serves its gameplay and themes, we talk about how it takes inspiration from John Woo films such as Hard Boiled, its pretty unique approach to the concept of HP, how it approaches and flips the concept of "winning", and its deeply character-driven nature.

Of course we also talk about Eureka's unique and awesome rules for investigative gameplay, and how it improves upon games that did investigative gameplay before it. How it trusts the players' intellect, but also won't leave them totally twisting in the wind after a bad roll or two!

My favorite thing we talked about, near the end of the show, was Eureka’s approach to monsters, disability, and its sympathy towards “bad people.” I’m actually going to be writing a whole essay on this topic hopefully before the Kickstarter ends on May 10th, but you can get a really good gist of it just from listening to this episode of the podcast.

Oh and on that subject, the hosts, two veteran Vampire: The Masquerade players, said in the show that in many ways, Eureka does vampires better than VTM. Like, wow, that’s high praise..

Here’s a reminder also that Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is kickstarting from right now until May 10th, 2024. Back it and get yourself a copy plus custom artwork or the chance to get your blood sucked by vampires as an entry on the random victim tables for playable monster PCs! With every stretch goal we meet, the game gets better and better. Tons of beautiful new artwork, new options for gameplay, and even two entirely new playable Monsters could be added to the book, so visit the Kickstarter and secure your copy today!

If you want to try before you buy, you can download a free demo of the prerelease version from our website or our itch.io page!

If you’re interested in a more updated and improved version of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy than the free demo you got from our website, subscribe to our Patreon where we frequently roll our new updates for the prerelease version!

You can also support us on Ko-fi, or by checking out our merchandise!

Join our TTRPG Book Club At the time of writng this, Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is the current game being played in the book club, and anyone who wants to participate in discussion, but can’t afford to make a contribution, will be given the most updated prerelease version for free! Plus it’s just a great place to discuss and play new TTRPGs you might not be able to otherwise!

We hope to see you there, and that you will help our dreams come true and launch our careers as indie TTRPG developers with a bang by getting us to our base goal and blowing those stretch goals out of the water, and fight back against WotC's monopoly on the entire hobby. Wish us luck.

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Makeup test as Eureka's own Thing From Beyond! The TFB is a playable shapeshifting monster investigator who folds herself into a humanoid disguise to hide her true alien nature! Oh also she's a very picky eater with a taste for sapience. Despite her monstrous nature she just wants to be a real girl n.n

You can learn more about the TFB and other playable monster on my friends' indie ttrpg kickstarter!

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The trouble with trying to talk about "the players just dick around while the GM does all the actual work of making the game happen" as a dysfunctional mode of play in tabletop roleplaying spaces is that it's so normalised that a lot of GMs genuinely don't realise that's what's happening. They'll look at a description of the problem and with a perfectly straight face declare "yeah, that shit would never fly in my group, that's why we [proceeds to describe a way of organising play in which the GM does all the actual work of making the game happen]". And we wonder by GM burnout is such a universal phenomenon!

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Vampire Poll 2

Consider this scenario entirely separate from Vampire Poll 1, I just had two different ideas for vampire poll posts so I’m doing both of them.

You and a friend, who is a centuries-old vampire have been on a road trip across the US for several days, taking turns at the wheel whenever you need to sleep in the back seat through the night. She says she can handle it, but in the final stretch you can tell that being stuck in the passenger seat under the bright Nevada sun is starting to get to her, especially after having driven for days.

She’s low-energy and irritable.

Do you offer her your blood unprompted, presuming that she must be craving your blood?

Vampires are one of the five core playable monsters in Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, along with and all the unsolvable problems that come with them, and you can read all about and even play as if you go download the demo from the free demo link on our website and jump to page 346.)

Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is going to launch on Kickstarter on April 10th and we need all the help we can get. Set a reminder from the Kickstarter page through this link.

If you’re interested in a more updated and improved version of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy than the free demo you got from our website, there’s plenty of ways to get one!

Subscribe to our Patreon where we frequently roll our new updates for the prerelease version!

Donate to our ko-fi and send us an email with proof that you did, and we’ll email you back with the full Eureka prerelease package with the most updated version at the time of responding! (The email address can be found if you scroll down to the bottom of our website.)

Or, if you can’t afford any of that, join our TTRPG Book Club and then just ask. Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is the current game being played in the book club, and anyone who wants to participate in discussion, but can’t afford to make a contribution, will be given the most updated prerelease version for free! It's also just an ideal place to learn about and even play other RPGs!

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Fairy Poll

Scenario

A fairy knocks on your door, and after getting over your surprise to see her (since she was supposed to be away in the fairy world for the summer), you ask her what she’s doing here and she tells you that she really needs to “borrow your childhood” for a few days, and doesn’t have time to explain it to a mortal. You’ve known her for years, and know she can’t tell a lie, but that’s a pretty heavy and concerning proposition.

You can read all about fairies by downloading the Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy demo rulebook and going to Chapter 8!

If you’re interested in a more updated and improved version of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy than the free demo you got from our website, there’s plenty of ways to get one!

Subscribe to our Patreon where we frequently roll our new updates for the prerelease version!

Donate to our ko-fi and send us an email with proof that you did, and we’ll email you back with the full Eureka prerelease package with the most updated version at the time of responding! (The email address can be found if you scroll down to the bottom of our website.)

We also have merchanise.

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All TTRPGs are "Narrative-Focused."

I feel like I have got to remind TTRPG players (and even worse, remind TTRPG designers) that “story” and “narrative” are happening the entire time they’re playing no matter what.

There is no such thing as "Roleplay vs Rollplay," it's always roleplay and it's always narrative, whether you are rolling the dice or not.

“Crunch” and "combat' is not “when there’s no story or narrative just a bunch of boring numbers” and “fluff” is not “the time that the boring numbers step aside and let there be an actual narrative.”

“Crunch” is when the rules and/or the dice influence the story or narrative in some way, and “fluff” is when a player (including the game master) has to come up with a part of the story or narrative without any mechanical scaffolding supporting its emergence.

This isn’t a factor of just combat, but combat tends to be what people say this about the most. It’s not “combat vs roleplay”, or "roleplay vs rollplay", combat is roleplay, combat is part of the story.

There is no-such thing as a "more narratively focused TTRPG", all TTRPGs are equally narrative-focused, you just might not be recognizing the narrative because it isn't the narrative you're trying to tell. Even combat-focused games like D&D5e are telling a narrative story, it's just a narrative story about larger-than-life heroes who get into lots and lots of fights. All of those crunchy numbers on the character sheet are "roleplay mechanics." The Fighter's role is to engage the enemy head-on, the Rogue's role is to sneak around an attack the enemy from behind. That is their role in battle and that is their role in the story, because the story is about a group of battling battlers and the battles they battle. What a character is good at and what they are bad at is part of their characterization, and their characterization is part of the narrative. You're playing a game that is meant to tell the same type of story as a Marvel movie.

In fact if you’re playing a game like any edition of D&D, that is based around combat, then combat is actually the most important part of the story, because that is the time that a protagonist can fail in their goals and/or die.

If you’re playing an RPG, and you’re finding that the rules and dice are constantly getting in the way of the story you’re trying to tell—well first of all let me remind you that TTRPG stories are supposed to be emergent, if the DM keeps faking dice rolls to keep the story "on track", you aren't really telling an emergent story—and secondly then that is a glaring sign that you are playing the game wrong, and you are playing the wrong game. And when you search for the right game, you don’t necessarily need a system with less rules, you could be very happy with a system with a lot of rules as long as you play a system with rules that support the kind of narrative you’re trying to tell.

I've said it in another post before, that for TTRPGs, rules are like wind, and the narrative is like a sailboat. You might be having to push your boat up-wind, and feel frustrated with all the wind pushing back against you as you try to make a combat-focused game like any edition of D&D be all about characters calmly working out their differences. You might think then that you need less rules/less wind, and that crunch, dice-rolling, and/or combat are the opposite of storytelling and roleplaying, but it isn't. You need to find some wind/rules that are blowing in the direction you want the story to go. You need to find a different game. No, you really can't just homebrew combat out of the game.

If you don't like combat, you need to find an RPG that isn't focused on combat. If you do like combat, well, still find a different game than D&D5e becuase its combat is pretty bad compared to like every other edition of D&D and every other combat-focused fantasy RPG. If you don't like D&D5e combat you might even find that you really enjoy some other game's combat if you give it a shot.

Here is a post about escaping from WotC, D&D5e, and the legitimately harmful effects it has. It also has a great many more resources for that than this post does.

I'm listing one resource here because it's my post. The A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club can a good starting point for where to find a game that better suits your needs. It’s a discord server that treats playing TTRPGs like a book club, with the goal of introducing members to a wide variety of games other than D&D5e. RPGs are nominated by members, then we hold a vote to decide what to read and play for a short campaign, then we repeat. There is no financial, time, or schedule investment required to join this book club, I promise it is very schedule-friendly, because we assign people to different groups based of schedule compatibility. You don’t have to play each campaign, or any campaign, you can just read along and participate in discussion that way. And if you can’t afford to buy the rulebook we’re going to be reading, we will make sure you get a PDF of it for free. That is how committed we are to getting non-D&D5e RPGs into people’s hands. Here is an invite link.

if you want to support me and my team specifically Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, our debut TTRPG, is going to launch on Kickstarter on April 10th and we need all the help we can get. Set a reminder from the Kickstarter page through this link.

If you’re interested in a more updated and improved version of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy than the free demo you got from our website, there’s plenty of ways to get one!

Subscribe to our Patreon where we frequently roll our new updates for the prerelease version!

Donate to our ko-fi and send us an email with proof that you did, and we’ll email you back with the full Eureka prerelease package with the most updated version at the time of responding! (The email address can be found if you scroll down to the bottom of our website.)

We also have merchanise.