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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!
There's a bit more to Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy character creation than just picking Traits, but this is a meme not a serious character creation session.
Make yourself in three to six Eureka Traits. Here's a big list of them. This isn't literally all the Traits, just the ones that have finished art. If you want to pick from all the Traits, feel free to download the free rulebook linked above! If you want to go a little further, you can explain your reasoning for why you picked each Trait and what they mean to you and about you.
Tag us, or just reblog your results onto this post! You don't have to make yourself either, it could be a character from pop culture, your friend, your OC, whatever! We wanna see what you do with it!
Are you thinking what I'm thinking, predictable, and it's for a book!
Not Finished Yet, Death Wish, Final Girl, Rumbler, Push It Tragic character who was meant to be a grand hero in another setting but instead has to work 9-5 and respond to work emails on the weekend
Wizened, Skeptic, Night Owl, It's for a Book, and Did You Know... i'm smart, frail, and constantly tired, but i struggle to sleep at night. i'm a professional writer and this explains many of my weirdest research topics and also results in me, y'know, retaining a lot of strange trivia on eclectic topics. and regardless of what i'm experiencing, i try to think things through logically before reacting emotionally- gotta exhaust all possible rational (and mundane) explanations before turning to the irrational and/or supernatural.
Skeptic, Technically, Little Grey Cells, Bottled Up +2 IP from taking a break
+2 IP from finding rational explanations
+2 charm & manipulate when using the truth in unexpected ways,
+2 composure rolls
Everything can be understood. It's just a matter of asking the right questions. If I do not understand, it's only because I haven't looked hard enough.
if the truth is too large, I just have to break it down into smaller truths that are easier to parse. Simply abandon preconceptions and let the facts speak for themselves.
I'm working on becoming more than a vessel for raw facts. There's a person in here somewhere.
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Or at least, these are the parts of me that relate to solving a spooky mystery. A lady has to keep SOME of her secrets after all.
In D&D or other D&D adjacent games like OSE and the like, how do you deal with player character death and their items? Something about just looting the stuff from a dead player (assuming you can get to the corpse ofc) always rubbed me the wrong way.
It's up to the players. If they feel their characters would loot the corpse of a dead companion, then they may. If not, then they won't. In my current OSE campaign I think characters have not been very cavalier about looting their friends, having let their friends keep their well-earned goods in death.
An important thing to remember is that simply due to logistics characters won't be carrying all of their money on them at all times. Most older editions even make it possible for players to have their characters set aside their accumulated treasure as an inheritance for the next character down the line. The character will still be starting at level 1, but they will have a bit of a leg-up on other starting characters in terms of equipment.
I think the logistics also has a lot of very interesting roleplay implications.
Your friend dies, which of their belongings do you bring home? If you're in a bad place financially, do you leave behind their memento for a jewel? How would you feel if a wandering monster comes across their weapon you left behind, and kills someone with it?
In high lethality games, I think the most interesting part is what different people do when someone dies.
as someone too poor to buy rpg rule booklets, I was looking into your game since it appears to be free to play. Was that correct, or did I misread it. (I think its pay what you want)
I was wondering if there was a good place to learn the basic rules. Like a youtube channel that might explain the difference between stats, and when they are applicable. I have never played a tabletop rpg, so the entire concept feels a little overwhelming.
I was also wondering how easy can the game be made. My only potential gaming group at the moment is one that finds monopoly overwhelming. Which means I probably need to look into playing online, or find a way to play single-player.
I know you’ve already had these questions answered by joining our discord server but I wanted to give it a public answer anyway for the sake of anyone else in the same boat.
First of all, yes, Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is free if you want it to be free. The beta is pay-what-you-want, which includes $0 if that’s all you can afford.
As for a YouTube video explaining the rules, the best we can do for that is direct you to the Tiny Table podcast. They do get a couple of rules wrong while they play(as most people do the first time they play any particular RPG), but the rules overview will give you the basics. Those basics won’t be enough to start playing from scratch, but they will at least prime you for what you’re about to read in the rulebook.
The only real way to learn to play any RPG is to just read the rulebook, and then play it, continuing to reference the rulebook as-needed while you play.
This may sound intimidating, but it’s really not. Most RPG rulebooks are not massive unreadable tomes, and the ones that look like they are, like Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, are really not as intimidating as they look. Yes, the page count says 700 pages, but only about 200 of that is super important to read before you start playing the game, and, since we use big font and have a bunch of pictures taking up space, as far as word count goes that’s really closer to about 120 pages of actual text, then about 40 more of combat rules. The rest is optional rules, homebrew guidelines, additional character options, and lists and tables and stuff. It’s easy, just go through a few pages at a time.
I actually think that Eureka, despite being a dense and crunchy game, is a very, very good starting point for first-time players of TTRPGs, because it not only tells you the rules, it tells you how you’re supposed to approach the rules, what the rules mean and what their purpose is, and it even breaks down a lot of the math for you. Most games just tell you the rules, but don’t actually tell you how to apply them. Many shorter games will tell you even less, which is why I think it’s not a good idea to start people off on one-page RPGs.
Finally, the best place on the Internet right now to get online TTRPG groups that are safe, respectful, and compatible is the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club.
There’s nominations and we vote regularly on a game for everyone to read together and then play, with groups put together based on schedule compatibility, but there’s also a section for just putting together any game at any time, and it gets a lot of use. I know you already know this because you’re in it by now, but to anyone else reading this who has the same question, here’s an invite link.
I’m planning to flesh out some of the info and themes in the Eureka rulebook about monster hunters, so I’m turning these thoughts into a proper post.
Where there’s monsters in modern fantasy, there’s monster hunters. It’s not actually quite that old of a trope, and often gets applied retroactively, (See: van Helsing just brings some guy who has read a lot about vampires in the original Dracula novel, but getting portrayed as a badass vampire hunting specialist in so many subsequent iterations) but whatever the case, the concept of a monster-hunting specialist will find its way into just about any setting with monsters.
These may many forms across different media.
Sometimes they’re for-hire almost like exterminators, sometimes they’re on the payroll of a secret government agency or a secret branch of The Church, sometimes they just do it because no one else will.
Sometimes they’re the good guys, vigilantes striking out against monsters that represent oppressive power structures, invading forces, dangerous problems that those in power turn a blind eye to, etc.
Sometimes they’re the bad guys, religious fanatics or government secret police who relentlessly pursue monsters representing some misunderstood, marginalized, and innocent group.
Sometimes they’re “one of the good ones,” hunting their own kind as a form of atonement.
Well, in Eureka, there is no global secret society run by monsters, nor a global secret society, government branch, or branch of the Church suppressing monsters.
Monsters are both a largely unknown - and legitimately dangerous - phenomenon to the general public, and yet still otherwise “normal” people with their own lives and problems. Read these posts for more on that subject.
If these are the monsters in Eureka, then who are the monster hunters? What kind of person becomes a self-described “monster hunter” in this context? Probably not a very good one. Now don’t get me wrong, monsters are very dangerous, but they also are so exceptionally rare that most monsters will have never met anyone else like them in their entire lives. Most people will never even unknowingly walk past one on the street.
So, first of all, to even believe that these monsters are out there and striking with such frequency that you could reasonably “hunt” them, you already have to be a little bit of a crackpot.
Now, there are dangerous people out there in Eureka and in real life. This is a work of art that strongly believes in the right to self-defense and ownership of the means of self-defense. What else are you going to do, rely on the police?
But for a self-described “monster hunter” in Eureka, this danger is not something they’re simply wary of and prepared for, it is something that, conscious or not, excites them. This isn’t “carries a gun just in case of the unlikely event of an attack” kind of “self-defense,” this is “drive three states over to a protest to make sure something happens” kind of “self-defense.” This is “hoping for any excuse and opportunity to rid society of undesirables from ‘the streets’ through violence” kind of “self-defense.”
And, in a world where monsters are so rare and also so hard to distinguish from normal people as in Eureka, what does “monster hunting” even look like? Well, it ain’t a good look. It means hypervigilantly scouring everyone you meet for any abnormality or sign of deviant or “dangerous” behavior. Then, when you’ve got what might be a hit, invade their privacy, stalk them, watch their every move for more evidence of the danger you know is there. Then, once they raise enough red flags, and you’ve got an opportunity, you attempt to destroy them.
Obviously most of these “monsters” are false positives, there just aren’t that many actual monsters out there, and their “tells” can often be identical to the behaviors of people who just don’t fit in with normal society for whatever other reason, and might even be huge assholes, but are ultimately not capable of causing much harm, if any.
Most “monster hunters” will have never encountered a single real monster, and if they ever did, they would probably be out of their depth, but they pat themselves on the back for their hard work keeping the community safe all the same. After all, a normal mortal who already has a stake through their heart can’t explain that they always ask to be invited in because they have OCD or anxiety. (And why should they even have to? Because you imagined they might be a vampire? Seriously?)
I don’t think most of you reading this carry guns IRL so I’m going to bring it a bit closer to home. In more online spaces, these are the same kind of people who start compiling “evidence” for callout posts as soon as they get a “bad vibe” from someone, or somebody is rude to or disagrees with them. It’s the same MO. Scan everyone for the slightest evidence “problematic” behavior, start stalking them and invading their privacy once you’ve got a hit, then move in to destroy.
Who cares if you stretch the truth a little bit? You know in your mind they’re problematic, so it’s up to you to protect the community from them by any means necessary, even lying, otherwise people might not take it seriously enough!
This is called "relational aggression" or "relational violence," by the way.
“But what about the real monsters who really eat people? Doesn’t somebody need to do something about them?”
Well, yes and no. It’s complicated, just like in real life. The posts I linked above explain the comparison between Eureka monsters and disabled people, with the fact that monsters eat people representing how disabled people can often eat up time, energy, and resources of those around them whether they like it or not. Some of them would be less of an issue if societal structures changed, others would not, and even within different categories of monster it’s pretty case-by-case. As much as these man-eating monsters have a right to life, the people they eat have a right to defend themselves from monster attacks. I don’t pretend to have the perfect solution to disability or to Eureka monsters, exploring the nuance therein is one of the things the game is about, but I do know that “we need to weed out and exterminate all people with harmful or burdensome needs for the good of society”, well, that ain’t it chief.
Be safe, be wary, but don’t be a monster hunter. Don’t go picking fights, don’t assume it’s your duty to cyberstalk and ostracize people whose backgrounds or behaviors are “suspicious” or less than squeaky clean, and do be skeptical of callout posts and related tools of ostracization. For every one legitimately, maliciously harmful person out there, there are a hundred more who are on the receiving end of this kind of treatment because they were an asshole to the wrong person, or because they caused a scene on a train car.
A self-righteous monster hunter is every bit as dangerous as the monsters they claim to hunt.
I have a "monster hunter" character, Elia, she doesn't quite go to the extremes described above, stalking normal people etc, she mostly goes after cold cases and "unexplained disappearances" etc, she tries to get rid of paranormal serial killers.
Now that doesn't absolve her of being dangerous, she killed multiple people and her dayjob is headhunting for the American police, not exactly the high road.
Now anyone currently playing with Elia stop reading please, I've talked about her before publically but... you know, keep some mystery alive
Her whole deal is that she's driven by a misguided search for "redemption" she's a home-brewed misc character I made a while back , she's a "fallen angel" got kicked out of heaven and everything, and she tries to make up for her sins by taking out individuals she feels are dangerous , the whole "if I kill two killers there's less killers in the world" kinda thinking, it's a while thing of well meaning but misguided attempts to help people.
So far she's only run into actual *monsters* in call of cuthulu stuff we played in eureka, so she didn't really need to grapple with much morality yet, but I'm hoping that changes soon! It's an aspect of her character I'm looking forward to exploring.
Inspired by @anim-ttrpgs's mystery ttrpg Eureka.
One of these creatures is a monster known to kill humans without remorse. You can't play as one, since that would interfere with the intended gameplay.
The second one on the other hand, the man eating shapeshifting sheet of flesh called the Thing from Beyond is totally fair game for a player character.
I was looking at Silk and Dagger and it looks really interesting and cool. Only problem - I have an INTENSE fear of spiders. What's the spider art situation on this bad boy?
At the time of writing this, spiders are mentioned frequently in the text of Silk & Dagger: A Sensible Drow RPG, but do not appear in any of the (currently very sparse) art.
As we continue to develop Silk & Dagger and get more art done for it, there will be spiders appearing in the art, but in the future we could consider releasing an alternate version that is free of the spider art, or including a warning up front that lists the page numbers where pictures of spiders appear.
I don’t know whether this next part is any comfort to you, but most (but not all) spider art in Silk & Dagger will probably lean towards relatively non-threatening and even “cute,” since these giant spiders are a domesticated and regular part of life in Silk & Dagger’s world.
Exerpt from Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy (with art by @theblackwarden)
"Blissfully Ignorant," investigator Trait from Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy.
I never anticipated that Eureka: The Fanservice Files would sell so much.
In 4 hours it made more sales and more money than Eureka Adventure Modules Vol. 1 did in 61 days.
One complaint/reaction we often get about Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy that I find really baffling is that we expect you to hide your PC's character sheet from other players at the table. A lot of people act like this is an impossible task, but, like tons and tons and tons of well-established tabletop games expect you to hide elements of play from other players? Poker? Blackjack? Go Fish? Uno? Settlers of Catan? DM screens?
Another, maybe more baffling criticism we get is "I don't like that this rulebook tries to tell me how to play the game."
God that 5e player culture really fuckin sucks
One complaint/reaction we often get about Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy that I find really baffling is that we expect you to hide your PC's character sheet from other players at the table. A lot of people act like this is an impossible task, but, like tons and tons and tons of well-established tabletop games expect you to hide elements of play from other players? Poker? Blackjack? Go Fish? Uno? Settlers of Catan? DM screens?
Hidden information has led to some of my FAVORITE moments in Eureka. Okay, so, imagine this: A group of homeless people are investigating a strange, grisly murder. One of them, Liv, is secretly a shapeshifting alien. As far as she knows, the others are human. She doesn't even know that any other kind of monster exists. The group had followed some clues to an abandoned warehouse. They were on a balcony on the second floor of the building when they saw two angry gangsters enter on the ground floor. The guys saw the party up on the balcony, yelled at them for trespassing, and started towards the staircase. End of Session 1. Liv was already off on her own near the only stairwell, so between sessions, I decided that she just hid to ambush them as they came up the stairs. She's homeless and hungry. And a large threatening dude makes as good a meal as anything. The GM and I did a secret session just before the second session to resolve the ambush. Liv dropped on the one in the rear, Andre, and rolled good enough stealth that the one in front didn't notice as she swallowed Andre whole. Start of Session 2. The guy in front, whose name we never learned, continued up the stairs to threaten the rest of the investigators, not noticing that Andre had vanished. He got to the main group, and there was a little back and forth trying to convince him that the party wasn't a threat. Eventually he was like, "Andre, rough this guy up." Only for Liv to come in behind him and say, in a shitty gangster impression, "Sure thing, boss!" The guy turns around, surprised.
Immediately after Liv walked up behind the guy, another party member, Quill, took advantage of the distraction and opened fire. The party managed to kill the guy(I remind you, his worst crime was that he asked why they were trespassing. he was maybe going to rough them up a little. none of these characters respect the sanctity of human life.), but in the chaos, one of them, Emmet, who was secretly an android, had built up so much internal heat that he had to take off his shirt right then and there to vent it and relieve stress or he would literally catch on fire. Naturally, a bunch of heat vents popping out of his back revealed to the other characters that he was not a normal human. Then, Quill, his long time boyfriend, saw this, and revealed that he was a living mannequin. (They seriously both thought the other was human. Their players didn't know about it. The whole table was surprised) Then, another party member, Mira, revealed that she was also a living porcelain doll.(the whole table was even MORE surprised.) All three of them had believed that they were the only living doll in existence, so they were extremely excited to find a sort of community. Liv and the one other guy, Cyrus, were freaking out because "what the fuck? Three robots?" (neither of them knew magic existed.) They left the room to freak out in the stairwell and talk about whether they can trust each other(Liv was a shapeshifting alien who eats people, but she's just as surprised by the existence of talking dolls as Cyrus is). The dolls had a bonding moment about being fellow secret automatons.(while the gangster is still freshly dead on the floor between them) Liv, at this point, is a scared lonely alien, who has just discovered that (as far as she understands) androids exist, and they've got her surrounded. She doesn't know how ANY of this stuff works, so she panics and comes up with a theory: they must be secret government androids coming to drag her off to area 51 and study her. Why else would three androids follow an alien around? After the dolls had their bonding moment, they tried to comfort the other two. It didn't go super well. The conversation eventually turned to "what happened to Andre?"(there HAD been two guys who entered, and the others don't know Liv swallowed him whole.) Liv was desperate to find literally any alibi. So she started running around all over the place loudly wondering where he could have gotten to and making up any bullshit explanation she could think of.
But Emmet found evidence of the ambush on the stairs, and asked, "hey, weren't you right by the stairs when this happened?" Liv made up a lie, but Emmet noticed that liv was six inches taller than usual(the mass from absorbing an entire guy has to go somewhere.), so he followed up with "and didn't you used to be shorter?". Now, Emmet was NOT a secret government android. He had no idea aliens existed. He was just so socially inept that he asks weird questions all the time. But Liv didn't know that. So, assuming she was about to be locked up in area 51, she immediately ran for her fucking life, rolled a 0 for her speed in the chase, and was immediately caught by Mira. Liv collapsed in fear. She grabbed the hem of Mira's skirt and begged for her life: "please don't kill me, I'll be a good alien, I don't wanna be a test subject, im scared of surgery, I promise I won't eat people," until she was just blubbering incoherently through the tears. And the others tried to gently calm her down because she was obviously in distress even though they had no idea what she was talking about. Being living dolls, none of them were too worried about her brief mention of eating people. Eventually, once Liv had calmed down, she shapeshifted herself some doll-like joints to fit in with her new friends. Meanwhile, Cyrus, the only actual human in a group of broken dolls, just took another long drag on his cigarette and tried to pretend that this wasn't the weirdest day of his fucking life. As a human, he was naturally a little worried that Liv had mentioned "I won't eat people anymore" Mira, the only one of the characters with a home, invited the others back to bond over their newfound community of dolls, where she used her craft tools to patch up some of the damage that Emmet had taken in the fight. Being tired and homeless, none of them wanted to pass up her offer of a warm place to sleep.
---
Further dramatic reveals, as well as the character' fumbling attempts to get each other on the same page while having no real idea what the others thought was happening, escalated things further into romance, betrayal, death threats, narrowly avoided murder-suicide, romcom antics, serial killings, staged cryptid encounters, attempted domestic terrorism, and gender dysphoria. All because of the careful interplay of trust and incomplete understanding.
And they still had to solve that strange grisly murder.
Amazing :D
(That's what a well designed game system can create; a story to tell long after the game is over <3)
Excerpt from Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy.
This previously patreon-exclusive adventure module was just released in beta on itchio!
"FORIVA: The Angel Game" takes place in Shreveport, Louisiana, 1999, as a mysterious condition seems to have taken hold of a growing number of local children and teens, and the word on everyone’s lips is “angel.”
This is a mystery-horror adventure that you can expect to take 2-6 sessions to play through, and, in my opinion, the best piece of fiction I’ve ever written. Also, it was Actual Played by the awesome @tinytablepodcast, here is their linktree and a link to the first episode.
You can download the adventure module here. Payment is optional, but highly appreciated!
Here’s the full adventure hook under the cut.
Check out our play through and this CRAZY module!! The level of detail in the module is WILD, like truly things I would have never thought to put in.
