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!
"I'm Okay, You're Okay," investigator Trait from Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy. Every investigator has 3 to 6 Traits!
Work on editing and polishing Eureka is continuing at a steady pace and in fact finally picking up speed again after a bunch of hiccups in development. The fact that it is being played by a bunch of people in the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club right now has given us a lot of very useful playtest data that has been super helpful in polishing the rulebook.
Another beta build of the game will release on itchio on February 27th, 2025 with the last little bits of the module writing guide finally completed, just in time for submissions to open on the module writing game jam.
The Eureka Mystery Module Game Jam opens up submissions on March 1st, 2025, but the submissions don't close until April 1st, 2025, so there is still plenty of time.
I have been busting my butt getting Silk & Dagger ready for alpha release on March 10th, 2025. It is not currently available to the public, but you can get it by signing up to our patreon. Normally I would not want to release a game publicly like this while it’s still in an alpha state, but our financial situation is such that we cannot really afford to keep it patreon exclusive any longer. We do better than most, but TTRPG game development does not make a lot of money.
Since Silk & Dagger will be releasing in alpha, not beta, it won’t be as polished, or even as finished, as Eureka for some time. The game is functional enough that it can be played, and is very fun and funny, but it has only been playtested like once and a good number of features have not even been written in yet. It is very much a work-in-progress/proof-of-concept, so do not set your expectations too high.
We will be holding more playtests on our official patreon-exclusive discord server soon as well.
After we release the Silk & Dagger alpha on March 10th, I will be shifting focus off of Silk & Dagger to work on A.N.I.M.’s third game, Death Bed, while I collect feedback on Silk & Dagger and apply it as needed. Patreon subscribers will get these improved versions monthly, while with the public alpha you will probably have to wait many months as I turn Death Bed from a bunch of scattered notes to a playable alpha version.
Once Death Bed is publicly released in alpha, my main focus will shift back to Silk & Dagger with the goal of implementing the rest of the feedback and bringing it from alpha state to beta state, while I wait for Death Bed feedback to roll in.
Death Bed is our attempt to actually bring Dark Souls-like feel and gameplay to the TTRPG medium, where so many others have failed before us.
You will start to see early pre-alpha versions of this game on our patreon as soon as April.
my mom sold me to Red Letter Media
there's this horrible school of attempted literary criticism on here that holds that 1. everything in any given author's work is autobiographical, especially if it seems "real" and 2. those themes seeped into the work subconsciously, revealing something about the author that they're either trying to hide or unaware of themself. it drives me up a wall, since it seems to deny the fundamental skills that make people good writers: the empathy to imagine and portray experiences that one hasn't had oneself and the ability to take one's personal emotional experiences or worldview and fold them, consciously, into the unworked clay of a narrative.
Love playing Eureka because there's a very important metagame of "are the other players' investigators supernatural or are they just weirdoes?"
Especially when the supernatural investigators are themselves weirdoes (potentially in ways completely unrelated to their alleged supernatural nature)! 😏
Yeah exactly. Sometimes a guy being a wolfman is the most normal thing about that guy and otherwise he's on some quirked up eccentric detective shit.
To everyone considering paying 5 billion dollars per year to play gamecube games on switch
Take my hand. I can show you a better way
ur payin eighty dollars for this?
this post altered my brain so now whenever i have a bowl of any food i think Oh fuck yes it’s a little bowl of seeds for me
"Skeptic," investigator Trait from Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy. Every investigator has 3 to 6 Traits!
the united states of america has declared war on affordable goods
The reason I think we need to get rid of the "roleplaying vs rollplaying" dichotomy is not just because it's a stupid meme borne out of badly articulated and unexamined elitism but also because it ends up placing one part of roleplaying (improvisational portrayal of a fictional character) over other parts of the act of play (rules-mediated play, player expression through system mastery) that are at least as important.
Like, get this, there's literally nothing wrong with putting on a silly goblin voice for your goblin NPC named Goblin Steve who likes to say "Check it out guys, I'm Goblin Steve," but placing that above developing system mastery and knowing how the rules have a voice in the creation of a collaborative narrative actually undermines people's willingness to learn the rules and that's literally a bad dynamic because game design is real and rules are good (unless the rules are bad in which case I recommend changing to a better ruleset).
and in the right ruleset for Goblin Steve, Goblin Steve will be getting bonuses or some other iteration of rules-based incentive when you have him say "Check it out guys, I'm Goblin Steve" in a funny voice
Equally, in the right system for Crondor the Ogre Slayer, Crondor will be getting bonuses or some other iteration of rules-based incentive when you have him say "RRAAAUGH!" and chop the head off an ogre.
Bob Smith, the normal but really nosy guy, in Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy will get bonuses or some other iteration of rules-based incentive when you have him investigate, and when you have him do any of the things that his personality/characterization, as created by the Traits you gave him, incentivize.
I have said this before, but your roleplaying is like a sailboat, and the rulebook is like the wind. Many, many people want to go in a different direction than the way the D&D5e wind is blowing, so they fight the wind, or try to excise and ignore it completely, and that's how you end up with phrases like "we don't do much combat or dice rolling because we actually roleplay" or "I like D&D5e because it's not all combat and it can be anything you want"
like, implying that people who do engage with the combat mechanics "aren't really roleplaying" is kind of disrespectful to the entire medium of TTRPGs. Like I said in another post, rules are written by the authors of TTRPGs on purpose with the intent to provide a particular experience by incentivizing certain character actions and disincentivizing others.
Which brings me to my other point, and, it's like, D&D5e kind of is all combat. 90% of the rules on any character sheet pertain to combat, and that's not inherently a bad thing! Combat isn't a lesser or more restrictive form of roleplaying any more so than, like, a movie having lots of fight scenes makes it a bad movie. But it means that if you aren't engaging with combat, you aren't really engaging with the rules of the game, you're not playing D&D5e, you're just sort of playing pretend with your friends, which also is not inherently a bad thing.
If you find yourself trying to fight or ignore the wind to have fun, you should get different wind, wind that is actually blowing in a direction you want your boat to go. When your desires and the desires of the rulebook are aligned, roleplaying can be so much more fun! The rules support and incentivize the actions you want to see the characters taking and the situations you want to see them in!
This only works if you engage with the rules and let them affect things, though, if you keep undoing/fudging dice rolls or whatever, then you might prefer a different kind of boat altogether, you might just not like TTRPGs, which is also fine! I think that many people playing TTRPGs would actually prefer to be doing, like, forum RP instead with no rules of dice rolls, just based on the way they treat rules and dice rolls as something to be avoided.
I want people to get the most out of their games, but Hasbro and WotC want to get the most (money) out of you, so they've sculpted a culture where, even if you don't like anything that D&D5e provides, instead of playing any other game from their competitors, you run yourself ragged twisting and contorting D&D5e until it sorta barely works for your purposes, or just buy the rulebook and let it sit there unopened. They don't care as long as they get your money.
And no, pirating D&D5e books doesn't make a difference, it still benefits them by suffocating all competitors.
If you like heroic-fantasy action-adventure with emphasis on combat, I urge you to keep playing D&D5e (or maybe switch to Pathfinder because it's the exact same thing but a little better designed), but if you don't like that, I urge you to please try a different game, there are so so many out there, and most of them are much easier to learn than D&D5e, D&D5e is actually in the upper-mid level of complexity and difficulty to learn, it actually isn't a very good beginner game!
I guess since I've come this far I'll also go ahead and plug the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club, which is a discord server for the purpose of introducing people to new TTRPGs. If you don't know where to start looking for a non-D&D5e game, give it a shot, we can hook you up.
Also, beyond what both me and @anim-ttrpgs have already said above, once you realize that "roleplaying" in the context of roleplaying game isn't just the play acting bits between all the times you have to use the "boring" rules and that the rules are an important part of the act of roleplaying, you suddenly unlock a bunch of new axes along which you can become better at roleplaying, beyond just becoming a better actor.
Because as stated, the play acting bit is a valuable skill to have and cultivate because they can make the experience of play so much more enjoyable for everyone around the table, but it is not the only skill that goes into the act of play. You can improve at roleplaying by simply learning and playing more games and cultivating a greater understanding of the medium as a whole and the types of narratives that specific games produce. You can improve at roleplaying by learning the rules in depth and learning to spot how the various different systems within a game interact and intersect, thus knowing better how to utilize those mechanics in the interests of a more interesting narrative or just a more enjoyable game. Heck, even learning all the weird corner cases and exceptions and unintentional consequences of unclearly written rules can help you develop a critical understanding of game writing while also helping you personally produce content that is more enjoyable.
These are all valuable skills to have. Knowing how to make a funny goblin voice and developing a kickass catchphrase like "Check it out guys, I'm Goblin Steve" is just one of a myriad of skills, as important as building Goblin Steve in a way where he interacts with the mechanics in a way that makes everyone at the table go "Holy shit, I love Goblin Steve"
As I've mentioned, Feng Shui is thus a nearly perfect RPG that avoids this dichotomy because going "Ka-chunk" and miming working the pump action of a shotgun whenever you have to reload one in game gives you a damage bonus, thus marrying RP and Combat into the seamless whole they were always intended to be.
Dgmw I get where you're coming from and Feng Shui DOES sound like an awesome game, and I know this might come off as nitpicky, but I think talking about it from the angle of how it "avoids this dichotomy" and how it "marries RP and combat" kinda still does reinforce the mindset that OP is arguing against here, because you're implying that such a dichotomy does indeed exist unless a game takes explicit steps to avoid it, and that combat and RP are normally separate activities unless a game "marries" them, when OP's point is that such a dichotomy doesn't actually exist and there is no inherent separation between combat and RP because combat *is* roleplaying.
This is called the "analog loophole" and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it. They can encrypt and copy-protect all they want, but eventually the file has to be sent to a speaker and/or screen, and it has to get there in a human-readable form because that's the whole dang point
The simplest way to exploit the analog loophole is just pointing a camera at a screen or a microphone at a speaker, but direct recording is also always possible and always will be. Anything that can be displayed can be saved and displayed again
Back in the day, people also used to share software over the radio with this technology. Because computer programs and files are really just sets of binary code, and that code can be turned into audio tones.
The resulting audio file can be played over the radio (sounding a bit like the old dial up noise, as it's just two quickly oscillating notes) and recorded to a cassette tape, which you can then give to your computer to "decode" back into 0's and 1's, which gives you the program file. You can then run it as if you'd installed it from a disk.
NPR did a very cool podcast about this.
