The official tumblr page for The Agency of Narrative Intrigue and Mystery, bringing you as much TTRPG material as you're authorized to see, including promoting the work of other creators and essays/discussion on TTRPG design. A five-person team comprised of lgbt and disabled individuals trying to make it in an industry dominated by D&D5e. Authors of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy.
Welcome to tumblr page of The Agency of Narrative Intrigue and Mystery (A.N.I.M.)!
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!
Our Games
Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy
A TTRPG for deep character roleplay, realistic combat, player deduction, and secret monster antics!
Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is a groundbreaking TTRPG that revolutionizes mystery investigation of all kinds!
Leave behind the days of "We walk into the room and roll Investigate." Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is a TTRPG all about investigation, and its purpose-driven mechanics let players take initiative, use their characters' unique strengths to find clues, and deduce conclusions themselves. We post about it in-depth a lot, so check out our blog for more info, or just read it yourself! Payment is optional!
We plan to support Eureka for many years to come through supplements and adventure modules. It comes with a short adventure module made specifically for teaching you, your players, and their characters the ropes, but you can also find the first set of higher-stakes adventures right here!
The Eye of Neptune and FORIVA: The Angel Game
Two brilliant mysteries for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy
Two adventure modules for use with Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy!
Eureka: The Fanservice Files
A comical expansion for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy.
A mini-expansion originally intended to just be an April Fools thing, but then turned into a real expansion! This features several new character Traits and powers!
Eureka: The XXX-Files
Erotic Traits for you urban fantasy adventures!
Another mini-expansion, featuring several new character Traits and optional rules!
"Eureka: Cold Open"
A short story set in the world of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy.
Not actually a game, rather a short-story set in the world of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy.
Silk & Dagger: A Sensible Drow RPG
Navigate a deadly social gauntlet in this satirical TTRPG about Drow and their underlings.
An asymmetric comedy game of drama and drow. Players either take the role of a brutal mistress whom everything she says goes, whether she understands what sheâs talking about or not, and whose position of dominance is maintained by the respect of her peers, respect that hinges on how brutal and controlling she is to her subordinates; or an array of pathetic servants who are helpless without their mistressâs âleadership,â (and maybe even be more so with it).
Edge Hedge Arena
A party game where your name is tied to an edgy hedgehog OC of immense power. Fight.
This goofy omage to the Sonic the Hedgehog fanbase of the 2000s and 2010s is more of a party game than a conventional TTRPG, but thatâs just means itâs fast to play and play again. The game will pair you with a real Sonic OC, so you can stat them out and battle them against others in the ultimate blood sport.
Our Mission Statements
1. To provide a source of income for those of our team who cannot support themselves by any regular means through disability.
To this end, we ask for your support as fans, if you want us to be able to continue to create more of the work you love. We put our games up in beta for feedback and extra publicity/support while we work diligently on finishing them, and as a completely independent and unsponsored studio, we are entirely dependent on word-of-mouth from fans like you to bring our projects in front of new eyes and keep us afloat through sales and patreon subscriptions.
What you can do to ensure that we can support ourselves and continue operations:
Follow us on tumblr and bluesky
Reblogging/retweeting/whatever our posts on these sites, even if you don't have many followers, makes a huge difference and is actually how we get most of our new fans and patreon subscribers.
Talk about us!
Play our games, tell your friends about them, make posts about your adventures or characters from our games, make homebrew stuff, etc. Like with the social media posts, this is the only way the word gets out about who we are and what we do! Without word-of-mouth, we're dead in the water.
Subscribe to our Patreon!
You get monthly rewards such as Eureka updates, adventure modules, short stories, previews of new games, etc. It also gets you into our patron-exclusive discord server!
Buy, or just download, our games on Itch.io
Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy
Eureka Adventure Modules Vol. 1
Edge Hedge Arena
Money helps a lot, but even just downloading them for free gives us a boost in the algorithm and gets more eyes on us!
Donate on Ko-fi
How this helps is pretty obvious.
Buy our snoop merchandise
We only get a small cut of this, but the stuff is pretty cool, and they're good conversation starters!
2. To fight back against the overwhelming hegemonic monopoly held over the TTRPG artform by Wizards of the Coast. This goes deeper than you think.
We donât just promote our own games, we promote the games of others, and healthy play habits as well through the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club!
Check out the A.N.I.M. RPG BOOK CLUB community on Discord - hang out with 443 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.
This is a welcoming and diverse space for fans of TTRPGs to discuss and play them. Plenty of different games will be running at any given time, but the main âbook clubâ aspect of it is that people nominate RPGs theyâd like to play, then the nominations are voted on regularly. Whatever wins, we all read and play. People are sorted into play groups based on schedule compatibility, so itâs very flexible.
Players are strongly encouraged to buy the RPG themselves to support the authors, but if you cannot for any reason, a PDF will always be provided for you. We have raised hundreds of dollars for indie and small press RPGs this way, and the community just keeps growing! If youâre a TTRPG designer, feel free to come in and nominate your own game!
Contact Us
Come talk to us in the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club or our patreon-exclusive discord server, or send us an email at [email protected]!
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my 37 year old vampire girlfriend keeps telling me i simply don't understand the woes of immortality as if I didn't also own a VHS player or visit a blockbuster a few times as a kid
she keeps staring off into the distance saying those shit like "those as youthful as you know not what horrors lie in your past" even though we both know damn well she's talking about the 2008 financial crash
"Games are art" doesn't just mean "games are good," to me it also means "games have meaning and deserve to be looked at as pieces created by people that actually reflect the circumstances of their creation." This means looking at games critically beyond a lens of "is it good on the scale of gameness?"
The Call of Duty games are actually popular not just in spite of their quality, but they're actually well-crafted games. However, there is merit in critical analysis of them that goes beyond "how many graphics" and "how much gameplay," but also looking at them via their quite real connections to the US military and how they basically mirror the ideology of the US military. This doesn't mean that you should treat the Call of Duty games as infohazards which will turn anyone who interacts with them into drones for the US military, but as reflections of real ideologies that are larger than the players themselves.
And like, there's a lot of art that carries ideologies that when transplanted into the real world would be morally repugnant to me, but as works of art they are worth engaging to me. Old-school D&D doesn't actually describe a real world but the fictional folks and structures used to populate it still say something about the people who made it, their priors, and what concessions they were willing to make in the fiction for the sake of gameplay.
This is something you should keep in mind when someone makes a point like "well the orcs/bandits/cultists deserve it because they did bad things in the fiction." These are in-setting justifications, ultimately come up with to frame the narrative of the game as heroic. There's not a lot of interesting ground to be covered in discussions of "how do we find an enemy in D&D player characters can kill without it morally compromising players" because the game isn't a cursed tome that'll turn you evil for engaging with it. What's more interesting is "what kind of priors went unexamined to uncritically make bandits/cultists/orcs the default enemies instead of, say, the lord's soldiers?"
And an unwillingness to think about these things doesn't make anyone morally deficient; however, in my opinion an unwillingness to entertain these ideas or an aggressive and vitriolic rejection of these lines of thought may be indicative of intellectual incuriosity and ultimately I feel it emerges from a similar place as "D&D must be woke or it'll infect me:" D&D must be protected from evil criticisms because otherwise D&D may seem morally deficient. Which is like so far besides the point.
And at the end of the day, I enjoy D&D when it's basically fantasy cops and robbers, or robbers and other robbers: it's a game of accumulating power by killing creatures and stealing their stuff. It's a really fun and I would even dare say good game when played that way. The reason I caution against approaching D&D from the point of view of "we must find the right type of monsters our characters can kill with moral impunity" is because you might accidentally end up from going from one unexamined trope to another but more importantly part of the buy-in of D&D is accepting that D&D the game as it exists thinks certain classes of monsters (and as we know from earlier, more equal opportunity editions, Men are also Monsters) are okay to be kill. It's literally fine, you won't be morally compromised for engaging with the game as is: but also, if you're fucked up like me you might find joy in thinking about "hey isn't it weird how this medieval fantasy world looks more like the American frontier than an actual medieval society?"
We got interviewed by the Round Table TTRPG Podcast. This was a great interview, great questions, and we got to talk a lot about game design as a skill with intent behind it, why Eureka is the way it is, challenge some deeply entrenched âwisdomâ of TTRPGs in general, etc.. The host was super nice and I recommend you check him out not just for this interview but the numerous others on the same channel.
I canât really list the questions here here like I sometimes do because what happened more is the conversation just sorta wandered from topic to topic, but rest assured it wasnât just rehashing the same âHow did you first get into TTRPGs?â questions.
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Mail Hauberk from Germany dated the 14th Century on display at the Wallace Collection in London, England
This shirt have short sleeves that reach the elbow with border links of brass that have the maker's name stamped on in Gothic minuscales "+ernart couwein" Similar inscriptions have been found in hauberks in the armoury of Churburg.
Armour such as this would have been worn beneath other armour such as plate. It would have protected the wearer from piercing damage but blunt weapons such as hammers and maces would crush bones beneath them.
Sorry to make this kind of post again I know it's barely the start of the month, but I've had some unexpected difficulties that ate up at my paycheck and looking at the rest of the month, I'm in the stiuation of having to choose between groceries and rent unless I can scrounge up around $300 USD to complete my rent. I'm putting all my stuff on itch.io on sale for a bit 3:
A bundle by imsobadatnicknames, $9.00 for 7 games
Don't feel obligated to help of course, I'll start looking if there's anyone I can borrow from too.
I updated this survey with a few new questions based on some of the answers we already got, if you already answered it, please take a couple more minutes to answer it again. If you haven't answered it but have seen any episodes of Muted Swallow (the Eureka "actual play"), please take a couple minutes to answer it. There's only like 4 or 5 mandatory questions.
I saw someone mention in that post you reblogged that you're not fond of PbtA. I'm genuinely curious: what don't you like about it?
The last time I made a post about why I don't like PbtA games it was cited in two callout posts, but lets see if I can beat that record with the exact same points and gripes as last time but with a bigger following.
I, personally, the one member if the A.N.I.M. team who writes these posts, hate PbtA games.
Some PbtA games I respect, because the designers understand what theyâre doing and have chosen the PbtA formula to play to its specific strengths and realize their idea for a game, but I still just don't/wouldn't enjoy playing them. To non-comprehensively name a couple off the top of my head, Monsterhearts and Dungeon Bitches. And of course the original Apocalypse World.
Articulating exactly why I donât like PbtA games is not easy though, because âPbtAâ is a pretty loose framework, but for the sake of this post being not too long I'm going to assume that people reading this generally know what features and elements they usually involve.
I find that most people who like PbtA games canât articulate it well either, at least without citing features that almost all TTRPGs have or demonstrating a misunderstanding of the design goals of non-PbtA RPGs.
Character Creation and Character Abilities
Not literally all self-described PbtA games use âplaybooks,â (FIST doesnât) but most of them do. A âplaybookâ serves a similar role to a character class from the challenge-based TTRPGs i tend to enjoy more, like (old school) D&D, but thereâs some big differences. Playbooks from my experience tend to be much more restrictive where I want them to be permissive. Sometimes you get to swap around a few abilities, but playbooks often have personalities built into them, they often even have character arcs built into them. I donât like this. It feels like picking a character, not picking a class for a character. I want to have full control over who my character is. For this, games like AD&D which have very limited mechanical character customization, feel less restrictive because it feels like they tell me âprovide a character who fits into one of these four categoriesâ instead of âhereâs your character.â
In AD&D, your characterâs personality has little direct mechanical effect (unless you count the fact that, if playing in the third-person verbiage similar to âauthor stanceâ like Eureka asks you to, and how I play every TTRPG that doesnât bar that), characters with different personalities will probably come up with different solutions to problems, and be able to talk or not talk their way out or different interpersonal situations than other characters even with the exact same abilities. (Which is something you should probably take into consideration especially in something like AD&D which subtly encourages a lot more talking than fighting when possible even though its fighting rules have more depth, and where the game expects you yo have multiple characters which you may even be playing all at the same time.)
I have a bunch of Fighters in my own groupâs on-and-off AD&D âtroupe campaignâ about a large band of mercenaries. Not counting some differences in skills and base stats, these guys all have basically the same abilities because they are all AD&D Fighters. But only Corvus, complaint-heavy peasant fisherman turned unwilling levy turned deserter turned reluctant highwayman turned reluctant mercenary(is there a difference?) would have thought to walk straight up to one of the slavers raiding the village the party rode out to save and say âOi, where are we going after this?!â The slaver, thinking Corvus was with his group, told him the plan.
Sly but dignified Sir Ferdinand the Fox couldâve never passed for a lowlife slaver so readily.
Eureka does mechanicize your PCâs personally, but itâs a personality you build yourself through character creation by picking Traits and Truths.
Dice Bend Reality
Another thing I donât like about PbtA games is that dice rolls bend reality rather than determining how well your character executes a particular action.
In the games I like, when a character is about to do something risky or difficult, you roll the dice. This combined with some aspect of their character sheet determines how well they execute this action.
PbtA games tend to give the dice a very different perview of control. They donât necessarily determine the characterâs execution of the ability, they determine the reality of the situation itself.
In AD&D or Eureka, well Iâll just show this screenshot.
In a PbtA game though, Iâll give FIST as an example (it isn't a great example but I had the rulebook on-hand.)
I donât like this.
In the âchallenge gameâ style TTRPGs I like, the GM says âhere is a challenging environment that your character may not overcome.â My job to look at my characterâs character sheet and say âmy character will overcome it like this.â The game says âprove that your character is capable of overcoming the challenge that wayâ and i demonstrate by adding dice to character stats and showing that they are above or below a certain threshold of âcharacter executes this action well.â And it not only has to be a well-executed action, it has to be the correct action. (This is actually super important to not just, like, the intended gameplay experience of Eureka for example, but super super important to its themes.)
I donât like it when the rules or dice or GM of a game bend and alter the established fiction (such as making 3 more guys appear that would not have existed on different dice results) to make things go well or poorly for my character. This is a very very bad GMing practice in challenge game style TTRPGs, and itâs something that is built into PbtA. Which does NOT make it a bad practice in PbtA games, itâs something that (well-made) PbtA games do with intent and are built around doing. I just personally hate it.
People Keep Confusing Eureka for PbtA
This is the weakest point on the list. Itâs just annoying. Eureka uses 2D6 with three degrees of success similar to PbtA games (though how the results are applied to the situation are very different), but it is actually an extremely âtradâ* challenge game. We have to semi-frequently point this out and tell people not to try and play it with PbtA-like conventions such as dice rolls altering reality and stuff. Having to say âthereâs different types of games which require different play styles or else they wonât workâ to PbtA players actually brings me to my strongest point, one that isn't just personal taste.
*âTradâ as in the branch of TTRPG evolution which shares much of its DNA with games like AD&D and Call of Cthulhu, not âtradâ as in Republican.
Indie D&D5e
Itâs indie D&D5e. This is through no direct fault of Apocalypse World, or any other particularly well-made PbtA game. In fact most of the blame still lies on D&D5e and WotC for basing their marketing around the idea that TTRPGs rules don't matter, but the reality is that PbtA occupies the same role and causes much of the same problems - albeit at a much smaller scale - in indie and small press TTRPG spaces as D&D5e does in TTRPG spaces as a whole. That is, players and designers see it as The TTRPG Framework That Can Do Any Genre, Setting, or Concept, when in reality it has strengths and weaknesses, things it is and isnât suited for, like any other engine. But everybody just keeps plugging every concept into it anyway with no rhyme or reason whether it works or not - and it often doesnât - but they do it because they donât know any better, or because they cynically know they PbtA sells the same way that D&D5e sells: PbtA players who wonât buy anything that isnât PbtA because âI already know D&D5- I mean PbtA, why should I bother trying to learn a different game?â
imo you get the most out of engaging with media when you strike a balance between treating characters as people (reading interiority into their actions, considering the effect of various aspects of their identity, etc etc) and as vehicles for storytelling (what narrative purpose do they serve, how do their actions and personality function to convey the themes of the work, etc etc). because of course characters are literary devices but also thereâs a reason we use literary devices written to embody realistic people in order to tell stories
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Iâm just throwing this out here because God knows our team wonât have time any time soon to make something like this. Anyone can take this idea for a Eureka mystery module and run with it. Donât worry if you think someone else is already doing it, two people taking this same idea are still gonna turn out with two very different modules. And, thatâs two modules. Players can play both.
In this post im gonna lay out all the concepts and ideas that this hypothetical module may entail. Iâm making this a regular type of post where I pitch Eureka adventure modules to the fanbase in a sorta stream-of-consciousness kinda way and offer as much scaffolding as I can in the hopes that somebody will make it, because the A.N.I.M. Team is at project capacity, but more mystery modules are always needed, and if we want to play our own game then the modules we play have to be written by somebody else anyway.
Anyone with ideas they think they can contribute on this concept, please feel free to comment and discuss them.
If any of these mystery module pitches im doing inspire you to take the concept in a very different direction than outlined, that's also okay as long as it, like, follows the setting guidelines and stuff.
SPOILER WARNING: This pitch contains minor spoilers for the Eureka adventure modules The Eye of Neptune and FORIVA: The Angel Game.
Hook
A friend of the investigators invites them on a week-long camping trip somewhere really remote, and mentions something about wanting someone to âwatch out for him,â but doesnât elaborate.
When the investigators get out there, they canât put their finger on it, but something isnât right.
Setting the Stage
Since this guy is the investigatorsâ friend, they need to know some stuff about him and have a history with him. You will need to provide a pretty detailed idea of his personality in the Setting the Stage section and some ways the investigators couldâve met him and some stuff they couldâve done with him before, as well as plenty of stuff they could know about his life.
This might not be entirely necessary, but you could also do the same for every other NPC that will be on the trip. In fact this would make for some great clues when one or more of them are not acting like themselves.
A good thing to do might be to create a 1D6 table for each NPC and roll once or even twice on it for each investigator to provide some extra facts they know about the NPC in addition to the given stuff in their Setting the Stage info.
As for the specific friend that invited them and said that cryptic shit, I can tell you that he is an engineer or has some other relatively high paying job in construction or manufacturing.
Truth
Their friend is aware that the company that he works as an engineer for is cutting some serious corners on their manufacturing, and are nowhere near government regulation standards. He has threatened to blow the whistle, and was given a cryptic warning. Now heâs afraid for his life and went out on this remote camping trip to make himself hard to find while he thinks about his options and decides if heâs really going to go through with it. He will divulge all of this to the investigators and other characters present while they are on the camping trip.
Unfortunately, and unbeknownst to him, the company has already made moves to silence him before he blows the whistle. Theyâve hired a hitwoman who never fails to make her targets disappear without a trace under circumstances that donât look too obviously like murder. No one who employs her knows how she does it, but itâs probably best not to ask too many questions that could incriminate them both.
The Assassin
When I come up with Eureka module ideas, I normally donât like to go with monsters that have a Monster Trait in the rulebook for a number of reasons. Firstly because I like to imagine investigators, especially folkloric paranormal investigators, going up against stuff that is much more âLovecraftianâ in concept (and by that I mean things that evoke the same kind of mysterious horror/dread as original Lovecraft short stories, not specific entities from âThe Cthulhu Mythos,â which was compiled and powerscaled into one big canon much later). I consider both The Eye of Neptune and FORIVA: The Angel Game to fit into this category. The paranormal threats in those modules can have their motivations discerned, their actions discovered, and their plans thwarted all through investigation, but what exactly they are and where they come from can only be speculated. And thatâs scary to me.
In a lot of ways TFBs and vampires do at least partially fit that bill, but the other reason I prefer to stay away from Monster Trait monsters for mystery modules is, well, their Monster Trait is fully explained in the rulebook. While Eureka doesnât consider reading these traits to be âcheatingâ or anything, it does potentially introduce some situations where the player will recognize the full extent of what the monster is long before the investigator. This probably wonât ruin the entire experience, but itâs something Iâd prefer to avoid dealing with.
Anyway, it isnt a hard rule for module writers to avoid making Monster Trait monsters the villains, and here I think that this idea is too cool to pass up.
The assassin is a TFB. She can easily consume and digest her targets without leaving a trace behind, and if that alone isnât enough to sell the disappearance, she can disguise herself as them after and carry out their life long enough to convincingly portray them randomly deciding to cut all contact with their social circles and move to another country or something.
She doesnât strictly need a âtrueâ appearance, but I like to think that her âdefault human personaâ looks a lot like this early concept art for the female version of the Spy from TF2, including the sense of style.
Anyway, she has already infiltrated the group by posing as one of the other NPC friends that the whistleblower friend invited. She didnât devour this person she is taking the place of, she studied them, disguised herself as them, and did something that would make them unable to make it to the camping trip but also unable to immediately let anyone know they canât make it to the camping trip. It would have to be something where they wouldnât be able to contact the friend group right away about canceling and the friend group wouldnât think anything is wrong because the TFB assassin showed up disguised as them right on time.
After maybe about a day of seemingly regular camping, the whistleblower friend sits everyone down and tells them absolutely everything about the whistleblowing stuff. This complicates everything for the TFB assassin, because now not only does she have to eliminate the whistleblower, she has to eliminate everyone here. Itâll be a lot to stomach, but sheâs up to the task.
Her goal will be to eliminate every other character there before they have a chance to leave with the knowledge they have.
Also a good clue to have would be that thereâs no cellphone service wherever theyâre camping, but if they get to a tall hill or something they can maybe get like 1 bar and if they try to look into the friend they the TFB assassin first disguised as, the investigators may find like a tweet or something lamenting that they had to miss the camping trip with their friends.. even though.. theyâre right here..
Also because the TFB assassin didnât devour the first friend, her disguise and knowledge of this characterâs personality will not be perfect. This will provide clues if the investigators get suspicious enough to think to scrutinize this friend.
However, other characters that the TFB assassin devours she will be able to use the information she absorbs from them to do a much more realistic impersonation.
The Post-Timeline
This adventure module will need a pretty extensive post-timeline, meaning things that are going to happen at certain Ticks on the Ticking Clock barring investigator intervention.
Im thinking gameplay starts when the party gets picked up by their friend and everyone drives out in one vehicle to get to the camp site. This will allow everyone to get introduced to everyone.
They get to the campsite, and everyone can get settled in.
Through some circumstances that would be elucidated in the post-timeline, the TFB assassin does not get a chance to eliminate the whistleblower that night.
Then, the next morning, the whistleblower tells everyone the information at breakfast. The TFB assassin has to change plans fast.
The first thing she needs to do is sabotage the car. In case anything goes wrong or anyone tries to flee, that will prevent their escape or at least make it harder. However, she needs to be able to drive the car back herself, so however sheâs going to sabotage it it needs to be in a way that she can easily repair. This could be removing a small but vital piece, like the spark plugs, which she could hide somewhere for when she needs to put them back in and use the car.
Maybe thereâs a bit of an itinerary and everyone is scheduled to go fishing mid-morning. While everyone is at the lake or river or whatever, the TFB assassin says she forgot something and has to go back for it. This will give her an excuse to go back to the cabin alone and sabotage the car.
No other NPC will offer to go with her. If a single investigator tries to go with her, she may try to devour them if she gets a chance while their back is turned or something, and then take the spark plugs. If multiple investigators go with her, she wonât try to get them both, but will try to get a short moment alone so she can send out her ancilliary and have the ancilliary steal and hide the spark plugs. If anyone tries to start the car and fails because the spark plugs are missing, a Driving skill check could probably diagnose the problem. Full Success would do it right way, Partial Success might take a Tick. A Driving skill check on the idea of why anyone might steal the spark plugs specifically could tell them that itâs a part of the car that could be put back in easily, perhaps implying that whoever stole them intends to use the car again.
The post-timeline will consist of events like this, where the TFB assassin secretly works to cut off the groupâs escape routes and then pick them off one by one.
Itâll probably be innocuous camping things for a day or so until the post-timeline puts the TFB assassin in a position to devour an NPC. Unless the investigators do literally like nothing, the post-timeline probably wonât happen exactly as written, so try to write it kinda flexibly. If she sees an opportunity to devour an isolated investigator and get away with it, she will do so.
She will disguise as multiple people back and forth to keep an illusion of normalcy for as long as possible before it becomes obvious that at least one person has vanished. Like for example, if the TFB assassin is disguised as Bob, and she devours Jill, she may then disguise as Jill. But then where is Bob? Bob must be missing. While everyone searches for Bob she might disguise as Bob again and come back acting like he just took a walk. Jill went looking for him but they must have missed each other on the trail. Sheâll probably come back soon. Then âBobâ goes to bed early. The TFB assassin slips out the window, disguises as Jill, and comes back after failing to find Bob out there. Sheâs so relieved to hear that Bob is back safe but she wonât go wake him up. They wonât see Bob and Jill in the same place from then on for as long as the TFB assassin can juggle these identities. When it becomes too much, she may just let one of the identities fully go missing, which will make everyone on-edge and alert, but by that point she may have eaten like 3 or more people even though the other characters are only aware of 1 disappearance.
Gameplay Concepts
This will probably use a kolchakian-style map and Ticking Clock even though it isnât really otherwise kolchakian at all.
I was first thinking they are like camping in tents as stuff, but maybe their whistleblower friend has like a really remote cabin and stuff out there. Having a place that has distinct rooms and walls instead of an open campsite would help the TFB assassin isolate people.
This module may benefit from the The Elements optional rule from Extreme Conditions, and may benefit from Rations though probably less so. What it would definitely benefit from from Extreme Conditions would be the bathroom rules because it would provide in-world reasons for characters to go off alone.
Banned Traits
Normally I donât ban traits just because they could defeat the monster, because finding the monster and how to defeat it is supposed to be the challenge, but since this module will deal with such an extensive post-timeline with relatively little pre-post-timeline evidence in the Truth, and the monster is right next to the investigators from the very beginning, it needs the monster not to be defeated too soon in order to work at all. So im banning Vampire, Wolfman, Fairy, Witch, Gorgon, TFB, Succubus, Living Doll, Changeling, and anyone with the Teleportation Mage Power.
Players Might Play Their Own Dead Characters
This is going to be a deadly module even for a pac-manian Eureka adventure, because the monster is right there with the party the whole time. She wonât discriminate between NPC and PC, if she has an opportunity sheâll take it. However, if the TFB assassin disguises as a devoured investigator, players are going to be wise to it immediately if the GM starts controlling that character. So I think this module should come with a copy-pastable set of instructions to quietly send to any player whose PC gets eaten that explains the situation and that it is now their duty to play the TFB assassin whenever the TFB assassin disguises as their dead PC, and try to keep up the charade. This is basically a co-GM role now which is what theyâd be doing anyway after the death of their PC.
Hell, if you have a player you think would be up for this, you could make the TFB assassin herself an optional pregen PC, and have a player play her from the very start. This would also be a co-GM role really, but the other players would think that that player is just another regular player bringing their own investigator to the table. Just tell GMs to keep in mind that if they arenât completely sure a particular player will say yes to this role, then asking that player will spoil at least part of the mystery for them.
All of this would take a ton of party splitting and texting beneath the table and stuff, but it only needs to work for so long.
NPC Eureka! Points
Normally, it takes a TFB about a week to process an entire adult human body, but that wonât be near fast enough for this premise to work. The TFB Trait does however have a Eureka! Point ability that allows them to digest extremely fast. For this purpose we will allow the TFB assassin, whether PC or NPC, to have Eureka! Points for the purpose of using this ability to devour and digest victims hastily.
It isnât normal for NPCs to have Eureka! Points, but it isnât against the rules as long as itâs done very sparingly and with a specific intent, like this. She should have like 5 or 6 Eureka! Points, or however many it would take her to rapidly digest each of the other characters in the module. NPC Eureka! Points donât need an explanation, they arenât exactly a dietetic in-world thing, but maybe she got them from investigating the whistleblower friend and the friend she first disguised as.
Thereâs a book Iâve been struggling to read for a year and a half. Seriously, itâs been like 5 pages a week for 18 months, if that. Thereâs a reason I havenât just given up on it but I wonât get into that.
Thereâs many reasons Iâm having trouble engaging with it but thereâs a subtle one I only just put my finger on. Thereâs nothing described that couldnât be experienced via television. No smells, tastes or touch. Some, but not very revelatory interior thoughts/feelings of the characters. A lot of characters immediately vocalize or do some other outward expression of their thoughts and feelings.
I donât feel like Iâm reading a book. I feel like Iâm reading a description of a TV show.
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I do enjoy that EUREKA: Investigative Urban Fantasy has a skill on its character sheet that's literally named ââââââââââ, whose description basically just says "you're not allowed to know what this skill is called or what it does, but putting points in it will benefit the kind of person who would put points into a skill whose name they're not allowed to know", and it's actually telling the truth.
