Soupup

when a movie is bad: aw dang the movie was bad

when a movie is just ok: well that was ok

The kid was picked up by an ambulance 30 minutes later.

Now as an adult working in security I get SO MANY folks- upper-middle aged mostly- coming to me to 'rat out' people they think are faking it.

I was once sent into a bathroom because a client demanded that the "fucker won't get out, so go drag them out"- I was NEVER going to do that, so I did a wellness check instead. You know who it was? A person recently released from the hospital after a car accident. They had a hole in their skull and major hearing loss. They couldn't answer the owner because they couldn't HEAR the owner.

Another time about a homeless man who got around town by kicking the ground from his wheelchair. "You know he doesn't actually need that thing, his legs work fine, it's just for pity points"- Oh, so he's not paralyzed, his wheelchair is performative? Funny story Dale, I actually know that guy, he was backed over by a truck and has chronic pain from his shattered pelvis. But sure, let's make him stand up and walk everywhere so nobody feels too bad for him and tries to help him or something.

"She doesn't need that scooter, I've seen her get out of it."

"Look how fat he is, because he just rides around and refuses to get up."

"She doesn't really need that cane- she comes here without it all the time"

it was not.

which is why you get all these books that embrace hyper violence but flinch away from any -phobias and -isms, because that would be uncomfortable.

what makes the dissonance especially jarring is that viewing violence as abstract is a privilege. in Canada and the States, we get to sit comfortably in our homes while our governments fund weapons and send troops to inflict violence overseas. and sure, we can watch a genocide live-streamed on social media, but it still feels distant.

Thank you. Anyone who has read just about any post on this blog or the Eureka rulebook knows that I think explaining not just the “what” but the “why” is super important for TTRPGs because, like, well firstly many people don’t believe there is a “why” but also if they misinterpret the “why,” since TTRPGs run on the brain of a human rather than a computer, misunderstanding the “why” will often mean the game just doesn’t fucking work.

This is an interesting question. I think the absence of any kind of VtM-esque “masquerade” is important to Eureka in several ways. I think it’s important to the themes as a game about solving “mysteries” with evidence-based conclusions in a realistic world where evidence is not always cut and dry. The fact that vampires and whatever else can have existed for at least a thousand years yet still be without consistent or widely accepted scientific documentation in the modern era, and how that can be the case even without a powerful systemic force actively suppressing this information - themes of confirmation bias, rigidity of worldview, academic arrogance, etc.. This is all very important to Eureka’s ideas of evidence-based discovery and particularly important in the context of crime investigation and the judicial system.

I also think it is important to the themes represented by most of the monsters, that there is no monster society or support network, there’s no one they know like them, no instruction manual for being what they are, officially they don’t even exist. Mundane normal people who don’t intrinsically understand their perspectives and yet still have the capacity to be there for them are all they have.

Going off that last point I think it’s important to the fact that their needs are not being met by conventional society. This makes it frequently necessary for them to meet their own needs by deception, force, aggression, and even sometimes outright violence with a real human cost in pain, suffering, and even death - and this in turn meaning they cannot often even (safely) talk about their situations to ask for help from anyone, it’s already too late to do so without confessing to a crime and facing the full sadistic force of the law. There is no community of people with similar situations and experiences. They are unknown, and if they were known they would be reviled.

I think the absence of a masquerade is important because despite all of this pain, suffering, and death, these monsters are inarguably not invaders/infiltrators, nor are they part of a shadowy secret flesh-eating cabal that antisemetic conspiracy theorists find comfort in blaming all their problems on and to whom mundane people are just ignorant livestock animals. They were born in this society or arrived to it in some way with no malicious intentions.

But all of the above is just me talking about why the “no masquerade” element is there in Eureka RAW; you’re asking if the game can still be played with this element altered, and I think ultimately the answer is yes, it would still be a functional mystery solving game and most of the Paranormal Traits themselves could still be used without a complete overhaul.

If I were to mod Eureka for a setting with a masquerade, here are a few things I think I would do or things I would at least consider.

There would be interpersonal discrimination on both a direct level and like even more importantly an economic level. Is anyone going to want to hire a vampire if they can’t come in during day shifts? Is anyone going to want to pay a vampire for night shift work? “Well, it doesn’t seem right to pay you extra for night shift work because you would be awake at that time anyway, and really it would make sense to pay less because nobody buys anything past 11:00 PM anyway.”

The Evangelicals would also have a fit about vampires being allowed to exist basically at all whether the Bible says anything to justify this or not (it obviously doesn’t but that never stopped them before). There would be hate crimes against basically any type of paranormal person. (This also made me think there would be all kinds of useless language put forward to. They won’t keep blood banks open past 1:00 AM, but they’ll sure as hell refer to you as a “person with vampirism” instead of a “vampire.”) (This also reminds me of a joke in Yvette Preux’s story where she actually prefers to be called a “revenante” but both the paranormal researchers she collaborated with and the short-lived real vampire community that briefly formed in New Orleans insisted that “revenante” wasn’t the correct terminology and she needed to call herself a vampire.)

There would be blog posts about how you should avoid giving kids certain arbitrary foods or vaccinating them because it might make them grow up to be a wolfman or a gorgon or a man-eater.

As a continuation of this here is a link to two relevant posts, one by @tormenty that actually is a Eureka post based on this very idea, and another probably not inspired by Eureka at all but that perfectly represents the ideas I’m thinking of by @meli-writes.