thy dungeon gal (non US citizen mode)

I don't think it's entirely impossible, but I think it's worth thinking of why it's so fun in video games: in video games the process of farming/grinding and other repetitive tasks is often very predictable to the point of the player being pretty much able to go on autopilot and not have to be at a 100% at all times. Tabletop RPGs differ in the sense that many of their mechanics are based on conversation and it's sort of expected that the mechanics only be brought in once the right conversation is done.

But now like tabletop RPGs aren't the only tabletop games out there and there are in fact heavily mechanized solitaire games where playing them can be heavily automated. Completing a puzzle can be a solitaire tabletop game, as can be a playing a game of the card game Solitaire, etc. and I feel those games can hit the same kind of spot as "doing a repetitive task in a video game that still feels rewarding and fun."

So like: if you want to model it through the traditional tabletop RPG framework of "two players in conversation and once the right conversation happens the mechanics are brought in and then the procedure is followed" then I think you might struggle with making repetitive tasks fun and rewarding in a tabletop. There's too much friction there, when the reason why those activities can be fun in a video game is due to them being almost entirely frictionless. However, if you accept that one of the modes of play in your "tabletop farming sim" could literally be "a player literally plays a bean-counting mini game on the side as an abstraction of their character being involved in the bean-counting side of farming and collecting resources and so on" and just let them do that, then yeah. Maybe.

Legally, we own a copyright for Eureka but practically speaking we don’t have an army of lawyers to enforce that and don’t love most copyright laws even if we did. The most serious thing is that like, we ask that nobody that’s not us host any official A.N.I.M. product for download anywhere. (There’s no point in pirating it, you can get it for free on itchio.)

We do allow people to make their own Eureka stuff, and in fact we especially encourage it when it comes to adventure modules. More adventure modules is something Eureka will always need. We even have a semi-formal approval process where we read, consult, and edit on people’s Eureka stuff to make sure it is up to our standard and if it is we will even link to it on our itchio page and in the rulebook itself. We don’t get any profits from this, you keep any money you make, but it still benefits us because having more adventure modules increases the overall playability of Eureka and it lets us play our own game.

(We are actually running a mystery module jam right now.)

This is a lot of extra work for no direct pay though, and that is part of why Trait supplements and stuff like that get much lower priority than adventure modules. I am personally much, much more anal about what is allowed in terms of Traits and stuff. (And I don’t think Eureka even needs any more Traits, a bunch of the existing official Traits have barely even been used.) If anyone wants to do any extra Eureka thing, I urge it to be an adventure module. There is a very comprehensive guide on how to make a good Eureka adventure module in Chapter 5 of the rulebook.

If anyone was interested in doing a, like, alternative setting, like one where there is a VtM-esque “masquerade,” or one where there is still no “masquerade” but monsters are relatively known to science, then actually I recommend that this be part of an adventure module too. Because well, like, there is little point in an alternative setting if there is nothing setting-specific for the PCs to do in this setting.

Such a supplement would introduce itself, explain the differences in setting and subsequently game rules, explain how this would likely affect the types of characters or types of behaviors and attitudes they would have, etc., and then it would give you the adventure module taking place in that alternative setting below that.

If we don’t like your Eureka project, we won’t sue you, we’ll just not acknowledge or promote/approve it. Granted, making Eureka supplements or whatever that go against the design principles, themes, intentions, etc. of Eureka will personally probably really upset me, but it’s not illegal.