thy dungeon gal (non US citizen mode)

Cairn I think isn't the best example of advancement in a levelless game because for the most part advancement in it is kind of purposefully vague and nebulous. I think it works for the kind of game that Cairn is, but it might not be the best indication of how that kind of thing can work.

For more concrete examples of levelless advancement schemes I would recommend looking at something like the World of Darkness games where characters gain XP and XP is in turn spent on individual advancements or the Basic Roleplaying Game and Burning Wheel where characters advance in skills and attributes through using them.

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 “wisdom” 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 can’t 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 wasn’t just rehashing the same “How did you first get into TTRPGs?” questions.

It didn’t always used to be like this, you know.

Right now if a person wants to learn about how to run a con or scam, chances are good there’s someone out there selling a pretty sketchy package of software they can just buy and run. There are Youtube Tutorials on a whole range of classic scams, some of which are just reduced to bar games and magic tricks. Hell, the Cryptocurrency landscape has made a whole range of extremely classic scams pertinent again, with communities having how-to-guides on doing pump-and-dump tricks in the discord and it’s seen as rude to not do it.

I get to live, now, in a time and place, where one of the most basic scams ever, the coin smack is not only alive and well but it’s got a name and people don’t even have to do anything risky to get it. It’s called rugging now, after ‘rug pulling.’ If you’re curious, a coin smack is what the grifter does when there’s too much attention and they don’t have time for a clean escape – they smack the money onto the ground and run with what they can carry.

But it used to be that if a person wanted to know about cons or scams or tricks, they had to read some books.

Yeah, it probably all changed forever when The Sting came out.

Quick content note; The Sting is a movie made in 1973 set in 1936. There’s a n-bomb in the first few minutes, hard r and all, and it’s repeated later. This is unremarkable to anyone familiar with the period, but it did surprise me when James Earl Jones’ dad gets slurred at in the opening. Also, spoiler warning, this movie is pretty much entirely about a series of grifts done to dupe people, and the audience is one of the people being duped. I have no intent on spoiling anything specific, which means, necessarily, I’m barely going to talk about the plot, as in the sequence of events in the story, but I am going to talk a little bit about cons and grifts, which is going to do a good job of hinting at the kinds of things that are in this movie.

Telling the story will involve a lot of detail that I don’t want to give up, but fortunately, there’s plenty of meat in the framing. See it’s about this guy, Johnny Hooker, a fresh grifter – note I said fresh, not young, Redford’s easily in his thirties here, which means this is a guy who’s probably tried to do something straight and balled it right up – who does a pigeon drop that winds up catching a mob boss’ bagman’s cash. Now, these days in organised crime terms most people would realise something was up and find a way to return the money – nobody wants no trouble after all – but Hooker’s fresh and stupid. He runs his money straight into a ditch at a rigged roulette game, and then the mob’s goons come calling. This kills the old guy he ran the pigeon drop with, and Hooker strikes out for revenge.

Con revenge.

He finds an old friend of his old friend’s, a guy called Henry Gondorff, and the two concoct a plan between them. They’re going to run a scam on the mob boss whose money they took – and in the process, take a lot of his money as well. It’s about revenge, but make no mistake – it’s also about the money.

But hey, up in that bit, I referred to a pigeon drop? What’s that?

A pigeon drop is a classic scam, with a few different permutations. What it typically involves is having something valuable, and convincing someone to take it off you, since you lack the means or opportunity to capitalise on it. It dates back a long way – ‘ring dropping’ goes back to the 1700s. Typically speaking it’s designed to look like a set of believable coincidences that reinforce one another. Someone has some money, or an item, or whatever, and they offer it in exchange for a convenience. Here, I can’t sell this Golden Idol because of religious convictions, but I can give it to you and you can donate to me a sum, and then you can sell it and make more money, right?

There’s a lot of different ways to do a pigeon drop. There’s a form I think of as ‘clean’ where the actual stage of the scam is done entirely through clear movements. It’s entirely possible to do a pigeon drop in which nobody has to do sleight of hand, or even meaningfully sell a convincing lie. But the deceit is all about constructing the coincidence, and then leaving things so that the mark takes action because they are greedy and dishonest; they want to take advantage of an opportunity seemingly presented by coincidence.

That’s not what happens in the movie, by the way, they run the whole book on this one and in the process also pick the mark’s pocket.

This is something that the movie uses a few times, and it really underscores the wildly different time this movie’s con artistry is from. For example, all the gaming houses shown are not just crooked they’re assumed to be crooked; poker games are probably rigged, people know that players cheat at games, and they still tolerate playing with them. That’s a really interesting thing for the time in question, because of course, that’s also a really under-regulated period of gaming history. This isn’t to say casinos or gaming halls don’t have cheaters, they absolutely do have people trying it, but the business angle of gambling is one where the house doesn’t need to cheat to win.

The movie shows a few of the really strong, recurrent ideas in this era of con artistry: It’s about making the mark believe that the grift is their idea, and that they have only a limited amount of time to take advantage of something that’s otherwise too good to be true.

Anyway, great movie, I liked it a lot. Hell, if nothing else, it’s a nice exercise to look into these classic movies just to work out what cool means and where it came from.

Muted Swallow Episode 1 - Eureka Investigative Urban Fantasy Gameplay

It’s finally out after 3+ months of work, the first episode of the official A.N.I.M. Muted Swallow gameplay!

This is kind of a Hail Mary for our company since we are not really at risk of going under right now but we have been struggling a bit financially and are hoping this helps to get Eureka in front of more people who have never heard of it or might be on the fence. What you’re listening to here is real by-the-rules gameplay, including diversions as long as those diversions have to do with TTRPGs or the characters themselves.

It’s cliche I know but it really would help us immensely if you would like, comment, and subscribe and share this series with everyone you know who likes actual plays and/or might be o the fence about trying Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy. (Don’t forget on the same channel we have a playlist of How To videos that will help you get started on Eureka.)

One more thing before this post gets to what the video is actually about: The first song you hear in the video is “Snack Break” from @tinytablepodcast. I forgot to credit them in the video description but I’ll fix that next time I log in to the A.N.I.M. YouTube account. The rest of the music is all by @imsobadatnicknames2

Now here’s what the video is about:

When Emily and Madison’s best friend, Sally Jeong, is found dead, the police declare her death to be suicide and swiftly close the case. Emily and Madison think they know better, but with a potential killer at large and the authorities turning a blind eye, they are forced to enlist the aid of a mysterious woman who arrives in the middle of the night.

Will the mysterious “Comtesse” be the key to solving the mystery and bringing them closure, or have Emily and Madison only invited more danger into their home than they could have ever imagined?

This is Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy.

(Also credit to bifferty and pas for helping me write compelling video descriptions.)

Muted Swallow Episode 12 - Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy Gameplay

Yvette shares the voicemails with Burnadette, and then they head back to the hotel.

This was the last recorded episode to feature our dear friend and team member Faeriedae. I think she would have liked that our last activity together ended on a nearly 15-minute discussion of Yvette's panties.

This is not the final episode in the series, it will return.

This is the twelfth episode of our actual play of Muted Swallow, a module for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy.

The music was composed by @imsobadatnicknames2.

Thumbnail by @legov7 combining Eureka art assets with his own art.

Muted Swallow Episode 11 - Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy Gameplay

Yvette and Burnadette make one more sweep of the apartment before heading to dinner. There probably maybe should have been a Composure roll + comforting factor called for when Yvette did... that, but not absolutely. We plan to be a lot better about being sticklers for some of the vaguer roll-calls going forward.

This is the eleventh episode of our actual play of Muted Swallow, a module for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy.

The music was composed by @imsobadatnicknames2.

Thumbnail by @legov7.

Muted Swallow Episode 10 - Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy Gameplay

Yvette and Burnadette return to Sally's apartment and make a significant deduction, then go around to try to talk to some of the neighbors.

This is the tenth episode of our actual play of Muted Swallow, a module for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy.

The music was composed by @imsobadatnicknames2.

Thumbnail collage put together by @legov7, the writer of the adventure module using his own art and official A.N.I.M. artwork.

Something I kinda just realized we could do is put non-official art into the Muted Swallow series (with artist’s permission of course) and this is a post about that.

First of all for those that don’t know, Muted Swallow is an “actual play” series being done by A.N.I.M. to serve as an instructional example of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy gameplay partially for instructional purposes, partially for marketing purposes, and partially for fun.

It is low-budget (we are not a rich studio), candid, and the first time anyone involved has worked on anything like this.

It stars two investigator PCs that are pretty well-known in the Eureka player community, Comtesse Yvette Preux and Burnadette O’Malley attempting to investigate the unusual death of a young woman, Sally Jeong.

This post is to tell everyone that if you draw Muted Swallow fanart and show it to us, we might put it in future episodes (with credit) as the raw footage gets edited. There’s a few rules about what to include or not include.

Rule 1: We might decide not to put it in for any reason.

Rule 2: Don’t send in anything based on something that has not happened in a publicly aired episode. I.e. don’t send what-would-be-spoilers to us in drawing or text form. Like if you have read the module and want to draw an NPC the party hasn’t yet interacted with in a publicly aired episode, don’t send us that. Don’t send or say anything about the mystery that hasn’t aired publicly in an episode.

Rule 3: The art doesn’t have to be “good.” MSPaint doodles accepted.

Rule 4: You can draw hypothetical scenarios or things that didn’t happen in gameplay, but we probably won’t air it if it’s out-of-character.

Rule 5: Don’t conflate player and character. I.e. don’t draw a PC as if they are their player or vice-versa.

Rule 6: Don’t draw the players like, at all. We don’t really generally want our faces publicly known. The only exception is that you’re allowed to draw Faeriedae, the game master for episodes 1-12 (but still don’t conflate her with any NPCs). As I was writing this I was informed that Umbral Dame doesn’t mind being drawn either but again don’t conflate her with any in-game character.

Rule 7: We don’t own your art you’re just giving us permission to use it in our videos.

Rule 8: No “AI” art please.

How To Send Us Fan Art

Email fan art to us at [email protected]. Make sure you include how you want to be credited.

Alternatively you can post it on Tumblr and tag us. However if you do that then make sure you don’t include any info at all about anything from Muted Swallow that hasn’t been included in a publicly aired episode, and for any info that *has* aired in a public episode, put it under a Read More.

Either way if you are drawing a specific scene make sure to include which scene it is and stuff.

Resources

You can find visual references for the PCs in this video and this video, as well as under the following headings in the rulebook:

“Character vs Character, Never Player vs Player”

Features Burnadette and Yvette on the left, showing their heights compared to each other.

“Consequences & Degrees of Success”

Shows Yvette grasping towards the viewer.

“Armor”

Shows Yvette in her biker suit.

“Taking Aim”

Shows Yvette firing a pistol.

“Reflections and Photography”

Shows Yvette hugging another woman (who is not Burnadette).

“Example Vampire Investigator”

Shows Yvette.

category 2:

category 3:

I recently was altered to and read a treatise called Unchained Mysteries, and it’s incredible that I had never heard of it before. It’s not a TTRPG, but it is a treatise about TTRPGs, particularly mystery investigation TTRPGs, and how bad they have been for the past 50 years at actually doing investigation gameplay.

For the roughly two years since we went public with Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, we have been fighting a war, an idealogical war on TTRPGs as an artform declared by monopolistic corporations, parasocial “”actual play”” shows, content mill YouTube channels and the loyal adherents of the above. The generals of this vast army, whether they consciously realize it or not, have a financial incentive to teach you that game design is not real and that it doesn’t matter. A consumerbase that understands game design or what a TTRPG is on even the narrowest, shallowest level is one where some people might sometimes choose to play something besides the most popular and heavily advertised game on the market when they are able to recognize that it does not suit their needs.

To this end they teach you “just ignore the rules when they get in the way of the story,” and “a good GM can make anything work.” They task the GM with putting on a one-man show so that people who do not like the kinds of experiences created by the rules of the most popular game do not ever have to engage with the experiences of playing the most popular game, but still buy all the most popular game’s products, and most importantly never buy anything else.

It’s been an uphill battle, but we have been able to carve out a little outpost for ourselves, convert others to the Game Design in Real faction, and occasionally make contact with like-minded individuals who fight for TTRPGs to be treated as a unique and meaningful artform and game, not just an annoying book that gets in the way of your improv session, as most self-identified fans of TTRPGs have been taught to treat them.

Unchained Mysteries is one of those times we discover a powerful ally, and it has been some real wind in my sails, lemme tell you.

As a TTRPG game designer, it really wears on the mind to get the same comments over and over and over from people who don’t even know enough about gleeblor to understand the position they’re taking, that all boil down to the same thing: Telling me that my work, and the work of others trying to design TTRPGs, is, at best, completely meaningless, because the rules we write shouldn’t be assumed to affect anything, that the right way to play TTRPGs is to just ignore the rules and make it up as you go. At worst, they get offended, and demand to know “why I’m trying to tell them how they should play the game” in the instruction manual for the game. And come at me with shonen hero monologues about how as an artist I have no right to even want people to engage with my art the way that I intentionally designed it to be engaged with, let alone have the audacity to express that desire. People’s right to not think about anything and put in the least possible effort for the quickest, shortest gratification is sacred, especially because game design isn’t real, so there’s no way that following the intent behind the design could lead to a more meaningful experience than just running off vibes.

And all this with the financial stress of being unable to keep a “normal” job due to disability, making my art my main source of income on top of the constant reaffirmation that large amounts of potential customers have been taught that the kind of art I’m best at and most passionate about, art that is really really trying to provide a particular experience through its design and intent, is the most undesirable kind of art, if they even know that kind art exists within the medium of TTRPGs at all.

Sorry about all that.

Anyway, it would have been cool to find such a well-written piece of writing that agrees with Eureka’s stance on investigative TTRPG gameplay on one point.

It would’ve been really cool to find such a well-written piece of writing that agrees on two points.

The points made, the problems highlighted, and the solutions proposed within Unchained Mysteries are about a 90% overlap with Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy’s, and presents them even more convincingly. (Which is to be expected, since it exists only to make these points rather than also being a whole game.)

If you’re interested in the arguments Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy makes and demonstrates about game design, give Unchained Mysteries a read.