thy dungeon gal (non US citizen mode)

In 3rd Edition there were five official NPC classes (with a sixth introduced in Eberron), and they were for the most part mundane, giving mechanics for various hirelings (expert), regular 1HD humanoids (warrior), and the traditional "primitive" humanoid spellcasters (adept), also answered the question "what if a 0-level character could gain levels at being 0-level?" (commoner).

2nd Edition had a more robust selection of less generic classes such as Apothecary, Blacksmith, and Cartographer, which used the delightful experience system of the game to gain levels by doing their professional tasks rather than adventuring ones. But once again these are mostly just for your hireling types.

Rhetorical dogwhistles are things that most people would not be able to identify as bigoted because they're INTENDED to have plausible deniability.

The wording changes are meant to be subtle enough that people really can mix them up accidentally when they don't have much information!

So when the gender critical movement calls trans women "transwomen", they're hoping for 2 things.

this usage will spread enough among people who don't know any better, to give transphobes the plausible deniability of not LOOKING like a frothing bigot constantly.

the usage grammatically places trans women in a different category than other women; it's changing "trans" from an adjective to part of a noun to make this distinction.

The more we can avoid this usage, the less deniability have transmisogynists have when using it, and the less we are helping their cause.

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.