#eureka ttrpg

[corviacore]

Some sketches of my Eureka character Elia, she's a homebrew monster I got to play on the ANIM RPG book club discord server by @anim-ttrpgs , these are scenes of her encounter with a much less amicable monster during the last session of our latest module, where she was forced to reveal herself as a fallen angel for the first time!

It was a lot of fun and while Eureka very much isn't *focused* on combat, more on the investigation aspect of the experience, the way the system handles it was still a LOT of fun and lead to a fun situation where her burning sword was simply put out and she fell back to her firearm, making her a proper Angel with a Shotgun!

[nastylilchangeling]

Believer, Final Girl, Just One More Thing, and Renaissance Man! (You could argue for Wicked and Night Owl, easily, as well!)

Fun Game: Make Yourself in 3-6 Eureka Traits!

There's a bit more to Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy character creation than just picking Traits, but this is a meme not a serious character creation session.

Make yourself in three to six Eureka Traits. Here's a big list of them. This isn't literally all the Traits, just the ones that have finished art. If you want to pick from all the Traits, feel free to download the free rulebook linked above! If you want to go a little further, you can explain your reasoning for why you picked each Trait and what they mean to you and about you.

Tag us, or just reblog your results onto this post! You don't have to make yourself either, it could be a character from pop culture, your friend, your OC, whatever! We wanna see what you do with it!

List of Traits (Non-Exhaustive)

Ambidextrous

Are You Thinking What I’m Thinking

Arithmomaniac

The Ascot

Ask Questions Later

Believer

Blissfully Ignorant

Bumbling Detective

Burnout

Cheerleader

Comfort Item

Dangerprone Damsel

Death Wish

Did You Know

Elementary!

Femme Fatale

Final Girl

Hard-Boiled

Hardy

It’s for a Book

I’m Okay, You’re Okay

Just Built Different

Just One More Thing

Kleptomaniac

Lovecraft Protagonist

Lover

Moneybags

My Glasses!

Night Owl

Nightstalker

Ninja

Not Finished Yet

The Other

Perfectionist

Push It

Predictable

Quick Draw

Renaissance Man

Rumbler

Showboater

Skeptic

Sleep on It

Smalls

Technically

Therapist

Unpredictable

Wicked

Wizened

Woo-Woo

[chaospyromancy]

The plight of being a woman walking back to your car at night is that they won't even let you start eating your burger before bothering you. Who's they? Why the wolfmen. Of course.

This is a modern AU of Gen for @anim-ttrpgs's Eureka!

[legov7]

Inspired by @anim-ttrpgs's mystery ttrpg Eureka.

One of these creatures is a monster known to kill humans without remorse. You can't play as one, since that would interfere with the intended gameplay.

The second one on the other hand, the man eating shapeshifting sheet of flesh called the Thing from Beyond is totally fair game for a player character.

[umbraldame]

I know that writers of Eureka always talk about "eating people" as a metaphor for people who's needs are difficult/impossible to meet but hear me out, this kind of "hot monster girls eating people" style of gameplay is cornering a market that other games are too cowardly to capitalize off of.

[coffeewolfart]

Fun facts about her:

Her traits are Night Owl, Technically... , and Woo-Woo

This is because she's spent many hours of the night looking up random shit she's interested in and then passing out until noon-ish, she is really cagey about things without wanting to actually lie about them, and she has weird superstitions about being able to see visions in dreams and thinks she might be able to read things in tarot cards (though she doesn't think all tarot readings are magical or helpful.)

She was adopted into a family that has practiced and taught witchcraft down generationally, and they're where she learned most things about magic and potion making.

(Not everyone in her family is a witch, but most of them have at least some knowledge about it even if they aren't able to practice it.)

She knows other supernatural things exist outside of witches (she encountered one herself after all), but she doesn't know all that much about them directly. She does study as much folklore about supernatural creatures as she can though, just in case some of it is real.

Her freckles glow like stars whenever she uses magic and always faintly glow in dim light. Its not enough light to be immediately noticeable or help her see things in the dark, but its still there.

On the subject of freckles, they subtly shift to reflect the stars in her hemisphere. It took her way too long to figure this out.

She doesn't think werewolves (as in Eureka wolfmen, aka the hollywood people forced to turn into wolf human hybrids under the full moon) actually exist. She knows that the Werewolf mage power exists, and she just thinks that some people just saw witches using it and telephoned it into a monstrous wolf human that preys upon people in the night. She's got weird priorities and standards for what counts as realistic to her.

She likes to knit and crochet little stuffed animals, her favorites are cats and owls.

Remade an old OC, meet Astra the dreamweaving witch!

Astra's an old pathfinder character that I decided to convert to the Eureka! system as a witch. She's gotten a goth makeover as a result. You guy's should check it out if you're interested, @anim-ttrpgs made it and posts a lot about it.

Astra's a college dropout of a witch living in a renovated van house and traveling the country. She makes a living doing "psychic readings" which may or may not actually involve magic and selling stuff on Etsy. She's generally very cheerful and slightly suspicious, but once a mystery has gotten a grip over her she bites into it and doesn't let go.

[octobelus]

hey if you want to solve mysteries as a genius detective, bumbling idiot, super powerful predator, deeply traumatized weirdo, Normal Guy, or some combination of the above, check out the ttrpg Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy

development is ongoing, but in its current state my character got to trigger a cascade of dramatic reveals and worsening mental health among the party where it turned out 3/5 of them were living dolls while a dead body lay at their feet and the only human was covered in its brains. I haven't played ttrpgs in yearsss and this was a hilarious way to come back to it!

[the-ghost-in-your-attic]

one thing about Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy that I've never experienced before is that for the first time in my 7 years of playing rpgs, I'm actually making a character who's a woman! as a trans person, the constant third person verbiage and reminders about player/character separation don't trigger my dysphoria like in other games, so I'm off to sail the brand new waters of pathetic women

basically an entirely new Loser Woman demographic: Extremely Dysphoric Transmascs

[bad-eureka-updates]

New monster type: People Taller Than 5'11"

[jamie101]

Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy portrays vampires really well for several reasons, but one of my favourites is that being an immortal creature of the night doesn't actually help with most day to day problems (and probably adds several more). Yeah, turn into a truck-sized bat monster all you like; rent is still due first of each month.

[corviacore]

Been thinking again about GMing and why I dislike it and why I dislike DnD nowadays, honestly half of it isn't even DnDs fault but how players want to interact with it, like I made a whole homebrew world, but did any of my players ask anything about it? Or ask where they could be from? What the local culture is like?

Naw just made characters and expected me to make em fit the world! They didn't even make em fit together as a team properly, and one player wanted me to come up with a whole new tribe of peoples for him to play, wich, ironically worked out the best of all of them because they happened to fit the theme of the campaign well.

This together with the last 2 games I played in being chaotic and undirected because players keep wanting to do random shit makes me just not want to play this stuff anymore.

Like if you want to build a crime empire while we are trying to save the world, fuck off! DnD doesn't support building a crime empire without the GM devoting significant effort to it!

And I'm tired of players expecting such work from GMs, I think that's why I'm so burnt out on DnD and why pathfinder won't help, because people expect it to be a sandbox, but it isn't a sandbox, they can't just do what they want without consequence, the consequence is the GM having a shit time!

So I just want to play narrower games that have specific things they want to do, like blades, or Eureka, because then the players go in with the expectation of what's going to happen and by god do I need them to actually understand what a game is about or I will explode.

This is 100% why I'm so happy about Eureka lately and had so much fun playing it, as any Ttrpg should it leaves you many options for what to do and I never felt "railroaded" or whatever, but still followed a cohesive line throughout the module we played and it was fun! Players focusing on the point of the TTRPG is fun!

Imagine if someone started playing a criminal who had 0 interest in investigating anything and asked the narrator to make up a system to start a criminal enterprise in a Eureka module, that person would be insane right? That's stupid! But somehow in DND they think that's ok, no matter what the DM had planned. :/

[haveyouplayedthisttrpg]

Have you played EUREKA : Investigative Urban Fantasy ?

By A.N.I.M

Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is a neo-noir investigation-focused RPG with (as you can probably guess from the title) a supernatural twist. Eureka fills several voids we have noticed in the TTRPG space. Eureka supports investigation to a degree we haven’t seen before, ensuring that searching for clues is a granular and player-driven process, but also ensuring that the whole story doesn’t grind to a halt after one single failed investigation check.

Though most PCs will be mundane humans—or perhaps because most PCs will be mundane humans—Eureka also supports playing monstrous PCs, such as a vampire, in a way we have never seen before. This isn’t just a watered-down stat bonus, it’s like playing an almost entirely different game, with all the monster’s strengths and weaknesses to account for while solving the mystery, plus the added incentive to keep it a secret from the other PCs as well as their players.

If you like or are interested in Call of Cthulhu, Monster of the Week, Dresden Files, X-Files, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Apocalypse Keys, or Gumshoe, you’ll probably find something in Eureka to really enjoy.

Currently being crowdfunded on Kickstarter

[tinytablepodcast]

Eureka x Tiny Table Investigators

Art of our investigators from Eureka! They're Scooby Doo meets the X Files and are DEFINITELY not facing the horrors...oh no is this a common theme in our campaigns?

[coffeewolfart]

Remade an old OC, meet Astra the dreamweaving witch!

Astra's an old pathfinder character that I decided to convert to the Eureka! system as a witch. She's gotten a goth makeover as a result. You guy's should check it out if you're interested, @anim-ttrpgs made it and posts a lot about it.

Astra's a college dropout of a witch living in a renovated van house and traveling the country. She makes a living doing "psychic readings" which may or may not actually involve magic and selling stuff on Etsy. She's generally very cheerful and slightly suspicious, but once a mystery has gotten a grip over her she bites into it and doesn't let go.

[mc-cookies]

Objectionable

(An Ace Attorney-inspired custom Trait for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, an excellent indie tabletop RPG by the good folks over at @anim-ttrpgs)

Once per Scene, when this Investigator proves that another character is lying or hiding relevant information, they gain 1 Investigation Point and a +1 Contextual Bonus on subsequent Interpersonal rolls to uncover further details about that untruth. During these lines of questioning, if another character finds a flaw in their logic, the Investigator takes a Composure roll with a +1 modifier, and their Interpersonal Bonus ends. [1]

[1] Investigators with this Trait emulate the tactics of scrappy defense attorneys from a certain series of courtroom drama visual novels. By finding contradictory details in the stories of others, they can pull apart an entire testimony at the seams, but if they take too big of a logical leap and can’t back it up, they quickly lose confidence, momentum, and the trust of onlookers.

Each Investigator (player character) has 3-6 Traits which mechanically represent various aspects of their character.

More information about Eureka and its mechanics under the cut!

Eureka is among my favorite RPGs I've ever read, and certainly the best investigation-focused system I've seen. Its systems are deeply elegant, creating a game where players can piece together mysteries alongside their Investigators in a grounded world that still leaves space for supernatural intrigue. Combat is swift and strategic, but deadly if you go in without a plan. Investigations can be complex, but even the stickiest of situations don't require railroading to keep players on track. Mundane and supernatural characters alike have access to unique abilities, quirks, and skills that make each character feel distinct in mechanics as much as in flavor. The game interacts with the real world by way of fiction in a way that's refreshing and endlessly fascinating.

I absolutely recommend you give Eureka a shot, especially if you've been disappointed trying to run mystery stories in systems like D&D5e.

This trait, as is probably clear from the art and description, is heavily inspired by the gameplay of the Ace Attorney franchise, where you're expected to pull at the threads of a story until the truth falls into your lap, but where every further question is a risk. This is part of a broader trend in the rulebook where traits reference investigators from other mystery media, including Columbo, Sherlock Holmes, Jacques Clouseau, Kolchak, and the Scooby Gang (two links), among others.

The text of Objectionable references "Investigation Points", which are an abstract representation of how well an Investigator understands the mystery they're looking into. They can be traded in for "Eureka!" moments, which allow Investigators to retroactively learn information from a previously failed roll or increase their chances on a future roll. Getting a bonus point in this case encourages players to use this Trait whenever it's applicable, and represents the growing confidence of the Investigator as they get to the bottom of the other person's story.

It also refers to Composure, which is kind of like an emotional HP system – having low Composure reduces the possible skill bonuses an Investigator can receive on a roll, because if they're scared, tired, hungry, frustrated, or otherwise thrown off their game, they're less likely to succeed at what they try to do. In this case, the potential loss of composure references Ace Attorney characters getting flustered and embarrassed when the player chooses the wrong line of inquiry.

I'm not affiliated with ANIM (other than being acquainted with their team, since they're quite active within their online communities), but I really do suggest supporting them on Patreon and/or itch.io and/or Ko-Fi. On top of making Eureka, they also run a TTRPG Book Club server on Discord, which is excellent for finding RPGs to read and play and people to read and play them with, and they already have other projects planned after Eureka's full release. There's also a free beta version of Eureka available on their itch.io page, on top of the more frequent updates available on Patreon. Go check out cool artists!

[umbraldame]

Local alien girl takes a bite outta misogyny!

The Thing From Beyond is one of the playable monsters in @anim-ttrpgs upcoming mystery ttrpg Eureka!