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anim-ttrpgs · 20 hours

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Wait does Eureka have its own established lore for how different supernatural creatures work?

Yes, it does!

(I’m going to preface this post by saying that just about everything I’m talking about here, and more, is available FOR FREE for you to read in the free pre-release version of the Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy rulebook that you can download from our website. Go to Chapter 8 to start reading about the supernatural lore. The rulebook itself will do a lot better job of explaining all this than I will, because it has the exact details of how each one works, and I’m just hitting the highlights and going over what those details mean.)

Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is a game about very human and believable investigators digging into dangerous (often supernatural) mysteries way over their heads, and sometimes those very human and believable investigators will be supernatural creatures themselves.

These supernatural creatures are every bit as human and “normal” as their mundane investigators counterparts, they have jobs, friends, families, hobbies, etc. They live among mundane society, not outside of it.

Most modern fantasy settings have some kind of separation between normal society and magical society, like you see in Harry Potter where there is normal society, and then a separate, secret magical society hidden away from it, or Vampire: The Masquerade, where vampires all have an agreement to keep themselves a secret from normal society despite acting within it.

In Eureka’s world, there is no “masquerade,” but that doesn’t mean that magic and monsters are well-known and well-documented phenomenons. Supernatural creatures such as vampires, wolfmen, etc. are exceptionally rare. Don’t take this as an exact number, but you can probably assume there’s about one of these per every 3.3 million normal people.

This rarity, as well as the fact that each individual has little to gain and everything to lose by revealing themselves (try “coming out” as a person who regularly assaults people and drains their blood), has led to them going largely undocumented in the modern day. Sure, this is the digital age, there are videos, but viral videos are not exactly scientific evidence. For every real vampire caught on camera, there are a thousand hoaxes and horror short films.

There is no secret vampire government controlling things from the shadows—most vampires don’t even know any other vampires, let alone enough to form a secret society with any effect on national politics.

As for how they work, well, that’s one of my favorite parts to talk about.

There are five playable monster types in Eureka (The Vampire, The Wolfman, The Fairy, The Witch, and The Thing From Beyond) plus two extras that are Kickstarter stretch goals (The Dullahan and The Gorgon), but in the interest of time, I’m only going to really go into detail with one of them.

Most playable monster types in Eureka are very, very old-school, with an emphasis on actual historical folklore over just making up all our own lore. That doesn’t mean Eureka doesn’t have a unique approach to the supernatural, though. Little of it is “new,” but it is certainly unique, because to my knowledge no other RPG has ever taken the old stuff this far before. A PC being a monster in Eureka isn’t just a few +1s here and there and maybe a little extra damage from silver weapons, it means playing by an entirely different set of rules from fellow investigators.

The vampires and vampire lore you see in movies are not folkloric vampires, they are mostly a 20th and 21st century pop-culture creation. Eureka’s vampire abilities, weaknesses, and other traits are based on pre-1900 vampire legends, with older traits usually taking precedent over newer ones. Thus, a lot of assumptions you might have about vampires going in could end up being very wrong. For instance, in movies, vampires instantly die when exposed to sunlight, but the first ever instance of a vampire in a story being killed by sunlight was in the 1922 film Nosferatu. In Eureka, sunlight is still awful for vampires, it strips them of their vampiric powers, but it doesn’t do any real damage to them. Sunlight is an issue vampires have to deal with, but it is far from instant death. That doesn’t mean being a vampire is inherently easy though, because in addition to having all the powers that folkloric vampires have (which is a TON), they also have all the weaknesses, and it is the emphasis on weaknesses that really makes the moment-to-moment playing of a monster PC in Eureka the most interesting. A few of my favorites for vampires are the refusal to enter homes without a direct invitation, and the compulsion to count large numbers of small objects. I think most vampire media these days considers these to be “silly” weaknesses and don’t want to acknowledge them in the lore of their “serious” scary horror vampires, but honestly I think that the “sillier” vampire stuff can still be used to great effect in horror. Imagine knowing that the only reason a vicious killer at your door hasn’t stormed in to rip your throat out is because they’re being polite.

A vampiric investigator will need to work around these weaknesses, and more, in their daily life, all while being sure not to reveal their true nature to their more mortal friends. It’s something that really changes how a character behaves and goes about problem-solving.

For instance, the rest of the party may be able to break into a house no-problem, but the vampire cannot. They need a invitation. That’s a problem. That’s a puzzle. It makes me excited just thinking about it.

This was originally going to be a much longer post where I went into more of the themes of monsters in Eureka, but I have decided that that would be most cohesive as its own post, an upcoming essay titled "How Eureka Handles Disability." So stay tuned for that.

Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is kickstarting from right now until May 10th! Back it while you still can!

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If you want to try before you buy, you can download a free demo of the prerelease version from our website or our itch.io page!

If you’re interested in a more updated and improved version of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy than the free demo you got from our website, subscribe to our Patreon where we frequently roll our new updates for the prerelease version!

You can also support us on Ko-fi, or by checking out our merchandise!

Join our TTRPG Book Club At the time of writng this, Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is the current game being played in the book club, and anyone who wants to participate in discussion, but can’t afford to make a contribution, will be given the most updated prerelease version for free! Plus it’s just a great place to discuss and play new TTRPGs you might not be able to otherwise!

We hope to see you there, and that you will help our dreams come true and launch our careers as indie TTRPG developers with a bang by getting us to our base goal and blowing those stretch goals out of the water, and fight back against WotC's monopoly on the entire hobby. Wish us luck.

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lackadaisycats · 1 year

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Varasta - a luck deity. Some artwork I did for The Delver’s Guide last year!

#delver's guide #beastworld #dnd #5e #anthro #art #fox #character art #lackadaisy #furry #roleplaying #tabletop

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shinsources · 3 months

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USEFUL SITES FOR ROLEPLAYERS

Thought I'd make a list of some useful websites for those of us who enjoy roleplaying and what have you here on Tumblr and whatnot.

roleplay formatter: Made by the awesome @rpclefairy. I honestly can't recommend this one enough. Great for adding color, changing the font size, and the whole shebang with bold + italics + underline + strikethrough. 10/10 always use

fsymbols + emojipedia: These are both great for making your tags fancy and whatnot.

alt codes: This is genuinely great for teaching you how to make the symbols with your keyboard for everyday use so there's that. It's especially useful if you and/or your muses speak a second language so that's a bonus.

text color fader: *marge vc* I just think gradient effects on text is neat. *end marge vc*

list of colors (wikipedia): Has a list of an infinite number of colors and their hex codes. Very useful if I do say so, myself. But that's just me.

screencapped.net: Great for getting all sorts of screenshots for making icons, GFXs, promos, and whatnot.

fancaps.net: Also great for getting all sort of screencaps for making icons, GFXs, promos, and whatnot. My only complaint is that it's a little annoying to navigate so here's the proper links to movies, tv shows, and anime.

photopea: Great if you can't afford Photoshop and/or don't like using GIMP.

hakuneko: It's not so much a website as much as it is a program. You can download manga, comics, webtoons, doujinshi, etc. for making your icons, GFXs, promos, and whatnot. It's also just a great way to read stuff and catch up on everything.

Feel free to reblog and add more. <333

#roleplay resource #roleplay help #roleplay community #roleplay #roleplaying #rpc #rpc help #rp help #rp resources #rp resource #roleplay resources #rp

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one-time-i-dreamt · 4 months

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I was on Tumblr and saw one of those old ask blogs where the person running the blog roleplays as a random character, except the character was me. The only post I can even remember was me saying I was apparently from Ukraine.

#dream #roleplaying #Ukraine

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whilomm · 17 days

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redoing poll bc i forgot some shit

the poll mostly about character creators with humanoid options, like your typical make your own char RPG. define stuff like "idealized" however you like

(if the answer is "well its complicated it depends on the game and...", choose whatever your favorite/most fun option is)

#buzzy #polls #games #roleplaying #rpgs #rpg #poll #character creators

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superectojazzmage · 8 months

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My Baldur’s Gate 3 hot take is that debates about whether or not Emperor Balduran is trustworthy or or not are a waste of time because a great deal of the point of the character — narratively and gameplay-wise — is that he’s an extension of you. YOU interpret and decide on his personality, nature, and choices the same way you do with your Tav.

If you want him to genuinely be the flawed and odd-thinking but ultimately noble and heroic “token good Mind Flayer” that he presents himself as, then he will be like that simply because you treat him as being such. He’ll be trustworthy and dependable, totally truthful about only wanting what’s best for Baldur’s Gate and about wanting to free the Illithids from Elder Brain control and make ceremorphosis a consensual choice, while also being open to compromise in the name of forging bonds. He’ll be the unlikely hero who, with you by his side, uses the Stones to destroy the Absolute and save his beloved city.

If you want him to be and treat him like a backstabbing, manipulative liar and potentially dangerous monster who is at best disconnected from basic reality, at worst a murderous narcissist trying to bend you to his will, then he’ll act like it. His interactions with be tense, snappish, and uncomfortable. He’ll threaten you, make unreasonable demands, never compromise, and try to assert control over the party while making clear that your alliance is one of convenience and necessity. And ultimately, he’ll either betray you and defect to the Absolute’s side because he can’t control you or, at your urging, hijack things and use the Absolute to take over the world.

His past is designed to be interpreted in massively different manners depending on what kind of person you want him to be. He killed Ansur either out of justified self defense because Ansur wouldn’t admit that Balduran was still himself beneath the changed form, or because Ansur was trying to stop his evil plans. He dominated Stelmane’s mind because she was a bad person and he wanted to turn the Knights of the Shield into something good, or because he’s an evil manipulator who dominates those he can’t charm. He withheld information from you because he was being cautious and wasn’t sure if you were going to be an ally (like your party members), or because he was manipulating you by making himself seem more sympathetic. He never freed Orpheus and doesn’t want to free him because as an Illithid he rightfully fears a Githyanki Prince and that freeing Orpheus will allow the Netherbrain to control him again, or because he’s an malevolent bastard who knows that Orpheus would ruin his plans. It’s up to you to decide.

He can change tune on a dime, make self-contradictory choices and statements, abruptly do things just because of something you decided to say because you wanted to see what would happen. Just like you do as a player, because he’s as much your PC as Tav. It’s why you get to customize the form he appears in your dreams with. The Emperor is good or evil or whatever depending on what you WANT or MAKE him to be.

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allthewitchesrpg · 1 year

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Hi everybody! I made a game called All the Witches!! I really wanted to make something magical for the queer community who have struggled with the creators of certain worlds being jerks. It’s an original TTRPG system with some cool deck building mechanics exploring the diversity of witches in fantasy. It would mean a lot if you checked out the Kickstarter here!

The Kickstarter ends this Saturday, April 15th at noon EST!

#ttrpg #dnd #dungeonsanddragons #d&d #indiettrpg #boardgames #witches #witch #tabletop #indie ttrpg #ttrpg design #signal boost #signal b00st #roleplaying #kickstarter

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dungeonmapster · 22 days

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Public Release Link

This ruin was once a remote community tucked away in the hills along the ocean shore, but has long since fallen into disrepair. The locals prefer not to speak of the place, but the corpses burned and hung as a warning to any others that approach. The sad tale of this place may not be of great concern however, as new residents have made use of the place and its disturbing reputation...

patreon

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myfandomrealitea · 6 months

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Omegle is dead. RIP to a generational gem.

For those of you who used it for fandom roleplay, EmeraldChat is a good, similar alternative. You can add interests in the same way, and there are additional options like sending images and saving chats.

#omegle #fandom #roleplay #RP #marvel #stray kids #DC #music #roleplaying #sephiroth speaks #myfandomrealitea #not discourse #stranger things

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tonksxmagicalxroleplayxmemes · 10 months

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#roleplaying #roleplay #rp meme #rp #inbox meme

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europaprisonmoon · 1 year

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I’m releasing a TTRPG supplement

Kind of says it all, really. Brought to life by the illustrations of the talented Kate Lucas (https://skeejeedoodles.carrd.co/), the supplement is on sale now at: https://hyrune.itch.io/the-goblin-market Hey folks. My name is David, I’m a queer games designer and writer from Ireland. In the autumn of last year, I was made redundant from my job of eleven years, and taking a look back over that time I realised I’d lost time. I’d lost so much creative spark that previously drove me, and in a fit of frenzied, caffeine-fuelled panic inspiration, I got to work making something. I’ve been playing tabletop RPGs for many years, both as a GM and as a player. As a GM, I’ve occasionally struggled when players go off the beaten track - you haven’t lived until you’ve stared blankly around the table, trying to think of a name for a random NPC you didn’t anticipate at all, having your eyes land on a coffee cup and proudly declaring their name is “Uhhhh... Muggsley.” If you’ve ever been in a position where your players are shopping, and you’ve had to quickly drum up a string of shopkeepers and vendors on-the-fly, this book might just help you. The Goblin Market is a system agnostic collection of over fifty merchants, monsters and even stranger things which can be dropped into your campaign to add weirdness and magic for your players: retired river gods, escaped nightmares, tea merchants, vengeful dragons seeking to raise an army to defeat tyrannical princesses, off-duty demons, magical roboticists, mystery cults, accidentally immortal witches, and more besides. Each entry details a merchant and the items they both buy and sell, but also contains a number of plot hooks (over 140, last time I checked) so you can give your players sidequests to investigate. Each vendor can be dropped into your game on their own, but also exists in a setting of their own - a setting where each market stallholder invokes and involves other entries and merchants as rivals, romantic interests, family members and possible eldritch accomplices from the days before the Moon was born. It’s a living, breathing place, and I’ve loved writing it so, so much.

#ttrpg #rpg #tabletop #d&d #homebrew #roleplaying

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anim-ttrpgs · 28 days

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Help Save the World of TTRPGs and Their Creators.

Okay I’m being a little dramatic, but at the same time I’m pretty serious. This is a call to action, and the livelihoods of myself and lots of other people, many of them (like myself) disabled, are depending on it. This is a post about why, what you can do about it, and (perhaps least often answered) how.

This post is actually an accompaniment to another discussion by someone else. If you don’t want to listen to a 90-minute in-depth discussion of much of what I’m about to tell you, you can just keep reading. Otherwise, click here or here and listen to this either before or after you read this post. (They’re the same thing, just different sources.)

If you have ever made or reblogged posts urging people to switch from Google Chrome to Firefox, you should be willing to at least give a try to other TTRPGs besides D&D5e for much the same principle reasons. I’m not telling you you have to hate D&D5e, and I’m not telling you you have to quit D&D5e, I’m just asking you to try some other games. If you don’t like them, and you really want to go back to D&D5e, then go back to D&D5e. But how can you really know you won’t like other games if you have literally never tried them? This post is a post about why and how to try them. If you’re thinking right now that you don’t want to try them, I urge you to look below to see if any of your reasons for not wanting to try them are covered there. Because the monopoly that WotC’s D&D5e has on TTRPGs as a whole is bad for me as a game designer, and it’s bad for you as a game player. It’s even bad for you if you like D&D5e. A fuller discussion of the why and how this is the case can be found in the links above, but it isn’t fully necessary for understanding this post, it’ll just give you a better perspective on it.

If you’re a D&D5e player, I’m sure at some point or another, you’ve been told “play a different game”, and it must get frustrating without the context of why and how. This post is here to give you the why and how.

[The following paragraph has been edited because the original wording made it sound like we think all weird TTRPGs suck.]

Before that though, one more thing to get out of the way. I'm going to level with you. There’s a lot of weird games out there.

You are gonna see a lot of weird TTRPGs when you take the plunge. Many of them try to completely reinvent what a TTRPG even is, and some fail spectacularly, others really do even up doing something very interesting even if they don't end up being what a core TTRPG player wants. But not every indie RPG is a Bladefish, lots and lots of them are more 'traditional' and will feel very familiar to you, I promise. (And you might even find that you like the weird experimental bladefish type ones, these are usually ideal for one-session plays when your usual group can't play your usual game for any reason.)

You're also going to probably see a lot of very bad games, and man have I got some stories of very bad games, but for now I'm just saying to make sure you read the reviews, or go through curators (several of which will be listed below), before you buy.

Now that that is out of the way, I’m going to go down a list of concerns you may have for why not, and then explain the how.

“I don’t want to learn a whole new set of rules after I already spent so much time learning D&D5e.”

Learning a new set of rules is not going to be as hard as you think. Most other TTRPGs aren’t like that. D&D5e is far on the high end of the scale for TTRPGs being hard and time-consuming to learn and play. If you’ve only played D&D5e, it might trick you into thinking that learning any TTRPG is an overwhelmingly time-consuming task, but this is really mostly a D&D5e problem, not a TTRPG problem as a whole.

“D&D5e has all of these extra online tools to help you play it.”

So what? People have been playing TTRPGs without the help of computers for 50 years. To play a well-designed TTRPG you won’t need a computer. Yes, even if you're bad at math. There are some TTRPGs out there that barely even use math.

“I’m too invested in the narrative and characters of my group’s current ongoing D&D5e campaign to switch to something else.”

There are other games, with better design made by better people for less money, that are the same kind of game as D&D5e, that your current characters, lore, and plot will fit right into and do it better. And no, it's not just Pathfinder, there's others.

“I can’t afford to play another TTRPG.”

You probably can. If you’ve only played D&D5e, you might have been made to think that TTRPGs are a very expensive hobby. They aren’t. D&D5e is actually uniquely expensive, costing more than 3x more than the next most expensive TTRPG I can think of right now. Even on the more expensive end, other TTRPG books will cost you no more than $60, most will cost you less than $20, and a whole lot of them are just free. If you somehow still can’t afford another TTRPG, come to the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book club mentioned below, nominate the game, and if it wins the vote we will straight up buy it for you.

(By the way, if you had any of the above concerns about trying other games besides D&D5e, that really makes it sound like you are in a textbook abusive relationship with D&D5e. This is how abusers control their partners, and how empires control their citizens, by teaching you to think that nothing could ever get any better, and even though they treat you bad, the Other will treat you even worse.)

“If I don’t play D&D5e, which TTRPG should I play?”

That’s a pretty limited question to be asking, because there will be no one TTRPG for everything. And no, D&D5e is not the one TTRPG for everything, Hasbro’s marketing team is just lying to you. (Pathfinder and PbtA are not the one system for everything either!) Do you only play one video game or only watch one movie or only read one book? When you finish watching an action movie like Mad Max, and then you want to watch a horror movie, do you just rewind Mad Max and watch it over again but this time you act scared the whole time? No, you watch a different movie. I’m asking you to give the artistic medium of TTRPGs the same respect you would give movies.

“I want to play something besides D&D5e, but my friends won’t play anything else!”

I have several answers to this.

Try showing them this post.

If that doesn’t work: Make them. Put your foot down. This works especially well if you are the DM. Tell them you won’t run another session of D&D5e until they agree to give what you want to do at least one try instead of always doing only what they want to do. This is, like, playing 101. We learned this in kindergarten. If your friend really wants to play something else, you should give their game a try, or you’re not really being a very good friend.

If that doesn’t work, find another group. This doesn’t even mean that you have to leave your existing group. A good place to start would be the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club which will be mentioned and linked below. You can also go to the subreddit of any game you’re interested in and probably meet people there who have the same problem you do and want to put together a group to play something other than D&D5e. You might get along great with these people, you might not, but you won’t know until you try. Just make sure to have a robust “session zero” so everyone is on the same page. This is a good practice for any group but it is especially important for a group made of players you’ve just met.

“I only watch actual plays.”

Then watch actual plays of games that aren’t D&D5e. These podcasts struggle for the same reasons that indie RPGs struggle, because of the brand recognition and brand loyalty D&D5e has, despite their merit. I don’t watch actual plays, or else I would be able to list more of them. So, anyone who does watch actual plays, please help me out by commenting on this post with some non-D&D5e actual plays you like. And please do me a favor and don’t list actual plays that only play one non-D&D5e system, list ones that go through a variety of systems. The first one I can think of is Tiny Table.

“I can just homebrew away all the problems with D&D5e.”

Even though I want to, I’m not going to try and argue that you can’t actually homebrew away all the problems with D&D5e. Instead, I’m going to ask you why you’re buying two $50 rulebooks just to throw away half the pages. In most other good RPGs, you don’t need to change the rules to make them fun, they’re fun right out the box.

“But homebrewing D&D5e into any kind of game is fun! You can homebrew anything out of D&D5e!”

Firstly, I promise that this is not unique to D&D5e. Secondly, then you would probably have more fun homebrewing a system that gives you a better starting point for reaching your goal. Also, what if I told you that there are entire RPG systems out there that are made just for this? There are RPG systems that were designed for the purpose of being a toolbox and set of materials for you to work with to make exactly the game you want to make. Some examples are GURPS, Savage Worlds, Basic RolePlaying, Caltrop Core, and (as much as I loathe it) PbtA.

“I’m not supporting WotC’s monopoly because I pirate all the D&D5e books.”

Then you’re still not supporting the smaller developers that this monopoly is crushing, either.

Now, here’s the how. Because I promise you, there’s not just one, but probably a dozen other RPGs out there that will scratch your exact itch.

Here’s how to find them. This won’t be a comprehensive list because I’ve already been typing this for like 3 hours already. Those reading this, please go ahead and comment more to help fill out the list.

First, I’m gonna plug one of my own major projects, because it’s my post. The A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club. It’s a discord server that treats playing TTRPGs like a book club, with the goal of introducing members to a wide variety of games other than D&D5e. RPGs are nominated by members, then we hold a vote to decide what to read and play for a short campaign, then we repeat. There is no financial, time, or schedule investment required to join this book club, I promise it is very schedule-friendly, because we assign people to different groups based of schedule compatibility. You don’t have to play each campaign, or any campaign, you can just read along and participate in discussion that way. And if you can’t afford to buy the rulebook we’re going to be reading, we will make sure you get a PDF of it for free. That is how committed we are to getting non-D&D5e RPGs into people’s hands. Here is an invite link.

Next, there are quite a few tumblr blogs you can follow to get recommendations shown to you frequently.

@indierpgnewsletter

@indie-ttrpg-of-the-day

@theresattrpgforthat

@haveyouplayedthisttrpg

@indiepressrevolution

Plenty of podcasts, journalists, and youtubers out there do in-depth discussions of different systems regularly, a couple I can think of off the top of my head are:

Storyteller Conclave (I’m actually going to be interviewed live on this show on April 10th!)

Seth Skorkowsky

Questing Beast

The Gaming Table

Rascal News

Lastly, you can just go looking. Browse r/rpg, drivethrurpg.com, indie press revolution, and itch.io.

Now, if you really want to support me and my team specifically Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, our debut TTRPG, is going to launch on Kickstarter on April 10th and we need all the help we can get. Set a reminder from the Kickstarter page through this link.

If you’re interested in a more updated and improved version of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy than the free demo you got from our website, there’s plenty of ways to get one!

Subscribe to our Patreon where we frequently roll our new updates for the prerelease version!

Donate to our ko-fi and send us an email with proof that you did, and we’ll email you back with the full Eureka prerelease package with the most updated version at the time of responding! (The email address can be found if you scroll down to the bottom of our website.)

We also have merchanise.

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