Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is our main project at the moment. It’s an original rules-medium 2D6 system for investigation-oriented adventures in any time period between about 1850 and the present day, with a bit of a supernatural twist. It’s made to be partially setting agnostic, able to run just about any adventure that isn’t based entirely around combat, and even effortlessly run adventure modules from other systems. There are many unique things about Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy. You can check out our tumblr page below for more details since we've been posting about it for months. If you aren't interested in that, though, instead, I’ll just rapid fire off a few: A unique approach to investigation that builds up points with each roll even if the roll fails, and with enough points a previously failed investigation roll can be retroactively turned into a success, resulting in a ‘eureka moment’ where certain pieces of the mystery finally fall into place. Fast, but deep and realistic combat, with a lot of strategy based more around the environment and positioning than use of special abilities; guns will typically take a target down in one shot, so keep your head down—or better yet just don’t get shot at in the first place if you value your life.
Freeform character creation where you can easily make either a normal person or a supernatural creature of the night without being constrained and forced to compromise by the system—so long as the monsters adhere to a few basic rules: They must be able to pass for human at a glance, they must have some supernatural weaknesses that don’t just apply to combat, and they must feed on people in some way. There is also the option to make a much less powerful supernatural character that doesn’t have to worry much about weaknesses or eating people, but they won’t be the combat powerhouses they the monsters tend to be. As combat is not the main focus of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, though, having some characters be more powerful in combat than others does not mean those weaker characters never get their time to shine.
Unique roleplay mechanics where supernatural PCs must hide their true natures from not only society at large, but the party and even the players at the table as well. Even if you’re on the same side, it’s usually best not to tell your teammates that you’re an eight-hundred-year-old vampire. They’ll start asking uncomfortable questions like “Where are the neighbors?” "Did you drain that guy whose body they found on the news?" That’s between you, your PC, and the GM only.
Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy takes inspiration from many other games, including like Monster of the Week—though in Monster of the Week’s case, that “inspiration” often took the form of doing the opposite of what Monster of the Week does, because we actually found MotW far too restrictive and limiting in its character creation and other elements for the kind of game we wanted to play—but also Call of Cthulhu, Trail of Cthulhu, Gumshoe, Shadowrun, AD&D2e, etc, both in the “do what they do” and “do the opposite of what they do” sense. In fact, if your TTRPG doesn’t take inspiration from a good number of other TTRPGs, that’s probably a pretty bad sign.
Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is coming to Kickstarter in early 2024, and the core rules can be downloaded now with a $5 subscription to our Patreon below. Follow our tumblr blog for more information and updates.
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Support us on Patreon for perks such as access to the official A.N.I.M. Community Discord Server, the ability to vote on what projects you would like to see us tackle next, and downloadable versions of our in-progress projects! Currently, being a $5 supporter of our Patreon will get you access to a fully playable copy of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, plus three fully playable prewritten adventure modules! If you would rather make your support a one-time thing, we hugely appreciate that too. You can support us on Ko-fi! This support is helping us get off the ground as a fledgling independent TTRPG design company, and handle the many fees associated with that.
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