Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy Beta Oct. 17th
A downloadable TTRPG
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Eureka Rules Breakdown! Episode 1 of an Actual Play of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy by the Tiny Table Podcast!
This first episode is only about 15 minutes or so and introduces you to a brief rundown of Eureka’s rules and concepts. If you have been wondering what all the fuss is about with Eureka, but don’t feel like you have the time to download the free beta version and give it a read, then this fifteen-minute rules breakdown might be a great place to start!
The next episode, releasing on Tuesday, August 20th, will be the start of the actual Actual Play. Stay tuned for the Tiny Table crew to tackle FORIVA: The Angel Game, an adventure module for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy.
---
Storyteller Conclave interviews A.N.I.M on Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy!
There’s a lot of good insight into the design of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy in this podcast, and a lot of it goes into stuff that we haven’t really covered on this blog, especially the themes.
We talk about the realistic and simulationist nature of Eureka and how this serves its gameplay and themes, we talk about how it takes inspiration from John Woo films such as Hard Boiled, its pretty unique approach to the concept of HP, how it approaches and flips the concept of "winning", and its deeply character-driven nature.
Of course we also talk about Eureka's unique and awesome rules for investigative gameplay, and how it improves upon games that did investigative gameplay before it. How it trusts the players' intellect, but also won't leave them totally twisting in the wind after a bad roll or two!
My favorite thing we talked about, near the end of the show, was Eureka’s approach to monsters, disability, and its sympathy towards “bad people.” I’m actually going to be writing a whole essay on this topic hopefully before the Kickstarter ends on May 10th, but you can get a really good gist of it just from listening to this episode of the podcast.
Oh and on that subject, the hosts, two veteran Vampire: The Masquerade players, said in the show that in many ways, Eureka does vampires better than VTM. Like, wow, that’s high praise..
---
The Story Told RPG Podcast reviews Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy for their 147th episode!
Even though they don't get deep into the nitty-gritty of the exact mechanics, you can tell they really get it, and their casual conversation about it is really enjoyable and entertaining!
---
Third Floor Wars: Tabletop Talk interviews A.N.I.M on Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy!
The major takeaway I think from this interview is that when you spend money on a rulebook and/or adventure module, the burden should not fall on you to make the experience good. You should be able to rely on the rulebook to do a huge chunk of, if not most, of the work in a session.
The rulebook should be providing a sturdy platform for the GM and players to stand on while they build their story, and ideally provide hammers, nails, screws, glue, paint, wood, scaffolding, cement, etc. for them to work with, and an adventure module should provide a structure at least half-built for them to work from, instead of making them put effort into just treading water while they also have to do all the other work.
If “listening for local rumors” is something a PC could feasibly do in an RPG, the rulebook should come with at least a DC to determine how difficult that is, so that the GM doesn’t have to make up a DC on the fly, then also determine what success or failure means on the fly.
---
Not DnD, EN World Live interviews the A.N.I.M team over Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy!
@ashweather and I go over some more of the design philosophy of Eureka, while @chaospyromancy, never before seen on a TTRPG interview, explains her approach to the art direction of much of the rulebook, and where she takes inspiration from for it! This was a very fun interview and the hostess was very fun to talk to, check it out!
---
Talen Lee reviews Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy!
He goes into the philosophy of play, the game's inspirations, and how it embraces the mystery genre and brings it into play!
---
An absolutely incredible review of the beta version of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy by review Willy Muffin, complete with visuals and deep analysis!
---
This is a playable beta! More information can be found on our Kickstarter - which succeeded with an incredible $15,455 - for more updates, and get updates earlier, as well as loads more content, by subscribing to our patreon!
Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is an original, fully fledged, over 300-page 2d6 TTRPG from The Agency of Narrative Intrigue and Mystery inspired by The X-Files, Kolchak: The Nightstalker, and much more!
Eureka features investigation mechanics that let players take initiative, use their characters’ unique strengths to find clues, and deduce conclusions themselves rather than to just walking into a room and roll Investigate.
Player-driven investigation, a rewarding system for solving mysteries themselves, realistic high-stakes combat, gameplay determined by roleplay, and inter-party deception are all features you can look forward to!
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- Visual Update!Nov 13, 2023
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Incredible design. Even if you have no intention on playing this game, it's still worth picking up for the commentary on TTRPG play conventions and game design alone. Revolutionary stuff. It's helped me grow as both a player and designer of TTRPGs.
This is a great investigative RPG for people who know how to read
I'm an absolute ho for mysteries in various media, and while many other games can mimic the aesthetics of a mystery story, Eureka is the first one I've encountered that's genuinely designed to enable investigation as a core feature of the gameplay. The Eureka mechanic is phenomenally well-designed to prevent the "banging your head against the wall" problem that can come with failing checks in an investigation, and the emphasis on designing a coherent mystery up front avoids a troublesome reliance on GM improvisation -- something common in other games with mystery aesthetics but both unduly burdensome on the GM and rarely conducive to creating a coherent investigation experience for players.
As for Eureka's versatility, I think the description here actually undersells it. While Eureka is not going to be the right tool for the job for a story that isn't about investigation, I don't think its setting is really constrained at all beyond that. You could absolutely run a campaign set well before 1850 in Eureka, and you could run a campaign set in the far future -- the only real limitation there is that you'd need to replace a number of the tables you roll on for random encounters and adjust the items and weapons that investigators can own to fit the setting. At Eureka's core is a really good system for investigation and mystery-solving, and that system as designed is surprisingly versatile. If the core of a module is investigation and it's set in something resembling the real world, adapting it to Eureka is likely to work!
I enjoy a lot of the rules for monster PCs and the way having them kept a secret from other players is encouraged, but it's worth noting that Eureka as designed is not confined to fantasy and works perfectly well for completely mundane mysteries. The "investigative" part of the title is the core.
I first heard about Eureka after asking a friend which system I should run an horror-mystery adventure idea I had in my head on and they recommended me this. I decided "why not, I'll just take a quick peek" and then spent the rest of the day just reading almost all of the 600 pages of the rulebook there was at the time. I was hooked and ever since then this system has taken up most of the space in my brain. The rules are relatively simple and straightforward while also allowing the players to try out all kinds of different strategies and ideas, and has rules for almost any method the players may use to try and solve the mystery, so the GM doesn't have to come up with a new mechanic on the spot. The game actively prompts the players to really explore the environment their investigators are in and pick up on small details, and rewards being as thorough as possible when investigating. The investigation point and Eureka mechanics also give the player an incentive to keep rolling and not feel discouraged even if they've been failing a lot of their rolls. It also encourages only rolling for something to happen if the outcome is uncertain, so a GM doesn't have to worry about a character getting a critical success and just instantly breaking the story by doing the impossible. Character creation gives a lot of options and opportunities for many unique investigators in the game, and no two characters will look exactly alike. It also encourages players keeping secrets about their characters from the rest of the party and explicitly says in the rules that investigators conflicting with or even fighting each other should not be a reflection of real world grievances or emotions, nor should it be a reason to be upset at each other outside of the game. This means that there's a potential for a lot of interesting investigation party drama or even betrayal, since the goal of this TTRPG is for the players out of game to work together to create interesting story and have fun doing it.
My favorite part of this system though has to be the supernatural rules and monsters. A lot of urban fantasy stories and TTRPG rules for things like vampires, werewolves, or other monsters don't usually land for me, as they never quite capture the intimidating and powerful presence these monsters should have. This system is not the case with that though, as it gives an interesting perspective on both the folklore and emotional core that inspired these stories in the first place, but also on how monsters or supernatural beings would live in and interact with the modern world. Most of the time urban fantasy either makes the supernatural victims of an unjust human society, bloodthirsty and irredeemably evil, or disconnected or above humanity and human society in general. Eureka chooses none of the above angles, all the monsters in here are just as much people and have just as much of a right to live as any mundane human AND a terrifying and powerful force that hurts and kills people for their own needs. Neither of these things are mutually exclusive, and it makes you question the assumptions you might have about people that take up more time and resources to stay alive and comfortable in real life. It also gives supernatural powers a lot of interesting weaknesses and conditions to work around, and simply the act of playing a monster and not getting caught by the other players or investigators is a puzzle and challenge in and of itself. At the same time it is also possible to have an interesting and fun time playing this game without the supernatural rules being used at all, which just gives you more options for stories you can tell.
I recently ran the introduction one-shot adventure and me and my players had a really fun time with it! If you're looking for a system to run a mystery game, is the system I would recommend.
I've had a great deal of fun with Eureka and a big pile of investigators I've made to play it more, the skill and trait system really makes a character that lives and breathes amd it's easy to throw someone together. Composure rolls are a great indicator for how a character should probably be acting, with the last adventure I played my character ended up at zero composure a lot. When it rolled into superficial damage, he ducked out. It felt like his own decision, it was awesome!
They weren't lying, it really DOES make you say "why the hell has nobody done this before" like every 5 minutes when reading it
Just finished a Eureka campaign using one of the adventure modules from the patreon (FORIVA), it ended abruptly and violently a la Tarantino and with only a single character making it out alive. What a wild ride!
I think it's worth remembering that this game is intended as a toolkit for a variety of potential stories. The rule book doesn't explicitly answer your question of what the investigators look into and why, but that's because the answer will depend on the mystery that the GM runs and the characters that the players create. Some games are made for very specific types of characters with very specific motivations, but in my experience Eureka is more focused on creating characters with all of the messy situations and motives of real people and then seeing what happens.
(In terms of the other questions, I think the game makes the motivations pretty clear: playing as a cop would make the game less interactive, because it would necessitate spending more time on police procedure and less on the characters personally interacting with the case, and monsters usually prefer to hide their true nature because it's scary and causes harm to other people.)
Hm. I don't think this framework of play actually 'wants' to be compatible with any published module set on an Earth from 1850 to the modern day? For a not-even-obviously-adversarial example, OPERATION WEEPING MOUNTAIN is a module for CAIN, another urban fantasy investigative horror game, just one that frames the party as superheroes working for a shady secret organization.
Which doesn't seem compatible with a framework that presumes you'll be trying to hide which type of monster you are from the rest of the party.
Which is to say, it's a disconcerting boast.
I think what makes the boast true, is that to fix issues like that you typically only ever need to remove features and mechanics - never add them? For example you can completely cut each piece of the game that supports supernatural elements all together and use it to run an entirely mundane noir mystery. Like, literally just cut the last chapter and ignore the blacked out skill.
So I think an issue as small as how the supernatural investigators are framed would be a pretty easy fix.
My read is that "you're a team of edgy low-rent superheroes working for the MIB" is a fundamentally different proposition from "you're the serious urban fantasy equivalent of a PARANOIA troubleshooter team, i.e. entirely composed of the exact groups you're meant to be hunting, and very keen on not letting each other know about this". Not a minor aspect of the game at all.
Relatedly, I'm... pretty sure kaiju TRPGs exist, like ones where you play Godzilla and Mothra and so on, and I'm pretty sure Earth-based adventures for those would take some significant homebrew to make even vaguely compatible. If they don't, that just raises further questions!
Well it has to be INVESTIGATIVE at the very least - I don't think Gozilla and Mothra typically solve mysteries. (Though I'll admit, I'm not super informed of Kaiju lore.)
But yeah, I suppose it's true that it might not mesh well with a module that assumes you're playing a power fantasy game. But I suppose when they wrote that line they were more thinking of stuff that came before, your call of cthulu mysteries or even generic mystery modules.
EDIT: Wait, I was basing this conversation off of what it says about using other Modules in the BOOK ITSELF. I see now you're responding to the line above in the itch post. I agree the wording might need modification.
Snoop Suggestion:
Fueled by Obsession
W
Why is it called "Penetrative" HP
Because it tends to deal with weapons that penetrate and/or do damage to the interior of the body, as opposed to Superficial HP.
I mean my comment was mostly a joke but the wording seems a bit uh, suggestive :P