The Agency of Narrative Intrigue and Mystery (A.N.I.M.)
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The Agency of Narrative Intrigue and Mystery (A.N.I.M.)
@anim-ttrpgs.bsky.social
1.2K followers 240 following 1.7K posts
A team comprised of lgbt and disabled individuals trying to make it in an industry dominated by D&D5e. Authors of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy.
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only A.N.I.M. could make me legitimately excited for an RPG where your character has to pee periodically
November 21, 2025 at 2:06 PM
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We could really use some sales if anyone has been on the fence anim-ttrpg.itch.io
November 15, 2025 at 3:00 PM
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But I'm not just saying that, I set out to prove it.

I took surveys of all the three official Eureka modules that I know have been played a bunch at the time of writing this to see how frequently they’re solved vs going unsolved.
November 7, 2025 at 5:24 PM
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Meal scene art from Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy. Investigators have to eat occasionally to keep their Composure up, and this doubles as an opportunity for the investigators to group up and talk with each other and go over the information they have already gathered. anim-ttrpg.itch.io #ttrpgs
first person view of the viewer sitting at a booth in a chinese restaurant sitting across from two women. Notes about a murder investigation are being looked at.
October 15, 2025 at 4:27 PM
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Excerpt from Unchained Mysteries, a treaties on investigative TTRPG gameplay that shares a lot of points with Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy. #ttrpg #indiettrpgs #rpgs #mystery #murdermystery #roleplaying

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I hope you can see that the game itself is a much more dynamic system than a linear experience flowing smoothly from a starting hook to an ending climax. Plot, in the typical story sense, is the by-product created through play itself. It is simply the record of the scenes and the changes that come about in them.
October 15, 2025 at 4:04 PM
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Excerpt from Unchained Mysteries, a treaties on investigative TTRPG gameplay that shares a lot of points with Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, and a relevant excerpt from Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy side-by-side. #ttrpgs #indiettrpgs

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If the characters are built with strong worldviews and they are drawn into the narrative ecology, then pretty soon the characters are going to differentiate each other over the issues at stake in the scenario. Once you've dropped the idea of everyone acting as a coherent team, then there's no need for everyone to agree on a single course of action or approach. Players can stick to their characters' ideologies and convictions and take appropriate actions based on them. These actions will have consequences, possibly negative ones, for the other player characters and that's a good thing. Let the player characters be free moral agents. Unlike the majority of TTRPGs, while Eureka is collaborative on the part of the Players, it is not necessarily a cooperative game, at least not in the sense that all the Investigators are always cooperating. The Players, however, are always cooperating - cooperating with each other to play an entertaining game and experience the story it produces. The Investigators have no inherent allegiance to each other just because they are all player-characters. The loyalty between Investigators in the party comes only from organically developed trust and common goals, just like the protagonists in a story told in any other medium. If the goals of Investigators diverge, so may the party, and they can even directly oppose each others' actions - violently if necessary.
October 14, 2025 at 7:58 PM
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Excerpt from Unchained Mysteries, a treaties on investigative TTRPG gameplay that shares a lot of points with Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, and a similar excerpt from Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy side-by-side. #rpgs

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concerns of the characters involved. The entire point of building richer player characters is to allow the players to express those characters fully and not just exist as a set of skills for acquiring information and a quirky personality to vocalize. Placing a character into scenes of immediate dramatic relevance is to look the player in the eyes and ask, "Okay, show me who this character you've built really is, for real." Players are encouraged to create Investigators that are not simply representations of themselves, but instead fully realized characters with distinct personalities and feelings separate from their own. Investigators are not merely an alternate identity that their Players take on for the duration of the session. An Investigator is more like a character in a novel, distinctly separate from the author of the book. Often an Investigator's decisions in the story as it plays out will surprise even their own Player! It's the Player's job to answer the question, "what would this Investigator I created most likely do in this situation," and roll the dice for them.
October 13, 2025 at 5:36 PM
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Excerpt from Unchained Mysteries, a treaties on investigative TTRPG gameplay that shares a lot of points with Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, and a similar section from Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy side-by-side. #ttrpg #indiettrpgs

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A question you might be asking is: Shouldn't the opening scene be the same for everyone? Aren't the players a team? My strong answer is: No. Place each character into whatever opening scene is most appropriate for them. Even when characters are professionals working for a formal investigative organization rarely is the whole team dispatched to the same location with the same mandates. Instead, the work is divided and different people work the case from different angles. Take the the traditional idea of the party and kill it. Split the Party! "Don't split the party" has been an adage in TTRPG spaces for as long as anyone can remember, owing to the fact that in a combat-focused game a half-party is at half-strength and thus extremely vulnerable to whatever opposition they may face. Plus, handling multiple PC perspectives can be a lot of work for the GM.[1] [1 off to the side in the final formatting] Eureka already goes out of its way to make the Narrator's life easier, so we think we've cleared a little room on their plate for this. Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, however, wants you to split the party.
October 9, 2025 at 4:57 PM
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Excerpt from Unchained Mysteries, a treaties on investigative TTRPG gameplay that shares a lot of points with Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy. #ttrpg #ttrpgtalk #indiettrpg #rpg

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The result of the above process is not the story that will be revealed to the players. It isn't even a history of events that will be explored by the players. The point of play is not to carefully and patiently dole out this information in a dramatic and entertaining manner. That is writing. Instead, the purpose of this is to prime the game master for playing on equal footing with the players. In many ways, it is simply the backstory of all the supporting characters in the scenario. Therefore, the only thing that matters at this stage is the game master's own enthusiasm for the material. Are they excited to play with, not merely present, the situation now boiling in their hands?
October 8, 2025 at 6:08 PM
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Excerpt from Unchained Mysteries, a treaties on investigative TTRPG gameplay that shares a lot of points with Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy. #ttrpg #indiettrpgs #ttrpgtalk

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Think of all the ways people in a community react in the presence of that sudden stress. The key is to make sure enough human drama exists so that the weirdness does not become the point. The simple test is to look and see if discovering and destroying the creature resolves all the crises and return things to the status quo. If that's the case, add in more trouble and turmoil among the supporting characters.
October 7, 2025 at 5:33 PM
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You might want to check out Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy for a game that does something very similar.
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September 28, 2025 at 7:17 PM
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A review for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy.
#ttrpg #rpgs #indiettrpg
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the perfect game for groups that share the braincell
September 11, 2025 at 5:36 PM
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You can probably guess that most investigation is going to be happening during the day.

Fortunately or unfortunately depending on your perspective, they can carry too.
a young woman with red hair dressed in sort of a 90s skater outfit with ripped jeans and red converse shoes. She is propping up a skateboard with her foot. The underside of the skateboard has a night sky motif with bats. She has pointed nails. Her skin is pale but flushed as if lightly sunburned. She is tilting up her sunglasses, revealing that her eyes have a little bit of a pink-red shine to them. She is smiling and clearly has long, pointed fangs. She also has a Beretta 92 in a holster on her forward left hip.
September 11, 2025 at 4:44 PM
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anyway the actual point i was going to make was about Monster Traits and how they are absurdly powerful in like one area but suffer really significant drawbacks. A clever vampire is a piss-yourself unstoppable nightmare person by night and indoors, but a feeble, trembling chihuahua by day.
a security guard or police officer holding a flashlight in a dark room. Behind him is a filing cabinet with the top drawer open. Above him, clinging to the corner where the walls meet the ceiling is a young woman holding a stack of papers in her mouth. The papers have the Eureka logo on them because we used this as a promo image. You can see that she has pointed fangs and that her eyes have a red shine to them.
September 11, 2025 at 4:44 PM
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A review for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy.
anim-ttrpg.itch.io/eureka-urban...

#ttrpg #rpgs #indiettrpg
Eureka is quite simply the very best piece of game design I have ever seen. I have seen a lot of them. This one I will unequivocally describe as "all killer no filler"
September 10, 2025 at 3:31 PM
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A review for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy. Some people seem to balk when they hear an investigation-focused game has combat. I think a lot of it has to do with D&D5e making players think combat has to be a slog. Eureka’s combat rules complement investigation by rewarding caution and planning.
I love Eureka! It's got the best combat ever, and is really well designed for complex mysteries that feel like actual investigations instead of investigation themed adventures. The traits are great for fleshing out characters, and Narrating for it is super easy
September 9, 2025 at 5:28 PM
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A review for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy. You can leave a 5-star review for Eureka by going to the top-right of the store page. Just note that this is one of the rating systems where anything below a 5-star counts as negative.
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#ttrpg #indiettrpgs #indierpg
Great fun for Mysteries and just stupidly dramatic character interactions <3 :D
September 8, 2025 at 10:43 PM
anim-ttrpgs.bsky.social
A review for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy. It helps us immensely if you leave a 5-star review for Eureka by going to the top-right of the store page, and it would really help us out! Just note that this is one of the rating systems where anything below a 5-star counts as negative. #indiettrpg
You can invent a strange sad little woman who has something wrong with her. and then stick her in a room with a bunch of other strange sad little women who also have something wrong with them. And then see if they can manage to solve a mystery or something. or kill each other. This game is so good for diving into a character's emotional state. It's got elegant, efficient rules for what characters fear, what they believe in, even their weird little habits. The way traits work in this game, you can hardly optimize an investigator without giving them some kind of weird little personality quirks. characters in this game have personality whether you want them to or not. It's also a good mystery game. I promise the two expansions do not represent the tone of the game. It's mostly a very serious noir horror game. but there's a running joke on the discord about hot monster girls and it kind of got out of hand.
September 4, 2025 at 7:32 PM
anim-ttrpgs.bsky.social
A review for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy. It helps us immensely if you leave a 5-star review for Eureka by going to the top-right of the store page, and it would really help us out! Just note that this is one of the rating systems where anything below a 5-star counts as negative. #indiettrpg
It's well made! It's spooky! It's the best system I've ever played for making Women with Something Wrong With Them! It's easy to GM! It encourages you to tackle questions like the nature of "humanity" and "monsters", but also lets you play as Scooby Doo! And most importantly it's SO MUCH FUN. Cannot recommend highly enough
September 4, 2025 at 7:31 PM
anim-ttrpgs.bsky.social
A review for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy. It helps us immensely if you leave a 5-star review for Eureka by going to the top-right of the store page, and it would really help us out! Just note that this is one of the rating systems where anything below a 5-star counts as negative. #ttrpg #rpg
(i don't know why the formatting is all messed up like that) Easy to pick up without sacrificing complexity, straightforward rules, a proper approach to the horror genre and greatly rewards note taking and game knowledge.
September 2, 2025 at 4:55 PM
anim-ttrpgs.bsky.social
but this just doesn’t apply to RPGs at all. RPGs rulebooks are all over the place in terms of formatting, they are often dense with art, and unlike a novel not all of their text is meant to be read straight through word-for-word.*
page from Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, some paragraph text, two pictures of a woman take up almost half the page, another fifth of the page is bullet points page from FIST, a picture of a rocket takes up about a fourth of the page, the text is a mix of paragraphs and bullet points page from Monster of the Week, it has several very large headings taking up a lot of page space and lots of spacing between paragraphs, as well as some bullet points page from Mothership, it is in a double-column format with a mix of large headings, paragraphs, and bullet points. a picture of a spooky astronaut takes up about an eighth of the page
September 2, 2025 at 3:16 PM
anim-ttrpgs.bsky.social
We’re used to using page count to denote the “length” of a book because of novels and nonfiction books which have relatively standardized formatting and density of words per page,
some pages from Sherlock Holmes, showing how it's all big blocks of text that take up almost all the page space some pages from the non-fiction history book Captains of Fortune, showing how it's all big blocks of text that take up almost all the page space some pages from Don Quixote, showing how it's all big blocks of text that take up almost all the page space
September 2, 2025 at 3:16 PM
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Game design. #ttrpg #indiettrpg #gamedesign
[from a fan] This is just part and parcel with the material, rather than a direct questioning, but I gotta ask how many cases there are of characters with paranormal Base bonuses having the corresponding Skill be negative to boost other Skills. Because beyond the cases where the obvious drawback of having it nullified by something was brought up, it still seems like a silly idea to do. [from one of our designers] This is an intentional design element, and was present as a Skill distribution incentive as early as the very first monster playtest. [from another one of our designers] Actually yeah, the reason that vampires have +10 to Athletics instead of some lower number is to subtly encourage players to make the Athletics Skill Rating of vampires negative in order to get a few more skill points elsewhere, both representing that they (in all likelihood) died of some emaciating disease in life, and also representing that they would’ve had time to pick up many more skills over hundreds of years.
August 23, 2025 at 10:14 PM
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A few reviews for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy. It helps us immensely if you leave a 5-star review for Eureka by going to the top-right of the store page! (As seen here you don't even have to write anything.) this is one of the rating systems where anything below a 5-star counts as negative.
four reviews. The middle two are blank but are still 5-stars. The first and last ones read: absolutely fantastic best investigative ttrpg system i've every played!
August 21, 2025 at 5:54 PM
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Now after the editing and overhauling, changelings are still shitty fairies, but their rules act as much more of a foil to fairies and fairy society, if such a thing even does really exist.

Changelings don’t follow the rules, they don’t know the rules.
Weird Powers (Choose Two) Choose two of the following options: Changeling Glamour: When not debilitated by iron, the changeling has a +1 Base bonus to all Interpersonal Skills except Social Cues and Threaten. Mage Powers: When not debilitated by iron, the changeling has a Mage Power. This option may be chosen twice, in which case the changeling may instead have up to three Mage Powers. Each Mage Power beyond the first reduces the modifier of all the Changeling’s Powers Composure Rolls by -1 (so with 2 Mage Powers the modifier would be +2, and with 3 Powers it would be +1). Name-Taking: When not debilitated by iron, the changeling may steal names from others. This counts as a Movement, and the changeling must be touching the original owner and speak their full true name aloud. A person whose name has been taken in this manner will forget their own name, and will not respond to it when called by it. If they learn their true name again by any means, (reading it, being told, etc.), they will have trouble understanding that it is supposed to be their name, and will forget it soon after. If a curse is put on the changeling through any of the names in their possession, or if the changeling is about to put a curse on someone unintentionally, they may instantly transfer that curse to any name they possess. They may then attempt to return that name (along with the curse) to the original owner, but this requires a Blacked Out Skill check, as written in “Undoing” below. If they fail to return the name to its original owner, then the curse affects the changeling (as the current owner of that name). Terrible Curse: When not debilitated by iron, the changeling is capable of placing a terrible curse on an unsuspecting victim that is within their sight,[1] which makes the target suddenly feel extremely feeble and ill.[2][3] Applying this curse requires a Powers Composure Roll and counts as an Action. The target takes a -2 penalty to all Skill rolls for 1D6 days. [1 off to the side in the final formatting] No really, it’s a terrible curse, no technique at all. [2 off to the side in the final formatting] One reason that these changelings are rejected from fairy society is that they have no sense of or regard for its rules. [3 off to the side in the final formatting] Symptoms include shortness of breath, nausea, fatigue, muscle weakness, loss of appetite, excessive sweating, dizziness, and a sense of impending doom. However, no medical doctor will be able to diagnose exactly what is causing the problem. Voice-Taking: When not debilitated by iron, the changeling may attempt to “catch” and take a voice.[1] This counts as a Movement, and the original owner of the voice must speak at least one complete word aloud within 15 feet of the changeling. Uniquely, this Movement does not need to actually take place during the changeling's Turn, but in that case it consumes a Movement on their next Turn. A person whose voice has been taken is unable to speak, while the fairy in possession of it can speak in the taken voice at will.[2] [1 off to the side in the final formatting] This varies depending on the changeling, but they might conceptualize this as physically snatching something out of the air and putting it in their mouth.
August 20, 2025 at 10:11 PM