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Got that @anim-ttrpgs t-shirt in!

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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.

 Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is launching on Kickstarter on April 10th, 2024! Here’s a link to the Kickstarter page.

You can find out more on the blog @anim-ttrpgs and download a free demo from the link on our website or on the itch.io page.

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I've briefly touched upon this topic before but here goes; I know you can play D&D for pretty much free because it's extremely easy to pirate, but I think we've settled by now that piracy doesn't actually hurt companies as much as they want us to think, meaning that pirating D&D isn't as big of a "stick it to WotC" move as it's often presented as. Of course if you absolutely have to play D&D (but, like, why?) you won't get any moralizing from me about piracy, like, ever.

But the point is: supporting another game either monetarily or with your valuable time is a much more direct and tangible way to stick it to the cultural monopoly of D&D than playing D&D and not paying WotC. I mean if it's another big-ish publisher I don't have a lot of faith in their working conditions being much better than WotC's, but in some cases it probably is so. As it often happens, the market leader can often afford to pay its employees worse simply due to those positions being more desirable.

But anyway who cares, there's lots of games out there where you can actually get a full game sometimes for less than the cost of a single D&D book and since those games are often built as more focused experiences than the D&D "forever game" formula you're actually more likely to get to experience all of the game instead of a lot of the content existing just as shadows on the cave wall.

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The Kickstarter for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is Live!!

Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is our team’s debut TTRPG, over three years in the making! The campaign will run from April 10th to May 10th!

How far would you go to learn the truth?

Play amateur detectives caught up in things they barely understand, and explore how the lives of your characters unravel as they push themselves to dig deeper into the unknown!

Tense investigations!

Delve into an investigation-focused mystery and horror system that lets players take initiative and use their characters’ unique strengths to find clues and deduce conclusions themselves. A few bad rolls won’t get the party hopelessly stuck, but at the same time Eureka respects their intellect and lets them take charge of solving the mystery!

Character-driven gameplay!

Stats and abilities are based on who your character is as a person. Freeform character creation allows you to build a totally unique little guy, and have a totally unique gameplay experience with him! This is supported by the backbone of the Composure mechanic. Stress, fear, fatigue, and hunger will wear your investigators down as they trudge deeper into the unknown. Food, sleep, and connections with their fellow investigators are the only way to keep them going!

Secrets inside and out! 

Any investigator could be a monster, helping their friends while trying not to reveal their true natures. The party will learn to trust and rely on each other, or explode into a tangled net of drama!

Intense, tactical combat! 

Hits are devastating, and misses are unpredictable–firing a gun will always change the situation somehow, for better or for worse!

Now in Technicolor!

Evocative artwork from talented femme-fatales @chaospyromancy and @qsycomplainsalot and the mysterious @theblackwarden paint a gorgeously-realized portrait of a world with shadows lurking in every corner.

Elegantly designed and thoroughly playtested, Eureka represents the culmination of three years of near-daily work from our team, as well as a lot of our own money. We are almost at the end, we just need some financial support to put the finishing touches on it and make the final push to get it ready for official release!

With every stretch goal we meet, the game gets better and better. Tons of beautiful new artwork, new options for gameplay, and even two entirely new playable Monsters could be added to the book, so visit the Kickstarter and secure your copy today!

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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The Crowdfunding Campaign for CLASH! Begins in 7 Days!

What's the plan?

The campaign, hosted on Crowdfundr, will last from April 1st to June 30th. During this time, I'll be running a number of playtests and implementing features, as well as diving headfirst into the art pipeline with @ispybluesky.

By the end of the campaign, the goal is to have completed a proper first draft, with a pretty good idea for what the finished product will look like. It's going to be a busy 3 months, and I couldn't be more excited.

What else is going on?

For the duration of the campaign, I'm putting all of my games on sale! Any single game will be 30% off, or you can get a bundle of my entire library for 50% off!

I'll also be finally setting up a ko-fi during this time, for anyone who wants to toss in some support

What comes next?

The end of the campaign is still a fuzzy dot on the horizon for me, and a lot can happen between now and then. My hope is that by the time July rolls around, we'll be ready for getting to work on a final draft. I'm also juggling the idea of holding a closed beta around this time to get some feedback from the wider community.

When I started work on CLASH!, I put release day at November 1st. I knew even then that that was an ambitious goal, and in all likelihood release will actually end up somewhere early in 2025. But honestly, things are moving at a good pace, and assuming my design chops can hold up to snuff, we might just get this thing out before Hannukah.

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Cry for you...

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Do you have any games that involve urban fantasy with less focus on fighting than something like Dresden or Shadowrun?

THEME: Urban Fantasy (Minimal Fighting)

Hello there! What I've got here is quite a mix, I wasn't sure how much violence you wanted (or didn't want) so I have a little bit of romance, a little bit of nostalgia, and a little bit of horror!

City of Mist, by Son of Oak Games.

City of Mist is a role-playing game of film-noir investigation and super-powered action. It is set in a modern metropolis rife with crime, conspiracies, and mysteries. The protagonists are Rifts, ordinary people who became the living embodiment of a legend, their Mythos. While your Rifts may seek to strike a balance between the mysterious nature of their Mythos and their mortal aspirations, the powers within them always threaten to tear their lives apart. They have unwittingly become a part of a secret world of clashing stories, and soon other legends will come looking for them with demands.

City of Mist is a combination of PbtA and FATE, giving your characters descriptive tags to use for both their benefit and their detriment as they go about solving mysteries in a supernaturally-saturated city. The primary theme of the game is mystery, and thus more than anything your characters will be primed for investigation. That’s not to say that there isn’t violence - but violence and fighting can be de-emphasized if the group is more interested in the mystery side of things.

Character Creation involves a combination of mundane and supernatural themes, as your character is endeavouring to strike a balance with the parts of themselves that they recognize (student, parent, office worker, ex-partner) and the parts of themselves that are hard to understand (mythical beast, deity, folktale, urban legend). What’s important to define is your daily routine, your personality, and what kind of supernatural powers you have.

This game isn’t explicitly anti-violent, but it absolutely provides you with ways to solve problems that aren’t violent, so I think City of Mist is worth checking out.

Scary Monsters & Nice Sprites, by Pammu.

Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites is a narrative RPG about spending your night in one of the only clubs in your city that’s safe for creatures of the night like yourself. All you want to do is have some fun just like the humans do. Play a supernatural creature of choice, put some sick EDM on the speakers and get your game on!

This game works best for an even number of players, up to 6, and is GM-less. It combines urban monsters with flirting, dark clubs and hookups. Each of your characters will look for a partner by doing things that will appeal to the other players. If they like what you do, they’ll reward you with tokens, which you can spend to improve the atmosphere of the club. Fill another player’s intimacy meter, you’ve won them over, and the two of you decide how the night ends for both of your characters.

If you want a game about flirting and the magic of a nightclub, this is your game.

The Far Roofs, by Jenna Katerin Moran.

The Far Roofs is an original role playing system and bundled campaign using pens or pencils, paper, six-sided dice, ten-sided dice, playing cards, and a bag of letter tiles. It's complete in one volume: with this one book and the equipment above, you'll have everything you need to play. 

As the story progresses, your characters will gain access to over 150 unique, narrative-focused powers developed and refined over the course of a decade for the Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine RPG before being simplified and adapted for use herein.

The Far Roofs is still being Kickstarted, but Moran’s work on Chuubo’s Wish-Granting Engine produced a game that emphasizes wonder and emotional experience. The Far Roofs looks to deliver along the same lines, and the examples of play point towards investigation, social interaction, and magic powers. Jenna Moran is also known for her unique and evocative storytelling in her work, so I think it’s definitely worth checking out.

Lighthearted, by Kurt & Kate Potts.

Welcome to the magical 80s dream world of Lighthearted. You are a Prep, Jock, Geek, Rebel, or Outcast, like those kids in The Breakfast Club, except you are just about to start magic community college. Through play, we'll explore how you grow out of your high school cliques all while dealing with magical mishaps, college parties, vampires, and worse—finals!

Lighthearted is a complete tabletop roleplaying game that uses the language of film and television to reimagine the coming of age stories popular in 80s teen movies like Weird Science and Sixteen Candles, but with a modern fantasy spin. It's set in an alternate 1980s with fantasy elements weaved into the most outlandish bits of 80’s pop culture. There are fantasy religions mixed in with mall culture, dark magic cold wars, and magical glamours instead of plastic surgery.

This is a game of magic and coming-of-age, as you play first-year students at a magical community college. You’re off to the big city, and the big world - will you survive your first college party? Your first vampire?

The whole game feels like the neon lights of a vibrant night-life combined with the nostalgia of an 80’s film. Your magic is attached to how you feel, so as your emotions change, so will your effectiveness at certain actions. If you want a game that’s as light as its name, and you are seeking out rosy-tinted nostalgia, this might be your game.

Changeling: the Lost, by Onyx Path.

Once upon a time, they took you from your home. They promised you a place at their side, and meaning in your life, and they surrounded you with beautiful things. But the beautiful things were oh so sharp, and they laughed when you bled.

Day by day, they changed you. But day by day, your will grew stronger. On the last day, you smashed your way through the beautiful things and ran, not noticing as you bled or feeling as you cried.

You fought with courage and cleverness and took yourself home. Now the beauty and the horror are yours, to have and to hold and to live.

Welcome to once upon right fucking now.

So I’m familiar only with the 1st edition of Changeling, but as far as I understand, the setting and core premise of the game is the same in the 2nd edition. Changeling: the Lost is a game of fairy trauma. Your characters are survivors of a fae horrorscape, a place both wondrous and terrifying all at once. This game is solidly in the horror genre, but it contains within it a taste of the magical, and it’s also the reason I got into roleplaying in the first place.

As in many Chronicles of Darkness games, fighting is an option in here, but it’s not a wise option. Getting into fights pulls at your characters’ ability to understand the difference between our world and the world of Fae, it’s very easy to sustain supernatural damage that is hard to heal, and, well, sometimes it’s hard to tell who your real enemies are in the first place.

I’d say that Changeling is more of a political game than anything else. Your characters will have to dance through the highly literal wording of faerie pledges, and untangle difficult relationships between Courts that are both safe havens and potential beds of sedition. This is a violent game, but much of the violence possible in Changeling isn’t physical - it's emotional.

This Night On The Rooftops, by C.M. Ruebsaat.

This is a game about gazing out over the smokestacks after dark, with the wind in your hair and a friend at your side and a thousand lights of progress on the streets below. 

This Night on the Rooftops is a collaborative storytelling game for 2-5 players about friendship, growing up, and revolution. You will play members of a gang of children in The City, a fantastic world of industry and dying magic, where witches labour alongside factory-workers to make ends meet.

This game looks slightly less modern, but it takes the fantasy aspect of witchcraft and places it inside an industrial city. The game uses a modified version of the No Dice No Masters rule set, which is excellent for stories that have an ebb and flow to them, managed through the use of token expenditure. This game is also GM-less, giving everyone at the table the same amount of control over what happens next.

Since the characters are a gang of teenage witches looking to make ends meet, this game doesn’t strike me as one that prioritizes fighting or violence. The city looks big enough to grind up the characters if they’re not careful, so they’ll likely have to find solutions to problems that don’t get them (or their dependants) in trouble. If the game is like other No Dice No Masters games that I’m familiar with, the group will also have a big say over which elements of the city are the most intriguing to them.

Partners: The Urban Fantasy File, by Tin Star Games.

Some murders are just elf defence…

Vampires are real, magic is real, elves are real - and murder is still very very real. This expansion takes you and your Partner down the moonlit streets of urban fantasy, where the dead sometimes get back up again but crime is still a mystery needing two heads to solve.

The base game for this, Partners, is a two-player mystery-solving game about a pair of detectives, a straight-shooter and a wildcard. You’ll need the base rules to play, but this supplement brings in dead elves, suspicious vampires, and other common characters in any urban fantasy genre. It can work as a one-shot, or as a series of episodes. If you want a game that's primarily about solving a mystery more than anything else, this is is for you.

Solacebound, by Sascha Moore.

Young monsters played at the boundary between the worlds. They slipped and stranded in a human city. Isolated and unwelcome, they search for each others help and a way back.

Solacebound is a GM-less Game for 3-5 people to play over a few hours. Search a sprawling, oppressive city for your friends, find out who is willing to give you a roof, bash back against authorities, cook together and console each other. Will you find a way back home before all passages close?

You are teenage monsters trying to find their way through an urban environment, in a place that is hostile to them. You survive by hiding out, finding each-other, and do things together to make sure you keep each-other healthy. Cards from a deck act as resources, but also as an oracle to help you describe the fallout of any given action, and the emotions that are attached to it. This is a game about metaphors, about what it is like to live in a place that fears you, so I definitely recommend making sure the entire table knows what this is about before starting a game.

You Might Also Want to Check Out

Subway Runners, by Gem Room Games.

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hear me out hear me out hear me out..... dracopia but it's the dracula (1992) rendition (prints!)

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Rascal News is well worth your money:

Well it's been a month. I waited and watched and thought ah you know if the lowest sub was less than $5 then maybe just maybe. But I did want to support because Rascal is setting a course for the direction TTRPGs as an arts industry can be steered in, whether I personally am on board or not (though my funds would certainly help).

Like I said, it's been a month, and they've now implemented pay-per-article if there's something you want to see or you can't justify $5 – which is a pretty smart move considering "paywall tho" is the thought terminating refrain in the twitter replies and one of Rascal's stated intents is to do more Real Important Journalism in an industry rife with corporate exploitation and abuses of power, which is the sort of news that needs both funding and low access to entry.

It's also worth saying that their articles are a good read.

"While there are still some crunchier elements to the final product (exemplifying what AP scholar Dr. Emily Friedman refers to as the medium’s “ambitious middle”), the subtle production details and the highly intentional performances in GUDIYA are a beacon of what is artistically possible for video-born actual plays."

"GUDIYA (the Hindi word for doll) overwhelmingly plays into the horror of not only its source material, but the horror of being both a woman and South Asian in the highly gendered and xenophobic world of the English Empire."

I've now signed up at $50 for the year, or £3.29 each month which is Really Quite Good, so for your consideration I wanted to share the article that made me commit (above) plus a couple of choice picks for tumblr:

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My friends are making a ttrpg where you can play as monster mystery investigators. Needless to say I've been having a blast designing monster girls! This cute little murder blanket here is the Thing From Beyond, an alien shafeshifter with very particular dietary restrictions. (It's people!!) It's just one of the several playable monsters that Eureka has to offer. The TFB is quite special as it's a Eureka exclusive creation and based heavily off of great movie monsters like The Thing, The Blob, and many more!

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KICKSTARTER'S ON BABY

GO SUPPORT MY FRIEND'S PROJECT

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Street Wolves: Turbo Edition Custom Music

With a synthwave inspired ttrpg setting like Street Wolves taking place in 1987 the one thing it was missing was custom music.

Thanks to the Kickstarter, that's going to happen! I'm super excited to be working with a spectacular composer @strautmaskreplica.

And since the Kickstarter is doing super well, we're going to get a full EPs worth of songs!

The Kickstarter is ending in four days. If you want to get these tracks, you can back at PDF level and above and get them as part of your rewards OR you can get the thematic USB cassette tape which will have them pre-loaded onto it.

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FYI I just came across a thread on twitter which says that an author shared on google docs an explicit story with a friend for beta reading and google removed the file due to violation of TOS (apparently it has been updated where you are not allowed to share anything with sexual content). Not sure if it’s just this instance or if it’s going to become a widespread thing but if you guys write in google docs MAKE BACK UPS!!

(Instagram link to the screenshots)

Edit: also wanted to add that it seems that Microsoft word has the same language in their TOS so onedrive is not a safe alternative!

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THE THING (1982) dir. John Carpenter

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>5E player believes that 5e is the be all end all of ttrpgs and that you can run any concept within that system >Introduces 5e player to Lancer, Masks, Girl by Moonlight, or whatever they're trying to run in 5e and encourage them to find more >5E Player realizes that people love making games for different settings and genres, check out those other genres and settings, and boost the TTRPG scene in general by trying many different ttrpgs, and maybe even go on to create their own

>5E player believes that 5e is the be all end all of ttrpgs and that you can run any concept within that system >Introduce them to pathfinder, 1 or 2e >Pathfinder player believes that Pathfinder is the be all end all of ttrpgs and that you can run any concept within that system, as Pathfinder is too similar to 5e do yall get why i don't "Just point at pathfinder"? the games are too fundamentally similar to D&D to make a meaningful difference

we saw this phenomenon happening LIVE when the OGL Debacle happened, people were blindly praising Paizo for creating the ORC, despite it just being the OGL with the rough patches sanded off

like there's a reason people don't try to play like. fluffy farming sims in Lancer, it very clearly tells you that it is not a generic game, Pathfinder 1/2 and D&D do do that, even inavertedly

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hey. do any of you trans/autistic mfs wanna see a baby werewolf

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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.