mentioned-rat-bastard

[mentioned-rat-bastard]

There are also ways to work around lacking ability in conversation without even using mechanics. Give people more time to think. Have people write instead of speak if it helps. Things can even be abstracted things without using mechanics. I'm sure people have done that last one fairly regularly when a character needs to quickly purchase something and nobody wants to role play doing that.

Regarding your post(s) about investigation checks and the like, there's something that's bothering me, and it bothered me for a while. Not in regard to investigation, but charisma (and similar checks, diplomacy, negotiation, persuasion, whatever the game calls it).

In a TTRPG with skills, those skills are an abstraction meant to simulate a characters actual capabilities. If I want to make a character who can effortlessly jump from rooftop to rooftop, I'll give them high Athletics, Agility, Endurance, whatever. Maybe some feats, abilities, perks, advantages etc that pertain to jumping. Now, if I want my character to jump from rooftop to rooftop, I just roll the dice, and the skills, attributes, perks etc will make sure I have a high likelihood of success. I don't need to prove to the GM or the group that I myself could make that jump.

But now let's talk about Charisma checks. I've often heard stories of groups who say they don't make those checks, they just let the player make the argument, and if the GM is convinced, they "pass." But like... that means the character will always be as persuasive as the player. If the player isn't good at formulating an argument, the character won't be, either. Same with perception, investigation, etc. Sometimes, players just aren't good at picking up on hints and clues and/or they're not good at drawing conclusions from the clues they have. So that means that they can't play as a character who is?

Don't get me wrong, I get your point, I just find this is an issue worth thinking about. Why are things like athleticism, stealth, and combat prowess, or even things like lockpicking, hacking, or repairing stuff okay to abstract away as dice rolls, but deduction, perception, and maybe also persuasion and rhetoric aren't? Or, maybe the better, more constructive question: How would you propose handling a player playing a character whose skills exceed the player's?

I also think it's an issue worth thinking about, but I think "thinking about it" also has to involve asking the questions "why is this a problem?" and "is this ACTUALLY a problem?"

Like this discussion comes with the prepackaged assumption that allowing you to play a character whose abilities exceed yours as a player is both a) a universally desirable thing, and b) something that must be treated as a game design priority. And, with that assumption, it's logical to conclude that a TTRPG has an *obligation* to allow you to play a character whose abilities are not limited by yours as a player in any way, and not allowing you to do so constitutes a failure on the game's part.

But let's question that assumption a little bit. Because, the way I see it "allowing you to play a character who is good at X even if that's something that you, personally, are not good at" is not an inherently desirable design goal. It's a value-neutral feature, and it becomes a good or bad design goal to pursue depending on what X is and whether abstracting X so that the player doesn't have to engage with it benefits or detracts from the desired gameplay experience.

Let's for example, imagine a TTRPG with wargame elements, where, among other things to do, there are situations where your character can assume command of an army to engage in large-scale battles. It's pretty clear that, in such a game, you simply can't play as a character who is a better tactician than you, the player, are. If I'm not a good tactician, I don't get to play a character who's supposed to be the most brilliant tactician in all the land. That's simply not a character concept I get to play unless I am also skilled at tactical decision-making.

Is that inherently a problem to be solved? If we got rid of tactical decision-making as an activity that the players have to engage in, and instead gave the characters a "Tactics" skill and we used a Tactics skill check to determine whether they win or lose a battle, that would certainly allow a player who's bad at tactics the freedom to play a character who's the best tactician ever. But would this be an objectively good change? I'd say no, because it would skip past the entire point of the wargame elements, which is engaging as a player with the process of tactical decision-making, and that's not something that I'd consider worth sacrificing in pursuit of allowing the player to play a character whose skills exceed theirs in this particular aspect.

To name a more concrete example that someone else mentioned in the notes of that post: Mothership has no equivalent of a stealth skill, despite being a game where a lot of your playtime is spent hiding from some flavor of Scary Space Monster, because if the game abstracted stealth that way the resolution to any situation where you're trying to hide from a Scary Space Monster would be saying "I roll stealth" and hoping you roll high enough. Without a stealth skill, you're forced to participate in the narrative conversation of paying attention to the GM's description of the environment, ask clarifying questions if needed, and describe how you try to hide in the space presented to you.

This, once again, presents a situation where your character's skills are limited by your own. It's pretty clear that your character can only be as good at hiding as you are at thinking of places to hide and describing how they hide in them, and that if the game took the "i roll stealth" approach instead, it would solve the "problem" of your character's skills being limited by your own in this particular way. But is solving this "problem" worth sacrificing the tension that the game seeks to create by deliberately refusing to abstract stealth in this way?

So yeah... I think lacking skill checks for stuff such as perception or investigation makes a dungeon-crawling game better because it forces the players to narratively engage with the environment as a real place when they're looking for something, and it's also true that the lack of such mechanics kinda does mean that a player who just isn't good at picking up hints and clues from environmental details simply doesn't get to play a character who is supposed to be good at picking up hints and clues from environmental details. But I think that ensuring a player's ability to play such a character regardless of their real-life skill level is not a design goal that a game has any inherent obligation to pursue, especially not at the cost of skipping over the actions that, to me, are the meat and potatoes of a dungeon crawl.

My answer to "why is it okay to abstract certain skills as dice rolls and not others" is that games are allowed to make decisions about which actions they want to skip over with a dice roll and which actions they want the players to have to exercise direct narrative control and mastery of, and sometimes that's gonna interfere with their freedom to play a character whose skills exceed theirs, and that's okay because sometimes other game design goals are going to have priority over the goal of ensuring the character's skills aren't limited by the player's real-life skills in any conceivable way.

[mentioned-rat-bastard]

art by @toy-dragon and @coffeewolfart Smokey is informed by a lot of things, notably the commentary on disability in Eureka, Harrier Du Bois, Travis Touchdown, and my dad, and also my second dad, and also several other men I've met. Perhaps consequently a few sessions into his first adventure the other players told me Smokey was just such a real guy. That they feel they'd met people like him before, but that he was the kind of person its strange to see anyone decide to make for a game. A brash paternalistic maladjusted ne'er-do-well that doesn't seem to have a heart of gold to uncover. They were also, I can only hope, at least somewhat wrong about having met a Smokey before.

All the answers in his cigarette box 👇

The man was designed to be a puzzle. An eclectic mix of ticks, habits, red herrings and lies. I did not draw from exact monster tells to have him mimic other than extra teeth and an aversion to mirrors. He's mostly just off in his own way and that worked regardless. It has posited at different times that he is a vampire, wolfman, fairy, thing from beyond, changeling, my homebrew dullahan, and the mothman, which isn't even a thing in Eureka. The truth is Smokey is a kind of monster, but his monster "rules" look like this

In the literal sense Smokey is a meth addict, hit man, and serial abuser in his late 50s. He's also a divorced dad with 3 daughters, each from different women scattered across the US. He's had many jobs, but most of his work has been criminal, and much of that violent. Between the drugs, shootings, accidents, and often related self destructive behavior it's a miracle he's alive at all. Indeed, he's a miracle, just like ma always said. That means seeing a lot of people come and go.

Smokey is also a lie, and not just because his legal name is Mitchell Cooper. He's a mask that may have nothing under it. I'd call it Schroedinger's Dysphoria, the thing under the skin is alive and dead at the same time. Of course, he doesn't really comprehend that. He runs from it, runs from everything, and this is where escapism and self destruction marry in the violent chorus of Smokey's life. He escapes through work. He loves being good at fulfilling work, even if it's murder. He escapes through drugs. That's much more straightforward. Its a slow motion car crash lovingly depicted in a torrential vomit of backstory that you'll only ever see snippets of, because if I wrote it all down and you found your investigator in a game with him you'd know when he's making shit up.

And I should say, he's not just the worst guy ever. That would be pretty one note. He has hobbies, wisdom, and humor. One of my favorite moments was his discussion with another investigator about ghibli movies and the matrix. These things often play into his themes too.

"Turns out our dystopian future has none of the cool shit. Taking a red pill doesn't lead you to bending spoons with your mind, just suffering without the painkiller of ignorance."

"I guess what I'm trying to say is, knowing things doesn't always let you change them."

But about monster. Its a strong word, but Smokey is specifically close to being a monster in the Eureka context. He only misses the mark by a few game mechanics and lack of paranormal traits, unless you consider his repeated unlikely survival a literal miracle. He might, when he's feeling particularly down. The thought occurred to me, reading the monster rules and disability allegories, what if I just cut out the middleman? Smokey has one of the most stigmatized and least sympathized disabilities in the world. He's an addict. He's more keen to hide this than even being a murderer, and its broken more of his relationships than the murders too. Dysphoria is also hardly understood much less sympathized with especially among the circles Smokey is in. He can't just not eat. He can't just say no to drugs. He squeezes days of escape from the years of life and hours of money his victims give him. These wounds cannot heal completely, and its an impossible argument to make that even if they came close Smokey could ever give back more than he's taken. An argument that wouldn't much help the bastard anyways. Putting moral weight on the exchange of productivity is part of the problem in the first place. Its among many reasons why every institution has failed him, and every individual has given up on him. I think you would too.

"When I want to kill myself, I do meth, then I don't want to anymore. I might get myself killed, but that's different."

Eureka currently has no specific rules for depicting addiction, but I actually prefer that to almost any rules I've seen on the topic. Addiction is different depending on the substance and the person, so rules that miss the mark are often constraining at best. But with Eureka I did find tools in the box in its philosophy and its Tiers of Fear system. Withdrawals is on Smokey's Tiers of Fear. When it comes to his attitude on and off meth, and other substances, that's just for me to play out. As few judgement calls for the Narrator to make as possible is policy.

Interestingly for Eureka, one of the possible symptoms of methamphetamine withdrawal is Psychosis, and that leaves Smokey liable to blame paranormal phenomena on his own mind. It still prompts a composure roll, its just Withdrawals rather than Monster or Magic, which is actually more frightening for Smokey. Monsters? Magic? "So life finally starts to get interesting. Like I'm in a goddamn movie!" Psychosis? "Not supposed keep happening this far out... God fucking damn it." Relating himself to a movie character you might get a sense of his most common terrible reason for going on any given adventure.

Even revealing all of this, there are many many things that texture Smokey's character. These broad strokes didn't get far into how he conceives of the world around him, the little ways his lies manifest, what those ticks and red herrings are, or the stats and traits of his actual character sheet. Part of that is to keep this from being overly long, but also, y'know, there are people playing Eureka out there. Maybe if you join the book club or A.N.I.M.'s patreon server you'll end up putting an investigator in an adventure with Smokey. Who knows.

art by @coffeewolfart and me in that order

if you've got Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy characters, we want to hear about them.

[mentioned-rat-bastard]

I've thought about this a lot working on my ttrpg where the "dungeon crawling" isn't an adventure it's actually just the PC's job. So there's always time constraints because they work for a company, efficiency, capitalism, etc. In that game I plan on having a funny little rule where the characters can skip the full descriptions of rooms, which can be an incredibly unsafe thing to do, to save a Shift (unit of in game time)

Something like prying open a door can actually take rolls because every roll out of combat is a Shift so failing actually matters. Splitting the party, while it risks smaller group sizes getting caught in ambushes, also saves Shifts because stuff happens at the same time. Division of labor is a core tenant of Transcendent Ideology after all.

If there was one thing I could retroactively erase from existence in the entire history of the tabletop RPG medium it would be the concept of using "perception checks" or "investigation rolls" or any similar mechanics in dungeon-crawling RPGs to determine if the PCs can see a detail in their environment.

"A DC 15 Perception roll is required to see..." "A DC 20 Investigation roll will reveal..." no. Shut up. If the thing is in plain sight or can be perceived with the senses by simply existing in this space and taking a look around then the PCs are perceiving it and describing it to the players is part of your role because you are their source of sensory information about the in-game world.

And if it's not in plain sight or deliberately concealed in some way then they simply DON'T perceive it but can reveal it by narratively interacting with their environment until one of their actions undoes whatever's concealing it, not rolling a die to see if they can Perceive Hard Enough to reveal it.

[mentioned-rat-bastard]

There are many games that handle this right, including older editions of d&d, and they are very good for it. Really this is a symptom of D&D 5e being bad at this and the single most popular ttrpg by miles, causing leakage into every play culture. I don't remember it being this bad even in 4e.

I find it's also far more intuitive to newer players for there to be less rolls about basic shit everyone knows their characters could do. Its a bad habit which has to be actively taught to continue existing. When in 5e a new player fails a roll for their character to notice something obvious there's a feeling of silly disconnect from the world, since justifying that failure is hard. Or worse, they sense this is bullshit (and they're right) Ive seen this make kids feel like they've been shot down too, and they stop taking the initiative with what their characters would do. When a new player just, interacts with the game, and there isn't an unnecessary roll involved, there's no issue. As well since they're using their heads instead of their dice, I've seen this produce more engagement with the game almost immediately.

This is one of many reasons why the first game I run for my students is Basic Fantasy RPG, and not D&D 5e, even if they think they really want it.

Also all of this applies to Athletics rolls to pry something open or breaking most objects when there's no time constraint. If a character sets aside 10 minutes to search every nook and cranny of that desk, of course they'll find the hidden compartment eventually. If someone with a prybar or axe has as much time to work on a wooden door, there's no need for a roll, they'll get it open eventually. There is no good reason to let characters repeatedly fail to get through a basic door if they have the tools and aren't under duress. Rolling shit 5 times in a row in various attempts to get through a non obstacle like that is funny sure, but precisely because it doesn't make any sense.

If there was one thing I could retroactively erase from existence in the entire history of the tabletop RPG medium it would be the concept of using "perception checks" or "investigation rolls" or any similar mechanics in dungeon-crawling RPGs to determine if the PCs can see a detail in their environment.

"A DC 15 Perception roll is required to see..." "A DC 20 Investigation roll will reveal..." no. Shut up. If the thing is in plain sight or can be perceived with the senses by simply existing in this space and taking a look around then the PCs are perceiving it and describing it to the players is part of your role because you are their source of sensory information about the in-game world.

And if it's not in plain sight or deliberately concealed in some way then they simply DON'T perceive it but can reveal it by narratively interacting with their environment until one of their actions undoes whatever's concealing it, not rolling a die to see if they can Perceive Hard Enough to reveal it.

[mentioned-rat-bastard]

THE DULLAHAN AND WRITING MONSTERS FOR EUREKA

If you only want to know about the dullahan as I've written it, just go for that link. If you want to get under the hood with me and learn how it came to be, keep reading.

What is a monster? Well it's something like 16 pages and 7,000 words. "Monster" is a subset of paranormal investigator types in Eureka. They are preferably based on an actual myth, and if so, mythology from before 1900 if possible. They have to generally "take" more than they "give" to society. This "taking" is expressed in Composure restoration via special needs such as eating people. They must have incredible powers and debilitating weaknesses that make existing as most do a difficult to impossible ask. And finally, like all investigators, they must be able to pass as a mundane human if they so choose in order for the suspenseful deduction game part of Eureka's storytelling to work.

So figuring all this out reading all 6 monster trait options in the book I thought "Where are my favorite headless agents of death? The dullahan would be perfect for this game." and after making a character with the vanilla rules that engages with similar themes, I decided to write it myself. I have very specific ideas about death I hardly trust anyone else to get right anyways.

It is my firm belief that the trope of the psychopomp, when used as the star of the show rather than a supporting element, creates a fiction that is inherently investigative. Simply put, reaping souls requires learning about people. Even if the agent of death doesn't go out of their way to do it themselves, inevitably that's what much of the tale is. The dullahan is a perfect opportunity to place this in an investigative urban fantasy game environment, and mostly for a pretty straightforward reason. When they take life, they do so with the victims full true name. In myth it's unclear how they come to know names, these questions don't need answering when it's fate, but for a dullahan as an investigator in an rpg, of course, they have to go out and learn names by entirely mundane means. Existing off of taking life isn't a strange thing for Eureka's monsters, but the requirement to learn something about ones victims is an intimacy only shared with the Thing From Beyond, and they do it in a completely different way.

Then there's the questions Eureka begs that most stories with psychopomps leave unanswered. How do they feel about all this? That is truly different from any of the other monsters in the book. Its not exactly like eating. It's not a need in the typical sense. This is an obligation. A duty or a job. Is it an honor? Is this what is right? Or simply what must be? Do they work with gusto or are they phoning it in? When the dullahan loses Composure for being inefficient in their work, that's not some paranormal weakness. That's just how they are. This is the purpose for which they exist after all, not that you would understand. You have the privilege of searching for your own meaning.

I also love the trope of the headless rider and I love a good ghost story. The dullahan isn't a ghost, we'll get to that later, but if there was ever a place to put inspiration from sources like The Legend of Sleepy Hollow or the penitent headless revenants of German lore, it would be here and with the Vampire. I am glad to recognize what I believe to be some of this in Eureka's Vampire monster rules. The dullahan as we understand it today is actually a pretty loose and recent myth. Most understanding of it comes from one source, Thomas Crofton Crocker, who we know to have been "reinventing" the stories he wrote down. That was in 1825, only 200 years ago. So corroborating sources and poking holes, I find what we know definitively about the dullahan is pretty scant. Not much to actually go off of. The answer? Well, I'm turning the dullahan into a monster trait in a game that demands it has an everyday life. The answer is to be honest. I am already a reinventer myself. If I'm going to do it, I'm going to say I'm doing it, and I'm going to do it right. And so my favorite pieces of headless rider lore are used to fill out the monster. Make it feel more coherent. For example, Crocker doesn't really say if the dullahan is or isn't corporeal. My favorite stories of headless riders have them existing physically, so the dullahan I write is certainly corporeal. It kills with a touch, like in the German tales. The nature of its detached head is subtly to overtly slapstick, like in, well actually almost every story about headless folks. That's a mainstay.

Then I ran into another problem. In some of Crocker's stories a dullahan is a kind of ghost. In others they are not. The scant sources I found that predate him grant a more definitive answer, not a ghost. I more or less knew this going in. I don't think I would have written dullahan rules if they were just a kind of ghost, because that undercuts the psychopomp element. Yet I have all these elements from ghost stories jumbled into the rules and lore. Headless rider ghost stories tend to be about a completely different element, though one I love well, the legend of the dead. My answer to this is where we depart from typical inspiration and get wildly personal. Deep into those very specific ideas about death I mentioned. If you don't want to deal with my specific flavor of autistic Too Much Information swag just call it quits now and go read the rules I wrote. I think they're very good. Below the cut, a story about my dead dad.

My father died pretty young, 15 years ago now. I got over it. That's not even the important part. The important part is when I learn many years later he wasn't anything like I thought he was. First it was drip fed to me. He was hiding a drug addiction. He hurt my mother. You know, little stuff. Many years after that I transition, and I end up talking about the taste in media he tried to instill me with to some other trans women on the internet. The man loved things like The Matrix, Serial Experiments Lain, Ghost in the Shell and Evangalion...

So someone jokes, not knowing he's dead, "Is your dad at all interested in estrogen?" I laughed my ass off.

Everything spiraled off from there. I call my mom, I call my grandma, I call my aunt. What do they say? "Never comfortable in his own skin." and "He was certainly repressing something." and "The jacket? I suppose he rarely took it off yeah. When did that start? Must've been oh, around middle school."

And that's just the stuff I learned that pertained to possible dysphoria. The uh, man was completely re-contextualized to me. I was forced to reinterpret all my knowledge of him.

That's the thing about dead people. They're dead. Everything about them that's left? All you. Death, the experience, isn't for the dead. It's for us. The knowledge of my own father I had 10 years ago and what I know now are completely different people. This, this is how you write a good ghost story. Or in the dullahan's case, a good not-a-ghost story.

This reaper cannot create its own life, so it wears the memory of someone who once lived. Reinterpretation of that memory harms it. If all memory is lost, the dullahan can't stay in this world. When it takes life, its duty is not about the life it takes. Not directly. Its about everyone's reaction to that end. Its the experience of death that matters, and that's for us and us alone. There's even some precedent for that. Stories where someone is dead, but no one knows of or acknowledges it, and a headless rider comes to demand we make things right. That's a great prompt for a Eureka mystery module, by the way, if you feel like writing.

[mentioned-rat-bastard]

(In response to the last paragraph) "What you're talking about here is an example of horizontal balancing, where two characters do completely different things that aren't comparable to each other. As another example, the Medic is blatantly the most powerful class in TF2, but a team of all Medics will always lose"

-my wise and beutiful wife just now

Game balance is overrated in ttrpgs, as transcribed from a discord rant I had.

Modern D&D and kin (theoretically) want player characters to be like, roughly as good at the narrow thing the game is about. Combat. For games that are super narrow this can actually make sense, but it depends on a number of things and notably, clashes with the idea of "roles" altogether.

So like, in D&D 5e, a party of adventurers encounters combat problems and has to deal with them. There are a bunch of roles, but because they are all almost always valid for the problem at hand, a party can easily be all wizards or something and do really well. Everything fits in the square hole.

Is this a problem? Well, idk, is the game meant to challenge? If you want challenge to be a primary lense through which players interact with the system of roles in character creation, this is a problem. D&D doesn't because the adventurers are meant to win and because classes are flavor for how they win. Hogwarts houses, if I were to be so derogatory.

So I look at it like this, if there are multiple roles in a challenge game, I want them to be very different, and I want them to be essential to one another. If being essential and different are the goals, balance actually isn't up there. There are a lot of ways this can be done. Old school dungeon crawlers are a great example, where the task at hand, dungeon crawling, isn't as narrow as combat alone, and so different classes are made to engage with different aspects of it. Its pretty intuitive, down to the fact that fighters are the fighting class.

The power of PC tools can be greater the more narrow they are. Eureka is a great example of this. Monsters are so so good at murder, but that's such a specific tool. An investigator being optimized for something doesn't mean they can plow through a mystery on their own, as a matter of fact in that game it probably means they will have to rely on others more to account for the stuff they're shit at. What does have to be balanced carefully in Eureka is options for IP generation, because it directly affects investigators uncovering the mystery in more or less the same way regardless of what kind of investigator they are.

That is to say, balance is a thing that matters only in contexts where everyone is mechanically doing the same thing. And moreover, if they're not always doing the same thing, then having things be imbalanced in the rare instances they decide to is very narratively interesting.

[mentioned-rat-bastard]

Game balance is overrated in ttrpgs, as transcribed from a discord rant I had.

Modern D&D and kin (theoretically) want player characters to be like, roughly as good at the narrow thing the game is about. Combat. For games that are super narrow this can actually make sense, but it depends on a number of things and notably, clashes with the idea of "roles" altogether.

So like, in D&D 5e, a party of adventurers encounters combat problems and has to deal with them. There are a bunch of roles, but because they are all almost always valid for the problem at hand, a party can easily be all wizards or something and do really well. Everything fits in the square hole.

Is this a problem? Well, idk, is the game meant to challenge? If you want challenge to be a primary lense through which players interact with the system of roles in character creation, this is a problem. D&D doesn't because the adventurers are meant to win and because classes are flavor for how they win. Hogwarts houses, if I were to be so derogatory.

So I look at it like this, if there are multiple roles in a challenge game, I want them to be very different, and I want them to be essential to one another. If being essential and different are the goals, balance actually isn't up there. There are a lot of ways this can be done. Old school dungeon crawlers are a great example, where the task at hand, dungeon crawling, isn't as narrow as combat alone, and so different classes are made to engage with different aspects of it. Its pretty intuitive, down to the fact that fighters are the fighting class.

The power of PC tools can be greater the more narrow they are. Eureka is a great example of this. Monsters are so so good at murder, but that's such a specific tool. An investigator being optimized for something doesn't mean they can plow through a mystery on their own, as a matter of fact in that game it probably means they will have to rely on others more to account for the stuff they're shit at. What does have to be balanced carefully in Eureka is options for IP generation, because it directly affects investigators uncovering the mystery in more or less the same way regardless of what kind of investigator they are.

That is to say, balance is a thing that matters only in contexts where everyone is mechanically doing the same thing. And moreover, if they're not always doing the same thing, then having things be imbalanced in the rare instances they decide to is very narratively interesting.

[mentioned-rat-bastard]

Deborah (Deb) Cooper!

Art by @officialrin

ANIM has a ttrpg book club discord which voted to play Eureka recently, running a Delta Green module called Signal to Noise. Deb was made for this, but there wont be spoilers for the module.

Deb is a massive woman with the physique of a powerlifter who is, despite appearances, an accountant, one not unfamiliar with investigating… businesses. She has a lot of empathy for everyone, to the point of prioritizing the needs of others over herself constantly. She is an uncompromising Perfectionist when it comes to people's expectations. That's a pretty stressful way to live, which is unfortunate for everyone around her considering she is an incredibly deadly Wolfman. A major exception to her extreme selflessness is her love of and need for copious amounts of food. In Deb's mind, eating enough regular food can prevent her from rampaging and eating people. This isn't the case, even if not going hungry is actually a good idea. Her third trait is Go With Your Gut to take advantage of her truths, account for the more Investigation Points monsters need to get a Eureka, and most importantly because its a pun. One of her truths is a play on "Would Do It For A Scooby Snack" after all.

In mechanics, Wolfman/Loup-Garou investigators have to pay careful attention to their Composure more than most. If they hit 0, they don't just have to deal with frayed nerves and poor bonuses like other investigators, they go on a rampage and eat people until they are full and at 7/7 composure again. Since its hard for them to regain composure without eating people, many wolfmen hunt humans intentionally. Deb has never done this. She refuses to, but de-prioritizing herself over and over, spending composure on her Perfectionist trait to get things done, working sleepless nights, means she kills again and again without technically meaning to.

Investigating mysteries in any Eureka adventure is also pretty stressful. At one point in Signal to Noise, Deb got into an argument with another Investigator, a monster hunter who was suspicious of her. Her reaction to the attempt at intimidation was more fear for the other investigator than for herself, and it brought her down to 1 composure. When she lost 1 more due to events that night, she killed and ate 7 people in the hotel she was staying. She woke up in a nearby forest naked, covered in blood, and literally steaming off calories. For Deb, one of the worst parts about rampaging is that she always feels much better afterwards...

Metatextually Deb's monster qualities represent complex post traumatic stress disorder, and blaming oneself for the special needs and considerations that entails. In my life, if I'm too stressed my body shuts down. I become literally unable to move. I have to ask other people to help me, if I can even talk. In Deb's life, if she's too stressed her body goes out and lets off some steam for her. If Deb really needs to learn anything, its to accept her needs and be more selfish. Pertinently, that would mean not investigating stressful mysteries that could reduce her Composure to 0 even if she thinks it would help other people.

Some fun little things: - Deb is scared of fireworks and thunder. Scared of guns too, but for the noise, not the bullets. Even in human form. - Due to literally having that dog in her, Deb looks 200something pounds, and is actually more like 400. Most chairs are not rated for her, she sinks in water, and is prone to falling through rickety floorboards. She also punches really, really hard. - Deb's earrings are magnetic because her earlobes kept regenerating. - Since all of her hunts have been rampages where she wakes up in human form, Deb sleeps in wolf form when she can to avoid being startled when she gets up. - Deb almost can't help but track small animals with her head when they are around. Again even in human form. - Her full wolf form is about the size of a class 2b light duty vehicle.

Art by @corviacore - To look closer to how you might imagine a werewolf does, she has to stop the transformation part way in lupine anthroform.

if you've got Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy characters, we want to hear about them.

[mentioned-rat-bastard]

Some bad traits for wilders written by @sapphicwhump one of the rat bastards of this blog. Concept inspired by the Eureka homebrew, Urethra: Bad Traits for Investigators by @faeriedaez

irl animal inspirations: Autonomous - Lizard dropping its tail Cold Blooded - You get this one I'm sure Faint - Opossums and goats Fecal Fling - Primates Fire Breath 2 - Not even an actual animal. Fake. Canceled. Ink Sac - Octopus and squid Oviparous - Literally anything that lays eggs Oviparous 2 (Parasitoid) - Bugs that lay eggs in things Sent Marking - So many animals really Skin Pisser - Sharks Stinky - You.

[mentioned-rat-bastard]

A Little on Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy and Lynch Mobs

Something that our team talks about a lot when planning for adventure modules for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is going out of our way to make sure it’s not just, like, a lynch mob game.

Eureka has a lot of contempt for the American “justice” system but on the other hand we try to write the modules so that they aren’t “the liberal police don’t care so it’s up to red blooded Americans to go out and kill Bad Guys without trial.” which is a really really easy pit to fall into when literal monsters like vampires exist in the setting. The problem with cops isn't that they don't kill enough people.

As I’ve said in another post linked here and to some extent text in the rulebook itself, self-described “monster hunters” are some of the sickest individuals in the setting.

Oh and anyone currently working on the adventure module game jam, check for this kind of attitude accidentally cropping up in your work too.