Latest Posts by tacticalpizzaoven - Page 2
When you encounter a problem, consider: have you tried evolving venomous spines about it?
uhhhhh..... well......... uhhhhhhhhh.....
okay don't judge me but
i'm not just dead. i'm like, NEGATIVE alive
i'm either blown up, torn apart, shot, gassed, crushed, evaporated, or a multitude of other fucked up and evil ways to die of death.
i'm fucked. i'm so unbelievably fucked.
no sales for 5 days..
im still losing it over the "how did high schoolers write 600 word essays before chatgpt" post. 600 words. that is nothing. that is so few words what do you mean you can't write 600 words. 600 words. this post right here is 45 words.
no sales for 5 days..
no sales for 5 days..
no sales for 5 days..
Scientists have just discovered some rocks at the bottom of the ocean can make oxygen... and they do it in complete darkness!
These aren’t magic stones, they’re polymetallic nodules, potato-sized metal lumps packed with manganese, cobalt, and nickel.
But here’s the twist; when seawater flows over their surfaces, they generate tiny electric currents that can split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. No sunlight, no photosynthesis, just deep-sea chemistry creating breathable gas in the pitch black.
This “dark oxygen” could explain how deep-sea creatures survive in low-oxygen zones far from the surface. What's even wilder is that if this can happen on Earth, it could be happening right now in the hidden oceans of Europa or Enceladus, two icy moons that scientists think might host alien life.
bloody hell y'all EUREKA is such a fantastic game please go play it im begging you
You’re not depressed. You just need $250,000 in your bank account.
fun fact: your Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy investigator can be forklift certified!
Eureka: The Fanservice Files adds a Trait to the game for your investigator having huge boobs.
This Mundane Trait, called “Well Endowed,” is for investigators with huge boobs.
It has two benefits and two downsides. The first is obvious, a +1 Contextual bonus to the Seduce Skill, always active. The second is a bit more situational. It makes your investigator’s cleavage function as a storage space, which, now that I’m writing it out, I think that that might be one of the features of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy that i haven’t explained on social media at all.
So now this post is about the Wealth Skill too.
In Eureka, you don’t track individual dollars, your investigators have a Wealth Skill Rating. This is essentially their social/economic class, and it serves dual purpose. Firstly, it can be rolled for knowledge of high-class society, and the modifier can be reversed when rolling for knowledge of lower class society.
This also acts as a modifier for WP roll, which i have already covered in a previous post.
During gameplay, though, Wealth can also be rolled to purchase useful items at stores. With a Full Success, they can find and buy just what they’re looking for. With a Partial Success, they may be able to find something slightly worse than what they need, or they can buy what they need but they lose Composure from financial stress.
Wealth rolls like this are not only made at stores though, they can be made at the investigator’s house, vehicle, or backpack, usually with a negative modifier, to determine if they already had what they needed tucked away in the closet or trunk or something. (Fairies in particular have a bit of a hammerspace thing going on with these, and can pull much more out of places than one would expect them to be able to hold.)
The “Well Endowed” Trait extends this ability to your investigator’s cleavage. It has a low modifier, but at any time they can try to produce a useful item from between their breasts. The snoop illustration for this isn’t ready yet, but it will feature a snoop and a well-endowed snoopette both tied up with padlocked chains; and the snoopette is wiggling a set of lock picks out from between her breasts for the snoop to take and free them both.
(The hammerspace features of fairies’ storage also extends to “Well Endowed” if they have it. A well-endowed fairy could even hide a person in there, in a pinch, with onlookers none the wiser.)
Now for the downsides of Well Endowed. If a well-endowed investigator is ever trying to squeeze through a very small gap, they run the risk of getting stuck thanks to their enormous breasts. Secondly, any time a well-endowed investigator starts moving on-foot at a rate that would require the Speed rules to come into play, they must make a small Composure roll, because ouch, their back!
Download Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy and its April Fools add-on Eureka: The Fanservice Files from itchio now, or get them from out patreon! They’re free on itchio, but we could really use the money if you can spare it!
we're hard at work inventing a femur breaker that automatically activates whenever someone looks at your real-ass name and goes "i'm not even going to TRY to pronounce that"
hey so uhh. I honestly don’t know what to open this post with but I do, unironically, recommend eureka! investigative urban fantasy to everyone, I’ve read thru the rule book, I’m in both servers and I must say. It’s worth it. It’s worth paying for. Everyone in the servers are lovely, I’ve made new friends (well I’d count them as friends anyway), and you can play ttrpgs (including eureka!) with said people! look. I can’t force you to buy eureka! or silk & dagger, but if you want to give your money to a small indie ttrpg who’s creators deserve the money (more than multibillion corporations)! Id seriously recommend it. I’m not super well-versed in ttrpgs, but eureka! is easy enough for me to understand while still allowing for complex characters and the like! Another fun thing is a bunch of new modules will be coming out for eureka! soon as well.
So please, if you’re considering supporting. Do it
plus, if you join the book club, I’ll always be down to chat :]
Also speaking of playtesting, I think that I may have inadvertently made one of the man-eater’s options way “stronger” than all the others and I’m not 100% how to fix it at the moment or if it for sure needs to be fixed, and I can’t dedicate too much time to it right now because I need to work on The XXX-Files (because we need another mini-release because by the way we are not doing good on money right now please buy our games.)
In short, the man-eater is a Monster Trait (from Eureka: The Fanservice Files, a mini-expansion for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy) that has the ability to swallow people whole similarly to the gorgon, but not much else in the way of powers. Also similar to the gorgon they are pretty female-coded though not explicitly gender-locked.
In some ways, this lack of other special features is an advantage because it means that a man-eater can pass for normal really easily, but it also means they don’t have a super obvious Weakness. I'm pretty proud of what I came up with, in fact I’m very proud of the whole Trait and being able to make a deviantart fetish into a mechanically interesting, viable, and thematic playable Eureka monster.
Man-eaters are the hungriest girls you’ve ever met, and that’s their weakness. Imagine the hungriest chick you can think of, she’s 100x hungrier than that. Eating enough food to qualify as “a meal” has a much higher threshold for them than other characters, and skipping a meal has much more severe consequences.
The “power” of a man-eater goes up with the severity of their weakness, and this is one of the most severe and punishing weaknesses out of all the playable monsters in Eureka. As you can see, man-eaters on the upper end of the scale can potentially drop dead from going, like, twelve hours without food.
Here’s the issue though. When first writing these, I considered the increased speed of the digestion to be a benefit offsetting the heavy penalties, since it dissolves evidence faster, but it might be the opposite. Because a man-eater having a full stomach like that means she automatically counts as having eaten a meal each time a meal time rolls around, she’s protected from the worst of the effects of the weakness. The faster she digests, though, the shorter the time she is protected from those effects and the shorter the time she can rely on a single oversized meal or victim.
I suspect that the higher metabolism severity levels will still see a lot of use even if they turn out to be sub-optimal in play, because I suspect around 60% or more of players that make man-eater investigators are playing that character because they wanna see her eat a lotta people, but if possible I’d like to avoid having one option that is just way way better than the others, especially if, like mentioned above, a lot of the people picking man-eater are probably gonna be doing it because they wanna see this chick swallow a half-dozen people alive. The ones that let her stomach stretch way more are gonna be the most fun to them.
Like I said in another post recently, character or strategy optimization is not the enemy of fun in games, “players optimizing the fun out of games” is a failure of game design.[1]
[1] within reason; if you have tens of thousands of people number-crunching to try and break the game like you do with tournament play in most games, even a super well-designed game will crack eventually.
As a game designer, you should design your game assuming that yes, obviously, players will want to win and will therefore will try to build optimal characters and use all the rules they can to their advantage, (and this is a good thing, it means that they are engaging deeply with the game mechanics you wrote!) so what you have to make sure of is that highly optimal strategies and character builds are also highly fun.
Of course, sub-optimal play for an intentional added challenge can also add fun to a game for many players, and Eureka knows this well, so again like I said near the beginning of the post, this may not be a huge problem, playtesting will probably have to be the thing that shows us whether this is a “problem” worth “fixing” or not.
But for playtesting to happen, people have gotta make man-eater characters and play them in-game and give us feedback. So go download Eureka: The Fanservice Files and show me the hungriest chick you can think of.
(Another thing I might consider to help differentiate the man-eater from just being a weaker gorgon is to maybe make them a bit more spry effectual even when they have a big meal in their stomachs, representing how they’re more, like, warm-blooded.)
Lots of pop culture fiction about the Middle Ages likes to tackle the concept of witch trials (even though that didn't even become a thing until the mid-1400s and didn't hit the stride we think of it with today until the 1600s) in one of three ways:
"actually they were really witches with magic powers! (Bad)"
"actually they were really witches with magic powers! (Good)"
"they weren't witches at all they were smart women of science more sophisticated and advanced than those STUPID inbred people could comprehend so they killed them because they thought that medicine was evil"
no they were just weird people. How do you treat weird people?
you can hit it raw, i’ve got an IED
I like the idea of killing a necromancer stopping his skeletons from attacking you not because a spells broken but because theyre not getting paid anymore
im pretty sure there are sapper tunnels under my walls
me when i find out a game has object physics
Eureka by @anim-ttrpgs is, unironically and importantly, great representation for women who have a lot of things wrong with them and are very difficult to be friends with or have around
no sales for 5 days..
Hey how’s it going? I like your tower, it’s very damp. The locusts are coming. It’s not my fault. Cool hat btw.
hey thanks, i really apprecia—wait what
some people just have no true appreciation for terrible women. oh she killed and ate people? well maybe she was hungry. "I cant defend her anymore-" well then fucking stand aside so i can talk to my client
I Had A Breakthrough On My Inventions. So I Get To Say Eureka