About us
The Agency of Narrative Intrigue and Mystery, or A.N.I.M. for short, is a small independant LLC dedicated primarily to the creation of table-top role-playing games, or TTRPGs, as well as pre-written adventure modules to go along with them. We also have plans to publish narrative fiction in the future.
Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy (Most up-to-date full prerelease version available through Patreon link below!), free March 7th, 2024 shareware/demo version here!)
The Kickstarter page for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is now set up, and the crowdfunding campaign will be launching on April 10th, 2024! Check out the Preview Page for the best look at what Eureka actually is!
The free shareware version of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy includes the entire rulebook up to March 7th, 2024, everything you might need to play a full campaign, as well as blank character sheets, four pregenerated playable characters, and an a starter adventure module where the protagonists will solve a "murder" at a haunted house on Halloween. Download it all for free from the link above, and have fun! This is an awful lot for us to give out for free, so if you enjoy it, please consider supporting us on Patreon to get more updated, polished versions of the full prerelease rulebook, two additional horror adventure modules, and a collection of short stories and a novella set in the world of Eureka; and/or consider backing us on Kickstarter on April 10th, 2024!
You can now buy A.N.I.M. and Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy merchandise!
Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is our main project at the moment. It’s an original rules-medium 2D6 system for investigation-oriented adventures in any time period between about 1850 and the present day, with a bit of a supernatural twist. It’s made to be partially setting agnostic, able to run just about any adventure that isn’t based entirely around combat, and even effortlessly run adventure modules from other systems. There are many unique things about Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy. You can check out our tumblr page below for more details since we've been posting about it for months. If you aren't interested in that, though, instead, I’ll just rapid fire off a few: A unique approach to investigation that builds up points with each roll even if the roll fails, and with enough points a previously failed investigation roll can be retroactively turned into a success, resulting in a ‘eureka moment’ where certain pieces of the mystery finally fall into place. Fast, but deep and realistic combat, with a lot of strategy based more around the environment and positioning than use of special abilities; guns will typically take a target down in one shot, so keep your head down—or better yet just don’t get shot at in the first place if you value your life.
Freeform character creation where you can easily make either a normal person or a supernatural creature of the night without being constrained and forced to compromise by the system—so long as the monsters adhere to a few basic rules: They must be able to pass for human at a glance, they must have some supernatural weaknesses that don’t just apply to combat, and they must feed on people in some way. There is also the option to make a much less powerful supernatural character that doesn’t have to worry much about weaknesses or eating people, but they won’t be the combat powerhouses they the monsters tend to be. As combat is not the main focus of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, though, having some characters be more powerful in combat than others does not mean those weaker characters never get their time to shine.
Unique roleplay mechanics where supernatural PCs must hide their true natures from not only society at large, but the party and even the players at the table as well. Even if you’re on the same side, it’s usually best not to tell your teammates that you’re an eight-hundred-year-old vampire. They’ll start asking uncomfortable questions like “Where are the neighbors?” "Did you drain that guy whose body they found on the news?" That’s between you, your PC, and the GM only.
Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy takes inspiration from many other games, including Monster of the Week—though in Monster of the Week’s case, that “inspiration” often took the form of doing the opposite of what Monster of the Week does, because we actually found MotW far too restrictive and limiting in its character creation and other elements for the kind of game we wanted to play—but also Call of Cthulhu, Trail of Cthulhu, Gumshoe, Shadowrun, AD&D2e, etc, both in the “do what they do” and “do the opposite of what they do” sense. In fact, if your TTRPG doesn’t take inspiration from a good number of other TTRPGs, that’s probably a pretty bad sign!
Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy also takes a great deal of inspiration from non-TTRPG sources, some of which are probably pretty obvious and some of which might surprise you, such as Blood(1997) and Warhammer 40,000(the tabletop wargame specifically, not so much the lore). Other inspirations include but are not limited to: Kolchak: The Nightstalker, The X-Files, XCOM(the reboots, not so much the originals), Columbo, John Woo films such as Hardboiled, Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, Scooby-doo, and too many horror movies and noir thrillers to list.
Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is coming to Kickstarter in early 2024, and the core rules can be downloaded now with a $5 subscription to our Patreon below. Follow our tumblr blog for more information and updates.
We are Running a TTRPG Book Club! It's Free!
We’re running a club that treats (indie) TTRPG-playing like a book club! There’s a nomination period for RPGs, then a vote to decide which RPG we play, then scheduling discussion, then everyone who can make it(we may split up among multiple groups depending on the number of sign-ups) plays the same adventure with the same RPG(usually a 1-2 session adventure, 3 sessions if it has to go on longer), then we discuss it. Then, repeat.
The purpose of the club is to play indie tabletop role-playing games, including but not limited to A.N.I.M.'s games, bringing new games to people’s attention and getting to experience how those games work in practice. It’s an encouragement to step out of your comfort zone and try new games with enthusiastic people who love them, and even step out of your comfort zone and learn how to GM a game if you’ve never done it. The way we set up the structure of the club makes it very easy, forgiving, and supportive for GMs even when playing a game they’ve never played before—it’s really not as hard as it seems, especially since we use adventure modules, the greatest GM tool ever devised!
You can join up using the Discord invite link here! (This is not the same Discord server as the A.N.I.M. Patreon Discord Server, this RPG Book Club server is free!)
Support Us
Support us on Patreon for perks such as access to the official A.N.I.M. Community Discord Server, the ability to vote on what projects you would like to see us tackle next, and downloadable versions of our in-progress projects! Currently, being a $5 supporter of our Patreon will get you access to a fully playable copy of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, plus three fully playable prewritten adventure modules! If you would rather make your support a one-time thing, we hugely appreciate that too. You can support us on Ko-fi! This support is helping us get off the ground as a fledgling independent TTRPG design company, and handle the many fees associated with that.
Support us on our Patreon!
Support us on our Ko-fi!
Contact Us
You can reach us by e-mail at anim.contactus@gmail.com.
Follow our Tumblr for updates and information about our projects!
Find us on itch.io too!
Check out our Youtube Channel!