Composure, Tiers of Fear, and Monsters in Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy
Time to make another post about a cool mechanic in Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, this time about Composure, a mechanic that has actually been mentioned a bunch of our other posts because it interacts with a lot of other mechanics, but hasn’t gotten its own post. Hopefully this will make all those other posts make a lot more sense.
So, every PC in Eureka has a Composure of 7. Think of Composure as kind of an emotional HP, though it is not ‘sanity’. Composure loss represents stress, fear, fatigue, and anything else that can make people not quite work at their peak performance.
Here’s how that works:
Normally, a character’s base stats for any skill max out at +3. +3 in Eureka is actually a very good modifier and will make the roll very very likely to succeed, and it represents expertise in the subject of the skill in question.
Composure, however, caps those skills. If a PC has 7/7 Composure, they’re fine, and their skills are unaffected. But a base skill modifier(the modifier that comes from putting skill points into a skill) can never be higher than the level of a PC’s current Composure. So if a PC has only 2/7 Composure, then that +3 becomes a +2. Skills that were already +2 are unaffected, but the PC now can’t make use of the full extent of their skill. Their hands are shaking, sweat is dripping in their eyes, they’re tired, and they’re more likely to mess up because of all this. At 1/7 Composure, their skills max out at +1, and at 0/7 Composure, their skills max out at +0. Thankfully, Composure cannot go into the negatives, but having +0s at best for all rolls is pretty bad.
There are ways to get around the Composure cap, but I’m not going to get into that for the sake of simplicity. You can find the full rules explanation for free in the shareware version of the rulebook on our website.
One way that PCs lose Composure is by making Composure Rolls whenever they encounter something particularly threatening. Failing these rolls takes away Composure. The modifier for these rolls is dictated by their Tiers of Fear.
-3 Horrific: -2 Terrifying: -1 Frightening: 0 Unnerving: +1 Creepy: +2 Obnoxious: +3 Ridiculous:
Tiers of Fear is a little chart on the character sheet that tells you how scared they are of certain things. There are mandatory Fears that must go on this chart, such as gunfighting, but players can also add their own.
What is “horrifying” and what is “ridiculous” varies from person to person. For example, an adventurous whip-swinging college professor who brawls with Nazis on a seemingly regular basis might consider a fistfight Obnoxious and a shootout Unnerving at worst, but any kind of snake is firmly in the realm of Terrifying or worse.
Whip-slinging Archaeologist Example Tiers of Fear -3 Horrific: Snakes -2 Terrifying: -1 Frightening: Monster +0 Unnerving: Witchcraft/Magic, Gunfight, Blood/Gore, Death, Corpse +1 Creepy: Arachnids +2 Obnoxious: Extreme Heights +3 Ridiculous: Fistfight, Melee Weapon Fight
So when gun combat starts, the PCs must first make a Composure Roll with a modifier based on how much they fear getting shot at. A worse modifier, obviously, makes it more likely they will lose Composure points.
There are also ways to lose a flat amount of Composure points, such as by skipping a meal or staying up all night, and ways to restore Composure points, such as eating 3 meals a day and getting a full night of sleep(resulting in a restoration of 2 Composure points a day.) Composure points can also be restored by the PCs comforting each other. See the rulebook for the full rules.
Here’s where it gets really interesting, though.
PCs that are literally Monsters.
Monsters are not limited to +3 in Skills, they’re supernaturally powerful, certain skills can go up to +6 or sometimes even higher. (They can still only put 3 skill points into a skill though. See the full rulebook for rules on how to make a monster PC.) link
Because their skills can go so high, they obviously start feeling the effects of the Composure cap a lot sooner, but for a lot of types of monsters, the way they gain and lose Composure is very different. Vampires, obviously, do not fear guns very much, nor do they have to worry about eating normal food or getting a good night’s sleep. This means that while their opportunities to lose Composure are fewer, they also have fewer ways to gain it… that’s where the part about eating people comes in.
Monsters eat people to restore composure. Not every monster literally “eats” people, but you get the idea. They hunt people and do their thing, or else, organically by the way Composure works, their supernatural powers will start to wane. This gives monster PCs a choice: Do they eat innocent bystanders to keep their strength at its peak, or do they let themselves wither and soldier on weak and helpless in the hopes of sparing more lives?
Note: No, you cannot just eat “bad people” who “deserve” to be eaten. If you have enough time, foresight, and detective skills to effectively and consistently determine if every meal is a “bad person” that “deserves” to die, why haven’t you already solved the whole mystery by yourself then, hotshot? Engaging in one’s True Nature may be a necessity for continued existence, but do not pretend this is an act of heroism.
