As we celebrate the passage of linear time once more I want to a share a quick development update with you all. The short version is: everything is moving forward and we remain on schedule for the Q3/Q4 fulfillment goal with all the additional stretch goal content.
Here's where things stand!
Artwork Art direction is complete and work is underway on the new illustrations coming to the book, including:
A weird and whimsical array of interior artwork througout the book
A new full page illustration for the chapter of ready to play disturbances by our guest writers
New art for each of the playbook, including the 3 new playbooks coming to (Meta)Physical Edition
Guest Disturbances Our guest writers have finalized their disturbance concepts and are off and writing! These disturbances will cover a range of different threat types, tones & influences, and playstyles for folks who are looking to pick up and play. I don't want to spoil anything, but I am very excited about what Elliot, Irving, Kendo, and Sam are cooking up for you all.
Miscellanous A few sundry updates:
Final playtesting for the three new playbooks - Animated, the Newcomer, and the Suit - is complete and feedback incorporated
While the world continues to spin off it's axis, as of this writing there are currently no new and unaccounted for tarriffs / production complexities that would pose an issue
Thank you for supporting Absurdia and I can't wait to conjure this book from the aether into our reality!
You don't have to stay here but you can't go home - today is the final day to back Absurdia!
I want to offer a tremendously surreal thank you to everyone who has pledged their support, helped spread the word, and generally just been psyched about this game. We unlocked our second and final stretch goal yesterday, which is genuinely more than I could have ever hoped for with my first crowdfunding campaign. It wouldn't have been possible without all of your support.
That means we're officially going to be making this book as weird and beautiful as it can possibly be, with even more absurd artwork from Kaylee and Ripley and a kaleidoscope of one shot scenarios from our incredible lineup of guest writers. If you've been holding out for Absurdia's apotheosis, now's the time to grab your copy.
The campaign officially ends tonight at midnight Eastern
The end is nigh, neighbors! The Absurdia crowdfunding campaign will come to a close this Friday, October 17th at midnight Eastern.
As of this writing we are less than $2,800 away from our second stretch goal of having some incredible guest writers create a strange and surreal assemblage of ready to play one shot scenarios to the game. It's an imminently achievable goal - so go back if you haven't yet and go tell your friends (& rivals) if you have!
A couple more updates as we head into the home stretch.
Two More Campaigns to Check Out
In the lead up to this campaign I reached out to quite a few folks in the TTRPG industry on how best to prepare for my first crowdfunding campaign. Few were more helpful or supportive than the team at Plus One Experience. This campaign wouldn’t be where it is now without their help.
As luck and good timing would have it, I have a chance to return the favor. Plus One EXP is partnering with two indie designers on a pair of very rad, very Absurdia-adjacent games that just launched on Backerkit. I’ve backed them both and I highly recommend checking them out!
Black Flies is a hidden objective roleplaying game where you play as the villains in your own horror story. It's a GM-less, rules-lite game where you can join a cult, gather followers, and - most importantly - go full Kafka and turn townsfolk into flies.
The CryptID Show is a storytelling game of call-in shows and cryptids woes. Host and Caller sculpt bite-sized stories of the bizarrely sweet, the hauntingly esoteric, and the just plain weird, all in the form of a live call-in show.
The Quinn Majeski Playbook
The timing didn't quite work out to announce it here, but over on Bluesky I promised that if we reached 400 backers, I would release the joke playbook I made a while back about playing me, Quinn Majeski, trapped inside my own game.
Well, we did it gamers. Over the weekend we passed 400 backers. So I’m - not proud exactly, but something pride adjacent - to present: The Quinn Majeski playbook.
Meta! Self Indulgent! Absurd!
Is it ridiculous and borderline unplayable? Yes. Does anyone actually want to play it? Unclear. Does it allow you to Jumanji into the game wearing a metaphorical Quinn skin suit? Absolutely.
It’s time for another behind the scenes look at Absurdia! While “Creating Absurdity” narrowly prevailed at the polls, a deep dive on the game’s playbooks was a close second - so let’s get into it!
The Playbooks
The (Meta)Physical Edition of Absurdia will feature 12 playbooks in total, including three brand new additions (👁️). Drawing on a range of absurd archetypes from the game’s classic and contemporary touchstones, the playbooks are:
The Animated 👁️: An inhuman object or entity bestowed with spontaneous sentience. The Animated is fully at home amidst the town’s strangeness, immune to the enervating forces of entropy and equipped with an array of peculiar skills. Touchstones include the Cheshire Cat (Alice in Wonderland), BMO (Adventure Time), .GIFfany (Gravity Falls), and Specimen 34 (Wolf 359)
The Bureaumancer: A practitioner of the Bureaucracy’s byzantine arcana. The Bureaumancer excels at containing dangerous situations through careful planning, eldritch talent, and shifting responsibility. Touchstones include A Vague Yet Menacing Government Agency (Welcome to Nightvale), Probabilitor (Gravity Falls), Hermes Conrad (Futurama), and the absurd bureaucracy of Discworld.
The Curio: A collector and purveyor of powerful and peculiar eldritch objects. The Curio possesses a range of strange abilities granted by their items along with an unnatural surplus of charisma and salesmanship. Touchstones include Stan Pines (Gravity Falls), The Cat (Infinity Train), Leland Gaunt (Needful Things), and Mr. Dark (Something Wicked This Way Comes).
The Forgotten Vessel: Formerly a powerful and terrifying avatar of entropy abandoned by the entropic horror that once possessed them. The Forgotten Vessel excels at bending chaos to their will, though trust from the town’s factions will be hard-earned. Touchstones include Bill Cypher and his various vessels (Gravity Falls), John Peters [you know, the farmer?] and the Glow Cloud [all hail] (Welcome to Nightvale), Isabel Lovelace (Wolf 359), and Debbie (King Falls).
The Newcomer 👁️: A fresh face in an absurd world, The Newcomer gets by on a combination of disbelief, prey animal skittishness, and the celebrity appeal of being new to town. It's only a matter of time before the town claims them as one of its own though. Touchstones include Alice (Alice in Wonderland), Dorothy (The Wizard of Oz), and early series Carlos the Scientist (Welcome to Night Vale).
The Paradox: A mockery of continuity and linearity unmoored from the normal passage of time. The Paradox wields the past and future as their weapons, skipping across time to avoid danger and engage their opponents. Touchstones include The Traveler (Welcome to Nightvale), Billy Pilgrim (Slaughterhouse Five), The Time Anomaly Removal Crew (Gravity Falls), and John Eggbert (Homestuck).
The Rascal: A mischievous youth whose boundless imagination is capable of wreaking absolute havoc. The Rascal is great at causing and escaping trouble, though they can be fragile when it comes to combat. Touchstones include Dipper and Mabel Pines (Gravity Falls), MT (Infinity Train), and Peter Pan (Peter Pan).
The Scrapper: A resourceful, clever, and reckless tinkerer, often underestimated due to their eccentricities. The Scrapper specializes in creative problem solving and hard-hitting robotics. Touchstones include Old Man McGucket (Gravity Falls), Carlos the Scientist (Welcome to Nightvale), Tulip Olsen (Infinity Train), and Rick Sanchez (Rick & Morty).
The Suit 👁️: A sartorial incarnation of municipal justice. The Suit is the living (?) embodiment of a faceless bureaucrat, relentless in their commitment to upholding a particular section of the town’s bizarre municipal code. Touchstones include The Sheriff's Secret Police (Welcome to Night Vale), The Man in the Tan Jacket (Welcome to Night Vale), The Dark Clerks (Discworld), and The Spooks (American Gods).
The Void Archivist: A collector and curator of the memories held within the empty tomes of the Archive. The Void Archivist is an erudite scholar of entropy, able to collect and recall others’ memories. Touchstones include the Society of the Blind Eye (Gravity Falls), the Librarians (The Magicians), and Mr. Quint (The Twilight Zone).
The Vox: An intrepid community radio host determined to make sense of the bizarre happenings in town. The Vox is adept at investigating, gathering information, and drawing strength from the “ordinary” elements of the town. Touchstones include Cecil Gershwin Palmer (Welcome to Night Vale), Sammy Stevens (King Falls), and Douglas Eifel (Wolf 359).
The Zeitgeist: A collective consciousness inhabiting several human bodies, united by a common purpose. The Zeitgeist is physically and mentally durable, possessing a number of unique skills and strengths owing to their amalgamated nature. Touchstones include Troy Walsh (Welcome to Nightvale), Unity (Rick & Morty), Gestalt (Rook), and Sensates (Sense8).
Playsheet Preview & Walkthrough
Let’s take a closer look at how the playbooks operate. Below is the playsheet for one of the most iconic archetypes of absurdist media: The Vox.
The first page of the playsheet shows the “play” information - what you need readily available during a session of play. At the top, we can see the four character ratings - Cheek, Wits, Pluck, and Chaos - along with their corresponding basic moves. As with most Powered by the Apocalypse games, you add or subtract these ratings whenever you roll one of the basic moves.
Each playbook also has its own unique Essence - the specific reservoir of strength that allows that character to stand tall in the face of the town’s relentless chaos and entropy. Essence can be used to power certain playbooks moves, push yourself to roll additional dice on basic moves, or avoid catastrophic harm from the town’s myriad terrors. Running out of Essence will result in a lasting Fracture to your character - too many of which will lead to a messy or fatal retirement - but each playbook also has a unique condition allowing them to reclaim their lost Essence.
Rounding out the front side are the playbook moves, covering a wide assortment of strange, surreal, and outright absurd abilities. Characters generally start with three playbook moves, some of which are selected by default to represent integral facets of the archetype. The playbook’s starting gear is also listed on the righthand side.
The second page shows the “narrative” information of the playbook, including character background and worldbuilding. The left column offers suggestions for descriptors, playbook related background questions, and agendas that represent the playbook’s goals and ideals (and opportunities for experience). The middle column establishes your character’s key relationships to other player characters, NPCs, and factions in town - offering a built in opportunity for collaborative setting- and world-building. Finally, the right column shows options for advancement after gaining enough experience to level up.
Heading into the Home Stretch
We are just shy of one week left in the campaign! We already unlocked our first stretch goal to add additional artwork and are gaining ground on our second goal to bring some incredibly talented guest writers on board the project. If you’ve been sitting on the (upside down, non-euclidean, white picket) fence - now’s a great time to back!
I'm beyond excited to announce the guest writers for our second stretch goal! At $25k, this talented cabal of authors, game designers, and storytellers will put together a harlequin kaleidoscope of ready to play one shot scenarios for Absurdia.
Elliot Davis, aka "moreblueberries", is a Brooklyn-based game designer, podcaster, and artist who loves all things weird and wonderful about the TTRPG industry. He is known for such releases as Project ECCO, Rom Com Drama Bomb, and the upcoming The Time We Have. When he's not losing sleep over a new game idea you can hear him play, host, GM, and more on the podcasts My First Dungeon and Talk of the Table which he produces as part of the Many Sided Media team.
Irving Benitez (he/him) AKA Jellyfishlines, is a queer, trans masculine, multi-disabled, and Mad CRiT Award nominated TTRPG designer, Actual Play Game Master, podcast host and co-host, performer, and poetry writer from the Appalachian region of NE Ohio. You can find his works at jellyfishlines.carrd.co, and you can find him at home under the Camperdown Elm tree covered in words and wishes of others.
Kendrick/Kendo (any/all) is an award-winning digital storyteller known best for her work on the actual play podcast Tales Yet Told, where he facilitates stories at the intersection of queerness and horror using indie TTRPGs. They've been telling stories for as long as they can remember and take immense pride in the opportunities they've had to share their stories with the world. Aside from producing actual plays, Kendo is also a TTRPG performer, a game designer, filmmaker, video editor, and an improv comedian. For their day job, Kendo serves as the Media Production Manager for Kobold Press, where they spend their time discussing the joy of TTRPGs and how players can maximize their gaming experience.
Samantha Leigh (they/she) is a tabletop RPG designer from Virginia. They are they owner of Blinking Birch Games and have published titles such as Anamnesis and Death of the Author. They've been a fan of absurdist humor since listening to Welcome to Night Vale in high school, and have published their own absurdist game, Outliers. Sam has also written for many other RPGs, including Cloud Empress, The Zone, and ECO MOFOS.
