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Absurdia: The (Meta)Physical Edition

Created by Quinn Majeski

An absurdist tabletop roleplaying game about the inane hilarity and mundane horror of everyday life, inspired by Welcome to Night Vale, Alice in Wonderland, and Gravity Falls.

Latest Updates from Our Project:

Behind the Scenes: The Playbooks
10 months ago – Thu, Oct 09, 2025 at 11:52:59 AM

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!

Stretch Goal Preview: The Guest Writers!
10 months ago – Mon, Oct 06, 2025 at 09:11:37 AM

Hello Absurdians!

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.

Behind the Scenes: Creating Absurdity at the Table
10 months ago – Tue, Sep 30, 2025 at 06:04:59 AM

With "Creating Absurdity" narrowly prevailing in our municipal ballot measure Behind the Scenes poll last week, today we have our first design deep dive on how Absurdia helps both players and GMs set the tone of weirdness and whimsy at the table.

Embracing Chaos - The Player's Perspective (or: Yes, It's Okay to Go Off the Rails)

Absurdia is designed to be, inherently, pretty absurd.

Powered by the Apocalypse games are at their strongest when the mechanics are rooted in a clearly defined genre, and Absurdia is no exception. Absurdia's ratings, basic moves, factions, and other core gameplay mechanics are all intentionally designed to emulate the hallmarks of classic and contemporary absurdist media.

The basic move Embrace Chaos is a good example of this (yes I'm sneaking a little bit of rules and mechanics into the creating absurdity post). You roll to Embrace Chaos when you contend with a source of entropic power - any overtly absurd or surreal element in town. While there are a handful of straightforward, mechanical outcomes available to the player on a hit (heal or inflict harm, recover essence), most options focus on influencing the "effect" of the otherworldly entity or phenomenon you're engaging with - encouraging the player to amplify or reimagine the absurdity of the town in new and strange ways.

As an example, let's say that you've just managed to leap atop the Quantum Bus: a temporally untethered bit of public transit that, because it is simultaneously late, early, and on time until it reaches an actual bus stop, is constantly skipping back and forth through time along its manifold routes. On a successful roll to Embrace Chaos, you might choose to "quell the effect" in order to temporarily fix its position in spacetime, "fan its flames" to send it careening way forward or backward on the route, or "subvert the power's effect" to skitch on the back and catapult yourself out of (or into) danger.

These structural design elements are further reinforced by the game's selection of playbooks (more on these in next week's update). The archetypes are drawn from touchstones across classic and contemporary works of absurdism. The introductory questions, agendas, and "Around Town" worldbuilding gently take your hand and invite you to step through the looking glass. Playbook moves empower players to do ridiculous, improbable, and unnatural things like call your shot across the timestream (Paradox), conjure an imaginary friend to defend you (Rascal), or retroactively be best friends with anyone in town (Vox).

All of these narrative and mechanical design choices are intended to reinforce a central theme for the players: it's okay to go off the rails. All those zany ideas and goofy bits that play culture in most TTRPGs tries to gently shepherd you away from? Absurdia invites you to embrace them - because that's where the absurdity is.

Every TTRPG player I've ever known - from the most narrative-focused story gamer to the most combat-focused power gamer - has SO MUCH absurd, chaotic, creative energy bottled up in their brains. The most important thing Absurdia does, from the player's perspective, is give you a license to set it free.

Subverting Normalcy - The GM's Perspective (or: There are Absurdities Everywhere for Those with Eyes to See)

I led with the player's perspective here because collaborative storytelling is an integral aspect of Absurdia, but I know why you're here. 

You want to run a weird game.

As with many Powered by the Apocalypse games, the GM section of Absurdia is organized around a set of agendas, principles and moves. While these cover a range of tools and tips for running the game, there are a suite that focus exclusively on the topic of creating absurdity at the table.

I won't be covering every detail here (gotta leave something for the book), but here are a few of the most important tools in the GM's toolbox:

Make the Surreal Ordinary and the Ordinary Horrifying
The key to absurdity is subverting expectations of normalcy. When you paint the world, treat the inexplicable, otherworldly, and unsettling elements as banal and pedestrian. No one bats an eye when the sidewalk swallows someone whole or the moon berates people on their evening walks; it’s commonplace, scarcely worth commenting on. 

The mundane aspects of our daily lives, meanwhile, are the town’s true terrors. Vehicles are vicious predators that stalk the streets at night. Trash collection is a harrowing tide that sweeps up anyone in its path. The HOA is a megalomaniacal hive mind. CrossFit is a literal cult. By turning these run-of-the-mill experiences into the horrors of the game, you flip the concept of “ordinary” on its head.

Embrace (and Mock) the Absurdity of Everyday Life
If you're struggling to come up with an absurd threat, disturbance, or setting element as the GM, you really don't need to look far. The world is chalk full of absurdities.

Go for a walk or drive around your nearest suburb, read a small town blog or newspaper, or (if you can stomach it) check out the neighborhood Facebook or NextDoor page. From strange traditions to urban legends to small town politics, these locales are rife with stories as head-scratching as they are laughable. Use these real world absurdities as the building blocks for your surreal threats and disturbances.

Embrace the Whispers of Chaos
As mentioned in the player section, Absurdia is designed to be a highly collaborative game. As a GM, the greatest reservoir of absurdism you have available to you are the people sitting around the table; your very own Whispers of Chaos.

Did someone crack a silly joke that has the whole table in stitches? Write that one down asap - you may have just stumbled into a threat for your next disturbance. Struggling to come up with a complication or consequence when someone beefs it on a roll? Open it up to the table. I promise you that someone has a ridiculous, hilarious, off the wall idea percolating that they'd be thrilled to share.

Absurdia is uniquely suited to collaborative improvisation and emergent storytelling. In a town where everything is upside down, there's no reason to limit yourself to just your own imagination.

That's All Folks

This post turned out to be a lot longer than I expected! Thank you for coming to my TED talk apparently. Tune in next week for our next Behind the Scenes post diving into Absurdia's playbooks!

- Quinn

More Actual Plays + Behind the Scenes Poll
10 months ago – Wed, Sep 24, 2025 at 06:04:25 AM

More Actual Plays

Good news for all you AP fiends out there - there are two new Absurdia actual plays to check out!

First, over on my podcast Monster Hour we just released a playtest of the three new playbooks coming to the (Meta)Physical Edition: The Animated, an everyday object bestowed with spontaneous sentience; The Newcomer, a fresh face to the town's absurdities; and The Suit, a sartorial embodiment of municipal justice. If you've been itching to learn more about what's lying in wait in the liminal space just beyond the horizon, look no further 👁️

Second, for those of you who prefer live streamed games, the fabulous folks at Game Master Monday are hosting an Absurdia mini series that will be airing weekly for the rest of the campaign. The first episode is TONIGHT at 5PM PT over on the GMM Twitch channel!

Poll: A Peak Behind the Scenes

For our next update, I want to know what you'd like to see! Help decide what "Behind the Scenes" look at Absurdia will be in our next update by casting your votes below.

  • Rules & Mechanics: An overview of Absurdia's design philosophy and gameplay mechanics
  • Playbooks: A deeper dive into the game's twelve absurd archetypes
  • Creating Absurdity: Tools and tricks for bringing the absurd vibes to your table

I'll share an update on the most popular choice next week. Stay tuned 👁️

- Quinn

Stretch Goal Preview: Interior Artwork
10 months ago – Mon, Sep 22, 2025 at 06:46:14 AM

Hello Absurdians! Now that we have successfully funded I want to do a little preview of our first stretch goal: expanded interior artwork.

Absurdia is already bestowed with both beautiful full page illustrations by lead artist Kaylee Rowena, and little absurd morsels sprinkled throughout the text by graphic designer Jon Merchant. Nevertheless, there's space throughout the book where the vibe could undoubtedly be just a little bit weirder.

At $15k, I've invited Kaylee and the surreally talented Ripley Ash to find their favorite lonely margins and empty spaces of the book and haunt them with absurd ephemera and vignettes that will immerse readers of the book into the surreal, whimsical, and terrifying world of Absurdia.
 
Ripley is NYC-based illustrator who draws inspiration from the everyday glitter, neon and grime from the city. They love bright colors, horror movies, looking for the unsettling in beautiful things & looking for ways to make the unsettling beautiful - which is pretty much the whole vibe of Absurdia in a nutshell. Here's a little peak from their portfolio of what you can look forward to:



If you've taken a stroll through the campaign page you're already familiar with Kaylee's work, but I'd never miss a chance to show how absolutely rad it is:


We're less than a week into the campaign and already more than halfway to our goal of leting these two incredible artists run amok through the pages. Let's make it happen!

- Quinn