Design Diary - ABODE 2e & the RPTree Creator Kit

Design Diary - ABODE 2e & the RPTree Creator Kit

21 October 2024

Super TLDR: Earlier this month I released a new game, ABODE 2e, as well as the RPTree Creator Kit! Check them out on itch.io!

On October 23rd 2023, I released ABODE 1st Edition, a gothic horror TTRPG where you build out a family tree through a series of scenes. At the start of that month I had no plans to release a game for Halloween, but in mid-October I had a brainwave for this game and I just went completely tunnel vision-mode and banged it out in a day. I spent the next couple days working on playtests, layout, the cover, internal art and a particularly out-of-place diagram, all in a mad rush to get the game out in time for Halloween.

I was decently happy with the end product. But as soon as I released it, I knew I wanted to stew on it for a year and release it again for Halloween 2024. So here we are! On October 1st 2024, ABODE 2e was released! I’m much happier with this version of the game, thanks to the new rules, new art and new layout! 

In this issue of Design Diary, I want to go behind the scenes on the creation of ABODE 2e, talk about the differences between the two editions, and touch on my new SRD for anyone who wants to make a similar game: the RPTree Creator Kit!

Inspirations

If I had to place one piece of media as the major inspiration for ABODE, it would be Mike Flanagan’s series ‘The Haunting of Hill House’. Themes of generational trauma and being unable to escape the house are central to the series, as well as many of the games of ABODE that I’ve played. I’m particularly fond of the subtle ways that Flanagan builds up the ghostly presence throughout the series, including ghostly figures in the backgrounds of shots and fakeout scares that aren’t actually supernatural. I did a similar thing by including supernatural themes in the list of traits. They exist as a background element, which you only engage with when you want to.

While writing the game, I also returned to the movie ‘Crimson Peak’ by Guillermo del Toro and ‘Ghost Quartet’, a song cycle about death and stories that features Edgar Allen Poe’s Usher Family, among other things. All of this media is referenced in the examples for family names or character names.

I also reference the Addams Family in the family name examples. While I was never particularly channelling their energy while making the game, I liked the idea of playing a tragicomedy or a comedically devilish family, so I wanted to offer that as an alternative tone for your story.

Mechanically, the game is heavily inspired by Microscope, with its GMless, question-driven scenes; and Fiasco, with character relationships made between players sat next to each other.

Process

This was my first time making a 2nd edition for a game, and it’s been a really interesting experience! It’s been fun trying to get back into the headspace I was in nearly a year ago and revisit old ideas with new perspectives.

When I posted ABODE 1e for feedback in the Brain Trust podcast’s Discord, the amazing Will Jobst gave me some great suggestions that I wanted to keep in mind for the 2nd Edition: including getting more uses out of the playing cards and improving the final scene.

I completely agreed that the card mechanic felt like it could do more, and I spent ages toying with different ways to make that happen. Ultimately they all felt disinteresting or forced. That was when I realised I could take the cards out completely.

In the year since I released ABODE, I’ve gotten more and more interested in randomless  design, thanks in major parts to Microscope, Wanderhome and the works of Eilonwy and the Randomless Renaissance. This inspired me to take a completely new perspective on the game, stripping it of some previously-central mechanics to create a more streamlined experience.

The final scene was also massively improved. When I wrote ABODE 1e, I really liked the idea of every game culminating in a scene with the question “Why was this the worst day in family history?” But it ended up feeling more restrictive than if I’d just let players come up with their own final question. The original question still survives in the examples, joined by other options that give players more choice for how their story ends.

In ABODE 1e, I mainly put the GM role in as a buffer to stop incestuous circles in the family tree. But in practice, the GM rarely contributed much to the story, since each scene was already guided by a question. Once I removed the random relationships, it left the GM role with very little reason to be in the game at all, so I decided to make the game GMless too.

Making the game randomless and GMless were both huge changes that breathed a lot of new life into the game. It frees players up to tell the story they want, while sticking true to my original vision for the game. Each game of ABODE still ends with the players having an artefact of play (the family tree), which is the most important thing to me.

All of this stuff about randomless and GMless design applies just as much to the RPTree Creator Kit as it does to ABODE. The Creator Kit is part SRD, part advice blog for anyone looking to make their own games built on ABODE. These games are identified as being “a branch on the RPTree,” and the creator kit comes with a couple of images that you can use to identify your game as part of the RPTree family. If you make an RPTree game, let me know on social media!

What Next?

I have a couple ideas for what I want to make next! I’m big into games about ghosts right now and have 2 more ideas that I want to explore: Dewin, a game about Welsh ghostlore, has changed a lot since I teased it in my review of The Folklore of Wales: Ghosts, it’s now going to be a 2-player game with 1 GM and 1 player, hugely inspired by Godkiller by Connie Chang, which I completely fell in love with after watching Transplanar RPG’s actual play series. My other ghost game is titled “Where Dead Once Roamed”, and it is about exploring haunted ruins and gathering the stories of the people who lived there.

Ghosts aside, I’m also making a randomless solo board game, and hopefully doing some interesting things with tabletop AI, a topic I’m endlessly interested in. It’s still unnamed, but I’m going to start playtesting a demo version soon, so fingers crossed it all goes well!