Abeo Lite
Everything you think you know is a lie.
There’s a larger, deadlier place lurking behind the file cabinets, closet doors and televisions we’ve built to shut it out. There are lovely, dangerous things waiting for you, if you would only step off the edge and into their arms.
Nightmares, dwellers at the crossroads, succubi, vampires and a million other creatures are hungry. You know; you’re becoming one of them.
Welcome to Abeo.
Set in a modern world very much like ours, this pen-and-paper RPG blurs the line between the hunter and the hunted as characters not only run from or battle the creatures of the night, but slowly become them as they cultivate and warp madness into power.
Step into the world on the other side of sanity, meeting creatures out of your darkest nightmares and most private dreams.
Grasp and twist your mind, choosing from over a hundred Pathos & powers that allow you to create change in the world by driving yourself further into passionate delirium. Unbound by the laws of the sane world, soar through city skies, destroy your enemies, or travel across continents in a step.
Abeo Lite includes a fully functional version of the game with everything you need to play. You can pickup a full version from Insomnium Games complete with artwork and an index.
Introduction
The World of Fear and Wonder
The lever, the winch and the wheel are not the beginning and the end of the mechanisms of creation; they are only the simplest solution. Society, industry and interaction are poorly suited to deal with a world where cause and effect are not laws, but suggestions. In Abeo, this stranger, more fluid world is the truer one. There are no rules when the dreams we have with our eyes closed are just as real as the ones we share with them open. We are encouraged to forget the fey lands of our most private hopes and fears, paying attention instead to the monsters that lurk in alleyways, crackhouses, congress and corporate boardrooms. There are rules for dealing with these horrors, and though we groan under their weight, we can bear their finite power.
Unfortunately, there are monsters other than the mundane ones, and it doesn’t take much to see them. Today, a woman was found gruesomely murdered in a room locked from the inside. Last week a man burst into flame in an enclosed office. There is no conspiracy to hide these facts from the average man on the street; he does enough of the job himself. Human torches and phantom murders just don’t fit into the supremely defined cosmos of his belief.
Belief in the absence of proof is faith. Belief in direct contradiction to proof is dangerous. In Abeo, you play one of those remarkable people who have taken a mad step, removing themselves from the danger of ignorance and placing themselves squarely in danger of knowing entirely too much.
Reason defines the Phenomenal world, but emotion taps into the Noumenal world and breaks it. Love does indeed conquer all, but so does hate. And fear. Fervor does more than motivate, it directly affects the world, removing the veils of apathy and illusion; fueling the ghost in the machine of causality. The vehement see that the world operates by the rules of irony, poetry, and passion as much, if not more than it does by those of gravity, electromagnetism, and the nuclear forces. It is only through a lateral shift in perception that characters are able to do what they had previously thought impossible. One must become insane to become free; to walk on water, you have to jump out of your boat.
Characters in Abeo find themselves shuttling between a banal but safe world defined by its objectivity and predictability, and a beautiful but deadly one bound only by Passion. Faced with both Phenomenal and Noumenal challenges continuously, these individuals often find themselves sliding into a particular kind of adaptive madness?a madness that
simultaneously grants the character the power he needs to survive and drives him farther away from the relationships and identity that he spent his life forming. These characters are called Liminal in Abeo, and an endless number of other names within the world the game defines. Those few who know enough to call them anything may understand them to be sorcerers, angels, monsters, demons or simply family members slipping away, bit by impossible bit.
Abeo is a game. While not real, it contains many of the elements of the world as we know it. Or perhaps more accurately, as we think we know it. No longer able to content themselves with sitcoms, political speeches, and student loan bills, they find themselves thrust into a world where their every adversary is capable of breaking all the rules. Maybe, if he survives, he will learn how to break them, too.
- Abeo_Lite.pdf
Download
Tags: Chuck Lauer, Jennifer Reynolds
