Abalastow Compendium: A Guide to Exploring Reality

Welcome! This page is about my upcoming game, Abalastow Compendium. Within a day or three I'll be posting an "alpha version" of it, for general consumption, released under a Creative Commons license. So, what is Abalastow Compendium?

Abalastow Compendium is possibly many things to many people, but first and foremost, it is a game. The "board" is anywhere that's accessible to you, and the characters are the real people you have playing with you. The objective is to broaden your experiences, and just plain have a lot of fun. It works like this:

First, through some random method, you select a Party Leader. They're the person in charge of the quest, and have a final say in any major decisions regarding it. Then, a quest is randomly determined by rolling a 30-sided dice on a very large set of tables, with quests involving pretty much anything. Once a quest is determined, as long as it's not something that one of the party members morally objects to, the Party must sally forth and attempt to complete the Quest, in whatever way amuses them most.

Most quests can be completed within an hour, but some may take longer, and there is a rarely-accessed Table that contains quests that could well take the rest of your lives to complete. For these complex quests, approximately one month of free time should be the minimum amount of time spent, but for most quests, one hour is the amount of time that should be spent as a minimum, unless the quest is truly completed faster than that.

The tables in Abalastow Compendium are meant to be customizable by the Party. The game makes certain Assumptions in each Table, and it is intended to allow the Party to choose which assumptions are correct and are not correct. Once these decisions are made, a simple rubric can be used to generate new tables "by hand", or a computerized method of table generation can be used. I plan to release an implementation of such a computerized method publicly as well.

So, why play Abalastow Compendium? There are lots of reasons. Some, for example, might view it as a divination method for what a party should be doing at that exact moment. Some might just wish to expand on their experiences. Others might simply want to do SOMETHING but need a prod to tell them what. It is my opinion that playing this game will improve the life of anyone who plays it, in the long term, by helping them learn more about themselves, reality, and the world around them, but don't take my word for it. Try it yourself. After all, it's free to use, and most likely, the worst thing that happens is you waste an hour.