Abeceus System

Working Premise

19 min read

Working Premise

The rough sketch of the game’s plot, motivation structure, and themes. This is a working document — the shape is agreed, most specifics are still open. Decisions we’re reasonably committed to are marked Decided; things still in flux are collected under Open Questions.

Format note: This is being developed as a video game first, with a possible later port to the RollHub VTT / the tactical milsim system. That framing matters: the story leans on authored moments (the tutorial betrayal, scripted reveals, witnessed consequences) that a video game can guarantee and a tabletop game can only hope for.

Companion doc: Campaign Structure covers how you move through the campaign — the information-driven location topology, act structure, and mission model. This doc is what the story is; that one is how you traverse it.

One-Line Pitch

A disposable rookie is used as the fall guy for a political assassination, left to die, and survives — and to stop being hunted he has to reverse-engineer the hidden org chart of the people who threw him away, getting his revenge and his answers one rung at a time, while the world quietly teaches him there was never a clean enemy to begin with.

The Opening (Decided in shape)

The tutorial is complicity

You start as a promising but green commando — real potential, big ego, no connections. You get embedded in an elite special-operations squad and can’t believe your luck; you think it’s the reward for your talent. The first mission is the tutorial: you control these badass operators, learn the systems, feel like the shit.

The mission is a political assassination. You’re told the target is an enemy — dangerous, deserving. You take the target out.

Then the squad sets you up. You take the fall. You hear them laughing at you with contempt right before you’re captured. The men you looked up to disown you. Your own side recasts you publicly as a traitor.

The tutorial’s real job isn’t teaching controls — it’s teaching the epistemics of the whole game: you acted on someone else’s framing of a human being, and it was a lie, and now you have to carry the body. Everything afterward is re-learning that lesson at higher and higher resolution. The assassination is the game’s thesis statement (see character-read bait-and-switch).

The prison ship (survival horror pivot)

You’re meant to be quietly killed in prison — framed by law, then removed so you can’t talk. A paid inmate is supposed to do it. It never happens: Oziri pirate raiders (Oziri) hit the ship to break out one of their own, and in the chaos you get your chance.

The tone snaps from choreographed elite violence to scrounging desperation. The ship is dying — hull breaches, failing oxygen, reactors going critical, claxons. Every prisoner is loose, arming up, fighting over dwindling space and resources like rats on a sinking ship. You move section to section, and each new section is still fucked — you never catch your breath. Relentless pressure to survive five more minutes and reach the next compartment.

Along the way you pick up the NPCs who become your squad (see Companions), reach a final compartment, and escape (escape pod / stolen craft). The wreck plausibly drifts toward or is taken to Oziri, dropping you into the slums of Zirta — act two happens in a district we’ve already mapped.

Core Motivation: Survival That Becomes the Hunt (Decided)

The spine is survival, in the inescapable-deadline sense (cf. Cyberpunk 2077’s chip), not the immediate flee-the-explosion sense.

  • The people who framed you didn’t find your body. They know you’re alive. They will not stop. You are hunted.
  • Survival is purer than revenge as a driver, because revenge is renounceable (a player can decide they’re done) and a death sentence is not. Nearly everyone fights to live.
  • Because the threat is attached and can’t be outrun, survival is active, not passive — the only vector to safety runs forward, into the conspiracy. To stop being prey you must find the source.

Survival transmutes into revenge (they coexist)

  1. Survive the next five minutes (prison ship).
  2. Survive the week — a marked man, a convicted traitor, hunted; staying alive requires the underbelly, contacts, resources.
  3. The hunt never ends until you end its source — so survival becomes a hunt of your own.

Revenge is real and cathartic, but it rides on top of survival rather than being the base. You genuinely hate these people and want them dead; you also have no choice but to deal with them.

Hunter and hunted (Decided)

You are both. Sometimes you initiate; sometimes they come for you — ambushes, scouting, watching your back. This is load-bearing, not flavour:

  • It keeps “they will never stop” viscerally true session-to-session.
  • It preserves underdog vulnerability against your own power creep — you keep feeling like prey even as you become a predator. Pure revenge (always you initiating) drifts into a power fantasy; being hunted counteracts that.

The “Nobody” Frame (Decided)

You are not special. That is the point, and the engine of the whole thing.

  • You were pickable precisely because you were disposable — a promising rookie nobody would protect, plausibly present on the op, with no ties to anyone who’d stand up for you.
  • Being nothing is more galling than being chosen. You wanted to serve; you were used and thrown away by men who laughed.
  • Separate who you were (a nobody — keep this pure) from why the world keeps circling back (acquired, not innate): you’re a loose end whose continued existence is inconvenient, and later, useful leverage to others.

Why frame you at all — “kill two birds” (Decided direction)

Blaming your own rookie wouldn’t buy the organization distance (the CIA-can’t-blame-its-own-trainee problem). So they don’t. They scrub your affiliation and recast you as something you never were — a foreign agent / defector / member of an organization someone wants damaged.

The hit therefore does two jobs: silences the target, and implicates a third party by attaching you to them. Your victimhood isn’t a byproduct — it’s a second objective. The scrubbing is the extra twist of the knife: your country replaces the you that existed with an enemy.

Why anyone bothers with you afterward (Decided)

Most powerful people have use for a man of violence with nothing to lose and no attribution — deniable, skilled, motivated, disposable. You’re useful and still a pawn: a hired gun who can be pointed at almost anyone and owned by no one. Expect to be double-crossed repeatedly — it’s a genuinely dodgy world where trust is hard for good reason (not as a gimmick, as its nature).

The Conspiracy: A Hidden Org Chart (Decided structure)

You are reverse-engineering a hierarchy. This is the concrete mental model that keeps the fractal intrigue legible — the failure mode of nested-conspiracy stories is illegibility, and a chart is a mystery with structure the player can hold. Consider an in-world artifact for it (case file, contact who assembles it, a wall of connected faces).

Each node you reach delivers three payoffs at once:

  1. Intel — climb the chart.
  2. A threat neutralized — survival.
  3. A new, closer personal stake — re-tightens the wound.

The shape: a leaderless peer network behind an airgap (Decided)

Two layers, and separating them resolves the tension between catharsis (needs faces to kill) and theme (no one at the top):

  • The obfuscation layer — NEXUS as the airgap. NEXUS is not the conspiracy; it’s the deniable laundering layer between the conspirators and their hands. Someone with real power leans on someone with a NEXUS connection; a work order enters the cloud, bounces through mutually-decoupled cells, and comes out as an instruction to a wetwork squad that has no idea who ordered it or why. NEXUS can’t have a puppet master — that’s the point; it’s what makes “trace it back to me” structurally impossible. Its canonical elimination-work-order mechanic doubles as the hunt engine (anyone can be a deputized operative collecting a bounty on you), and its information-bidding market is a canonical way to buy leads.
  • The conspirators — a leaderless peer network. Above/outside the cloud sits the Immortality Consortium: a small inner circle of powerful peers with no single head. There may be a facilitator/fixer who connects them, but not a king. This is the purest form of the theme — a system with no head to cut off — and it makes the climax a choice, not a final boss (see Final Choice).

You cross the airgap to get from the deniable hands out to the first “real” person, then climb the peer network. The faces you reach are real, culpable, killable — catharsis intact — but wounding the network never beheads it, because it has no head. The system grinds on. You were fighting the specific limb that closed around your throat.

Canonical grounding: Azure Reach & the Immortality Consortium (Decided direction)

The deepest layer maps onto existing canon — The Azure Reach Incident: a rogue AIA cell’s bioweapon, covered up by blaming Oziri (a war founded on a lie), whose anti-aging side effect now drives a cross-national Immortality Consortium. National allegiances mean nothing beside eternal life — that is the “teams are fake at the top” theme, pre-written into the setting.

  • The target (illustrative): a whistleblower — official, scientist, or Freehold journalist — about to crack Azure Reach open, sold to you as an Oziri/enemy collaborator. The kill silences the leak; framing you as their agent discredits the faction that might expose the truth and pre-poisons any future leak as “enemy propaganda.” Personal ruin and master cover-up are the same act.
  • Consortium size: a killable inner circle (a handful who know everything; a few heavily characterized) wrapped in a larger penumbra of complicit beneficiaries who don’t know the full shape. Manageable revenge target plus the “it’s the whole elite class” feeling.
  • The grayness: their goal — not wanting to die — is the most relatable human fear; their means — mining a quarantine of the permanently insane, murdering witnesses for decades — is monstrous. The gap is the grayness.
  • Valen Morrec — the detonator and the dark mirror (Decided direction): not a conspirator. A man discarded by the same machine, decades further down the revenge road — your possible future, already arrived (the “becoming the monster” arc personified). He has (or can produce) proof of the whole thing and is about to escape and release it. Your climb-from-inside and his blow-the-wall-from-outside are on a collision course; he becomes the fulcrum of the final choice.

The reveal discipline (Decided)

  • Zoom out on the world; zoom in on the wound. Every reveal makes the conspiracy bigger and the stakes more personal — never the reverse. Widen the lens on the machine; tighten the lens on the pain, together, every time.
  • Additive, not subtractive. A reveal must never say “your last target didn’t matter, your effort was wasted.” It says “that target was real — and getting here uncovered something worse and closer.” Recontextualize what you did; occasionally implicate you; never retroactively make it pointless.
  • Re-contract, don’t bait-and-yank. Each act, deliver a real catharsis (a genuine kill, a genuine answer) and in the delivery expose a bigger, closer stake the player chooses to chase. Keep every promise while widening the frame. (The opposite — reveals that only open and never close — is the mystery-box death, e.g. Lost.)

Example ladder (illustrative, not final)

You catch one wetwork operative → interrogate → a NEXUS cell → another cell → out of the cloud (crossing the airgap) → a low-level conspirator who actually knows something → up the peer network toward the inner circle. Six-or-seven jumps, each one several missions (cultivate a faction, acquire gear/allies, run side objectives), not a single step. The pettiness (deniable operatives who don’t even know what they’re doing) opens into system-defining stakes; you were several layers down, one minor implication of something vast.

Theme (Decided)

There is no central villain; the system incentivizes inhuman behavior, and ordinary people get ground up in the works.

  • Good-guys-vs-bad-guys is a story sold to the lower classes. At the top, teams are fluid and transactional — supposed enemies collaborate when it profits them. The escalation of the plot isn’t “a bigger boss”; it’s “the categories you believed in are fake.”
  • The player is the flashlight, not the treasure. Every layer peeled back is about the world, not about how special you are — which lets the web expand indefinitely.

The vigilante option and “becoming the monster” (Decided as option, not core)

  • Straightforward vigilantism as a sincere, endorsed motive is a trap (edgelord fantasy). Rorschach/Batman work because their stories interrogate them.
  • So vigilante action is available, not the thesis — the underbelly is full of innocents caught in the works, and you can take matters into your own hands.
  • The honest counterweight is the axis vigilante ↔ succumbing to the system / becoming the thing you hated. Revenge is the perfect solvent for ethics (“just this once, to get closer”). The corruption should be disguised as pragmatism, never presented as an obvious evil choice — the player should look back and be unable to find the moment they crossed the line.

Characterization Philosophy (Decided)

  • Normal distribution of morality. A few genuinely good people, a few genuine monsters, most people in the vast middle — comprehensible even when they disgust you. Avoid both cartoons: clean good/evil and “everyone’s equally scum” grey mush (adolescent cynicism, equally flat). You need real innocents (so stakes are real) and a few true monsters (so the world has a floor).
  • Monsters indict the system. The point of a genuine monster isn’t that he’s evil — it’s that the world produced, protects, or celebrates him. The ideal is the publicly celebrated “hero”: a decorated figure of the Oziri Conflict whose fame rests on the Azure Reach lie — not cartoonishly evil, but put on a pedestal for it. (This public hero is a conspirator, distinct from the clandestine wetwork squad — see hero split.) Even he gets a causal backstory (e.g. war normalized from a young age) — explaining, not exculpating.
  • Everyone has a lie they tell themselves. For each significant character, know the story they tell to stay okay with themselves — nobody is the villain of their own narrative. The most chilling have the most coherent self-justifications; the most tragic have ones that are almost right. The rationalization the game is really about is the player’s own — the “becoming the monster” arc is just the player’s accumulated “just this once,” and the player supplies that inner monologue themselves.

The character-read bait-and-switch (Decided)

First impressions are systematically incomplete; fuller truth is discoverable by the player who uses their brain. The assassination target is the first instance: told he’s a monster, you later learn it wasn’t the whole truth, and you have to grapple with having killed him on a lie.

Cut both ways. Sometimes the “monster” you were warned about is human; sometimes the decent-seeming person is worse than you assumed. If every reveal runs “actually they’re nicer than you thought,” players learn the pattern and it curdles into sentimentality. Keep the direction unpredictable.

Consequences: Witnessed, Not Scored (Decided)

No morality slider. No karma. No weighted scales (evil = richer but hated / good = poor but loved). Morality is never a game mechanic.

Distinguish three things usually lumped together:

  1. Karmic weighting — the game grades you and pays it out. Rejected.
  2. Causal consequence — the world reacts truthfully: you kill a man and watch his wife sob over the body; a spared enemy remembers; a burned contact closes a door. Embraced. The consequence of a choice is that you and the world must live in its wake — you have to carry it, with no number telling you whether to feel good or bad.
  3. Arbitrary / unfair outcome — good punished, evil rewarded, sometimes at random. Seasoning only.

Critical caution on #3: randomness only means something against a causal baseline. If outcomes are frequently decoupled from choices, the player learns their agency is fake and disengages — the opposite of “live with your decisions.” The world must be mostly causally legible so the rare unfair outcome lands as tragedy (cf. Chinatown) instead of noise. Baseline = actions ripple truthfully; unfairness = the deliberate, occasional violation that says “the world has no karma.”

Choices affect the plot and the fiction (causality, who lives, which doors open), never a meter. The game is adult and unsanitized — the real consequences of violence are shown, not laundered (contrast Fable’s consequence-free town massacres). It does not tell you what to think; it puts you in hard situations and makes you decide and live with it.

The Companions (Decided in shape)

  • Loyal to you, not necessarily good. Not “secretly good people” — people who genuinely have your back while not being good overall.
  • Shared glue: they’re all loose ends. Each is someone the system spat out, wrote off, or would rather forget — disowned, like you, though not necessarily framed like you. This explains the military competence (ex-soldiers, ex-clan enforcers, ex-corporate security who know too much) and gives the crew a real identity: an island of the deniable.
  • Not all bound to you the same way. Some relationships are tense; some have motivations that pull against yours. Earn trust in both directions; at least one should be genuinely dangerous or serving another master.
  • They are the emotional ballast for a faceless threat. You can’t hate a system, but you can grieve what it costs — and it costs specific people you travelled with. The crew is also the mirror: they see your corruption before you can. The darkest version — one companion is drifting the same way you are, and you see in him what you can’t see in yourself.
  • First companion should save your ass in a tight spot on the prison ship, establishing earned trust, not scripted trust.

The Two Tracks and the Final Choice (Decided in shape)

Run two motives on separate tracks so intellectual reveals never cheapen emotional payoffs:

  • Emotional track — the squad who laughed at you. Personal, concrete, doesn’t care who pulled the strings. Getting to them stays satisfying no matter what you learn. Delivers closure at intervals.
  • Intellectual track — the conspiracy / org chart. Fractures and widens; nothing is ever the final answer. Delivers mystery.

Because the Consortium is leaderless, the finale can’t be “kill the apex” — there is no head. So the two tracks converge on a choice, not a boss, and Morrec is the detonator that makes it concrete: you finally have your shot at the man who laughed / the celebrated hero and you hold (or can hand Morrec) the proof that would expose the whole arrangement — and you can’t do both. The bullet or the truth. Personal revenge or its meaning. Likely the first genuinely free choice the used man ever gets — tying theme (you were never allowed to decide) to catharsis (you decide) in one beat.

Open: does the protagonist even want vindication, or just blood? If he doesn’t care about clearing his name, Morrec’s proof becomes a temptation he might refuse — more interesting than a prize he chases.

The clandestine squad vs. the public hero (Decided)

Two distinct antagonist roles, deliberately split — clandestine operators can’t also be public celebrities:

  • The wetwork squad — clandestine. Personal, early/mid catharsis; the men who laughed, killed in the shadows. Drives the emotional track.
  • The public “hero” — a Consortium conspirator higher up, celebrated for a war built on the lie. You seethe watching him lauded while you’re branded a traitor; his glory and your ruin are the same lie. Late-ladder, thematic hatred.
  • The bridge: the squad leader may be the hero’s instrument, so getting the squad leader is what first points you at the man on the screen.

Faction playground

Because you’re a deniable asset chasing threads, you can work with (and be used/betrayed by) many powers: Oziri pirate clans, Atruna intelligence, Mesulea corporations, Nuilea military, aristocrats, and more. Missions are means to your ends (intel, access, resources), full of morally gray — sometimes outright black — work.

Open Questions

  • The ending fork (the big one — everything upstream should be tuned to land it):
    1. Partial peace — you sever this branch, the specific hunters are gone, you actually get to stop running, but the machine that made them is untouched. Bittersweet, earned, closed.
    2. Never safe — you get every face and the hunt just re-sources higher up; the freedom you fought for doesn’t exist. Bleak, thematically maximal, risks invalidating the climb.
    3. You become a node — you end this branch and in doing so become a feared name others will one day hunt up their own chart. Survival and the monster-arc fold into one final image.
  • Who is the assassination target, and what does the kill accomplish? Pick the accomplishment before the identity. The public reason is a lie; the squad’s real orders aren’t the whole truth either; the deepest “why” keeps expanding. Strong criterion: the lie that jails you should be the same lie that crowns the final-boss “hero.”
  • Does the protagonist know he’s becoming the monster? Tragic awareness (Rorschach/Kovacs — cold) vs. dramatic irony (he still thinks he’s the wronged hero while the player sees the slide — warmer, sadder). Sets the whole tone.
  • The squad roster — who’s the psychopath, who had moral doubts, who’s indifferent, who’s corrupt/in-it-for-money, who’s the hyper-nationalist true believer; which one(s) are not simply evil (coerced / already dead / doubting) to keep revenge a question rather than a checklist. (The publicly celebrated “hero” is a separate, higher role — a conspirator, not the clandestine squad leader.)
  • The apex — probably none. Leaning toward a leaderless peer network (no single head), which best fits the theme and makes the finale a choice, not a boss. If a single characterized face is wanted as a capstone, a fixer/facilitator (connector, not king) fits a headless network better than a monarch. The canonical hook — someone powerful enough to have had Emperor Tashen IV killed — can sit inside the inner circle without being “the boss.”
  • Which power do the inner circle and the public hero come from? Atruna is the gravity well (AIA, Azure Reach, the compromised Emperor); a most-prominent member from a supposed enemy power would reinforce “the teams are fake at the top.”
  • Whose betrayal is it — which nation did the protagonist serve? Atruna = intimate, closest to the rot; an outsider (e.g. Nuilea) = climbing toward a secret that isn’t even his nation’s.
  • How safety is dangled — how relentless the hunt feels, and whether real safety is ever offered, must be tuned to whichever ending fork is chosen.

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