(A bit of self-indulgence here. Simple homebrew setting for a game I reviewed here.)While Mnemosyne helps to break down the barriers between your mind and the minds of your fellow patients, it also weakens the barriers between the compartments of your mind. Memories, dreams, books, graffiti – all of these can mix together. To help you distinguish fact from fiction, we have prepared this guide to the world you live in. You may treat the following statements about the world as true:

– The circumstances of finding you clearly link you to the occult side of the City. You must understand, Mnemosyne is a miracle of narco-alchemy. It wouldn’t be used on just any person. However, it is clear to us that you are connected to something outside of confines of normal sense. Something or someone has caused you to lose your memories, which makes them important. For you and for us both.

– It is the early twenty-first century. Technology and structure of society – the parts that would be known for uninitiated – should be consistent with your hazy recollection. No new breakthroughs were made, humanity wasn’t thrown back into dark ages, no dictator took over the world, etc.

– The City is alive. The City is a great beast larger than sum of its parts. Buildings are its bones, traffic is its blood, humans are cells ensuring its survival. Its dreams bleed into graffiti and white noise of television screens, neon light hypnotizes people into serving the City and not noticing the horrifying reality of their existence, trap streets appear to ensnare those who deviate from allowed pathways. The City has a will to survive and power to back it up. And while it needs people to be, it doesn’t care for any individual person.

– Most people don’t exist. Something causes people to disappear without a trace. To fill the void left behind, the City creates phantoms – fake people imitating life. They appear normal for uninitiated. Initiated, however, can see their boll joints and red fabric filling their hollow bodies. Phantoms, for the most part, live normal lives. It is their purpose. However, they can easily turn hostile – overtly or subtly – against those the City rejects.

– Afterlife is real. This is not a good thing. There is an entrance to the afterlife in every building, on every street, for those who can see: cracks in the walls, doors that shouldn’t be there, broken windows. They lead to an endless labyrinth of completely empty hallways, rooms and stairwells. Lost things: your pencil you forgot somewhere, a toy you can barely
recall from your childhood, a lighter you threw away – always find their
way there. One of those things is the dead. Lost souls have nowhere else to go but there, but they certainly want out. In order to do that, they devour other lost things, absorbing them into their bodies, becoming abominations of flesh, wood, metal, plastic and glass, and leaving the place completely devoid of any and all signs of life. Those who are successful, manage to return to the world of the living and partake of life once again. Those who are unlucky to be devoured or not being able to find enough life to consume, are reduced to nothing more than whispers lingering in the corners. And, of course, the easiest way to devour life is to devour a living. Powerful dead wait near surface of some abandoned building and play a haunting melody in hopes of enchanting a lost person to come to them.

– The City hates you. You’ve stepped outside of allowed path. Perhaps you are an adept, a practitioner of City’s magic, stealing its secrets to gain power over it. You can control people with graffiti, kill their memories of you with glass knives, see through the eyes of pigeons and bind roadkills to do your bidding. You can claim a part of the City as your own territory, turning it into a cancer tumor over which the City has no power and reshaping it into your image. Perhaps you are one of the dead lucky enough to crawl back to the world of the living and unlucky enough to realize you now need to kill to remain here. Perhaps you are an ordinary person who discovered the truth by accident. Whatever the case, the City hates you, for you are no longer a part of it. And it will use its power to end you, provided other people in the know don’t get you first.

– There is no escape. Any attempt to leave the City will fail.

Questionary

1. What was your first encounter with the occult?

How has it changed you?

2. What have you sacrificed?

Was it worth it?

3. How have you lost your memories?

What effect did it have on the City and people trapped within?

Do you want to remember?

You can still return to normality of everyday life if you wish so. All you need is to allow the City to claim you.

(Well, something like that. Hopefully the description is detailed enough to provoke interesting ideas without being too restrictive. Feel free to use it in your TRPG projects should you have the desire.

Also, a check on interest: does anyone want to play Penny on this blog/in e-mails/some other method? It’s more a creative writing exercise following certain rules rather than a traditional game, so it translates to web format nicely and avoids many of the typical traps. I have some good experience with RL playing, and now I’m interested in trying it out with you guys. No immediate plans yet, just checking to see if it’s worth thinking about.)