Mimesis Role Playing System

Background

Sorcerers & Demons is a new roleplaying game that has come from two entirely different projects that have merged. The first has been a long-term experiment with historical-fantasy, where real-world history and mythology supplements a historical game. The argument primarily being that for the purposes of telling of a story about a historical period necessitates a certain degree of false enchantment to properly reflect the mode of consciousness of those premodern times. This began over a decade ago and followed through with three Dungeons & Dragons campaigns; two based in North-Western Europe during the eleventh century, another in the Balkans during the eight, a RuneQuest play-by-email based in the Malay archipelago in the 16th century, an early version of the Mimesis game system based in Transylvania around the same time, an Ars Magica campaign in southern France, and most recently a GURPS Time Traveller campaign which specialises in turning points of history.

The second relates to several short-term campaigns based in the continent of Castofan for the game Barbarian Kings which first appeared in the SPI magazine Ares. Written by Greg Costikyan this product included more than a modest amount of geographical realism plus some requisite humour that always comes from said author; the common currency of the land is "the sequin", there are Vikings who raid with airships and last but not least, are are species of sentient frogs who form war frog units. One of the events of a game is that a Mage can raise a dead army into a zombie army; however there is a chance that said zombies go beserk - being eaten by your own recently raised zombie warfrogs is not a pleasant experience, believe me. The short-term campaigns based in Castofan included games of DragonQuest, RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer, and Swordbearer with DragonQuest famously providing its demons from the Lesser Key of Solomon and Swordbearer with a magic system based on nodes of pure elemental essence and psychic humours.

In many ways the combination of games and location was not always the best fit. The demons from DragonQuest were not necessarily a good fit for the world of Barbarian Kings which was a little technologically askew as well with most of the games being best suited for a dark ages and beyond period whereas Castofan was, by the descriptions of the societies, at an iron age period of development (indeed, increasingly Rolemaster seemed to be a particularly good fit). Indeed, the idea of developing a Barbarian Kings game system strongly derived from DragonQuest and Swordbearer seemed to be a bit of a waste, given the mythic realism of using such beings as the Key's demons and the magic system of elementalism and humours should also be included in any game that claimed a degree of historical narrative.

A solution lay in the game of Demons by SPI which used the same beings from DragonQuest but as a small-scale hexgame based in Armenia during the 1000s. The general idea was that each player was a wizard searching for the Ring of Solomon that could provide control over diabolical powers. To aid them in this quest, the wizards had various shields that they could use to summon and hopefully control those beings they summoned. The demons had appropriate powers as per the Key, such as "Cause Women To Show Themselves Naked" and "Create Warfare Between Two Parties" etc. Various secular forces would scour the countryside in search of Wizards and if they found them engaged in them in a short but deadly combat.

The pieces at this stage fell into place. Originally the idea was publish according to the GURPS model; have one set of core rules plus supplements. Instead, it is deemed preferable to use the Chaosium model; whereby a set of compatible, but not identical rules are provided according to each temporal context thus allowing both in-depth concentration on the setting on-hand and ensuring that a degree of elegance in the game design.

Theme & Setting

The theme of the game is about the quest for supernatural power. The PCs are wizards or loyal allies who are engaging in the quest for the powers of Solomon in medieval Armenia during the eleventh century. In this quest for power they have access and at least nominal control over supernatural demonic forces, although some may be quite unfriendly. These demons are derived from the Ars Goetica section of the Lesser Key of Solomon and other, related, texts (e.g., The Complete Book of Magical Science, 1573) which provide for archangels and Olympian spirits. These forces will utilise their magical abilities but require the release of psychic humours through sacrifice. Thus the greater the quest for power the more depraved the character's become until they either (ultimately) reach the power that they so desire or find within themselves a solution.

The setting is in the first half of the 11th century in medieval Armenia. During this time, the old independent kingdom under the Bagratid dynasty was on the wane with pressure from both Byzantium and the Seljuks; historically the former took control of the region in 1045 and the latter in 1064 with the remains of the dynasty moving to establish the Armenian Kingdom in Cicilia in 1078, which was not part of Armenia at all, but populated and controlled by a large number of Armenian refugees and provided important support to the Christian Crusaders until 1375. It should be possible in a properly designed chronicle to include all administrations in the course of the story development.

The Mimesis System

Impressed with the social and physical realism in RuneQuest and GURPS, yet also equally so by narrative-orientated games like HeroQuest, an attempt to merge the two directions in the form of the Mimesis role-playing system was developed. In many ways this game follows a traditional structure; there are relatively stable attributes largely derived from innate abilities, there are professions (with levels, no less) which include a collection of skills and knowledges, there are lists of equipment and so forth. The system is simple, but with a great deal of potential and complex elaboration (think in terms of the variation that is derived from the core mechanic in Over The Edge) and easily understandable within the existing tradition of roleplaying games. Insights in this particular were also gained by other games such as Sorcerer which emphasised the narrative tension with possession and Kill Puppies for Satan which pushed a model of "junkie" wizards constantly trading evil for magic from "pusher" infernal powers. Conversations with fundamentalist monotheists explaining their notion of demons also proved helpful.

The first distinctive element is the game is a sharper and systematic clarification between players and characters. It is well-known that games like the Hero System, GURPS, and HeroQuest which provide bonus character points for the player's roleplaying activities encourage roleplaying in a systematic sense. But by the same taken they confuse player rewards with character rewards; thus the Mimesis Role Playing System distinguishes between player points and character points. The former is a transferable value for players to invoke narrative elements; the latter is a representation of the character's power. A player may have many player points, but within the role of a weak character; a powerful character may be assigned few player points for narrative input. Characters will gain character points according to game-time and training, whereas players will gain player points during real time.

The attributes of the game are Strength, Dexterity, Agility, Perception, Intelligence, Spirit which are based with a human range of roughly 5-15 in the normal distribution and 3-18 in more extreme cases. The actual normal deviation varies in species and sex, but player-characters are built from a point-based method and as such, they are not subject to such statistical distributions. The attributes themselves were chosen with consideration of actual attributes, such as attempted in games like the rare All-Adventure Roleplay Game and Little Fears, both of which had attributes like Hands, Legs, Brains etc. The problem with this approach was that a degree of abstraction is necessary; consider the elephant's trunk - is that strength or dexterity or both? The latter is the true answer, but the representation has to be encapsulated in both attributes.

By the same token, attempts to correlate the abstract attributes with real attributes did mean developing what is believed to be a better sense of balance than a lot of games. With an unsurprisingly human-orientation for a game based around historical-fantasy, the RuneQuest trio of linked physical attributes; Size, Strength and Constitution seemed a little excessive and variations between such attributes could be better expressed as enhancements (e.g., dense musculature) and handicaps (e.g., overweight), as well-established by GURPS. Speaking of said game, it suffers a similar problem in the other direction; by fourth edition the editors have realised how overpowered IQ and DX are in that game - part of an early design flaw from the days of The Fantasy Trip. Instead in the Mimesis system Dexterity is split into Agility and (Manual) Dexterity, given that the two can and do vary significantly in a person and likewise Intelligence into Intelligence and Perception; the same applies. One may give a nod towards DragonQuest for being one of the earliest games to make both these distinctions (although it didn't have a Intelligence score as such). Intelligence is pure cognitive ability; it does not include skills, or general knowledge. The Spirit attribute takes up the role of communication ability, empathy and willpower and magical capacity.

Attributes are loosely coupled with skills and knowledges in the similar way to what is used in Feng Shui (yet another design credit to Robin D. Laws). For example, if a person has a skill in Writing, they have this ability as their ability to write, the knowledge of writings and a social circle of writers. Sometimes the appropriate attribute to the skill or knowledge will be Spirit; at other times Intelligence. The occasional case may arise where Perception or even Dexterity is the right attribute to link to the skill. Further to this the relative contribution of the attribute or skill will also vary. The New World of Darkness is one of the few games that gives some recognition to these differences by varying the default level among physical, mental and social skill groups. The fact of the matter is, however, that the ability to perform some skills (such as athletics) are very much dependent on physical attributes, whereas in many knowledges (such as Egyptian hieroglyphs) the contribution of innate Intelligence is slight at best. The Mimesis Role Playing System varies the contribution of attribute and skill or knowledge depending on the type of action performed.

Like many games, from Traveller onwards Mimesis uses a roll versus target number system for successful completion of unopposed actions and a contest for opposed actions. This is a universal, yet adaptable, resolution method used throughout the game for all activities and conflicts. Taking a visceral note from Earthdawn (rolling different-sided dice simultaneously is interesting) and acknowledging (like FUDGE) that random implies positive and negative possibilities from the base score, the Mimesis game system provides variable positive or negative randomness based on rough estimation of environmental circumstances that are either unknowable or just too boring to calculate exactly in actual play. Thus an action could have a target number of 15 with a character with a base ability of 13. The positive modifiers could provide an additional 1d8, whereas the negative modifiers a 1d6. Character points can be thrown in at this stage to give an additional plus or minus d20 - it's on the edge of plausibility, but allows just enough beneficial random possibilities for the players to get excited.

With a roll-over system with values the game system has no special need for criticals and fumbles, as these will be built into the results themselves. Further, there is no need for secondary rolls for effects as these will be derived from multiples from the degree of success. No more hitting your opponent by five over the required number then rolling a one for damage! There is a large degree of narrative input from both player and narrator as specific results rather than table look-ups and the like, and active encouragement to improvise results. Deriving from HeroQuest, the actual amount of dice-rolling is based on the narrative importance of the scene rather than the quantity of actions; an entire battle can be resolved in a single conflicted dice-roll and a negotiation with a merchant can take several with the haggling for the an item critical to the story going back and forth.

History and Cultural Anthropologies

A roleplaying system which emphases historical narratives will make use of story-telling mechanisms and especially the way that myths are formed, such as the distinction between synchronic and diachronic in Claude Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology and modes of consciousness suggested by Jürgen Habermas. These narrative approaches are complemented by historical research in the actual practise of magic, as investigated by Bronislaw Malinowski, Sir James Frazer, Marcel Mauss etc.

A distinction is drawn between the paranormal, supernatural and psychic which equates to roughly the terms used in Rolemaster for Essence, Chanelling and Mentalism and the professions in RuneQuest such as Shaman, Priest and Wizard. Actual historical documents, like the "recipe-book" magic, protective amulets, Babylonian demon bowls and defixiones serve as examples to a the general principles of sympathetic magic, contagious magic, divination etc. As mentioned, these become tied to elemental and humour traditions which remain within their cultural contexts as being incommensurable; there is no attempt here to force particular instances of magical thinking to fit a universal game abstraction, rather the model must fit the reality.

On a wider scale, the Mimesis line of game products seeks to invigorate an interest in history with a narrative perspective. By concentrating on particular turning points (or would be turning points) and typically with a more exotic outlook players and GMs will be engaging in 'depth hermeneutics', putting themselves in the historical context and mentality of the people of an age.

There is no attempt here to do everything. The line of Mimesis game products does not pretend that it will be able to produce good games based on fantastic or science fiction and nor is it going to try. It will concentrate entirely on historical fantasy; that will its niche market as it were. Hopefully, it will contribute to making history and cultural anthropology interesting again.

First published in RPG Review, Issue #4