Okay, I’m sitting in the dark waiting for the baby to go to sleep. Let’s talk about Mnemonic, for real, yeah?

This game has been lurking in my head for more than a decade. It started in earnest with a question about XP cost in #DnD. When you lose XP, what does that mean in the story?

That isn’t really a thing in 5e, but in 3.5e you spent XP when you created magic items. If you were a wizard at a high level, sooner or later you were gonna spend some.

But what does it MEAN?

I answered the question during a future tech psionics game where I was a lonely magic user from The Time Before. Magic was a limited resource—I wasn’t a spell caster, I was a rogue who could cast spells—but only if I had the right components. And there was an XP cost.

The answer I came up with: XP is memories. You gain XP when you do things because you learn from your experiences. When you lose XP, you’re also losing the memories that would give you the benefit of those lessons.

When you’re eight thousand years old, you’ve got a lot of memories to burn.

But when you’re burning them on a regular basis, how do you know which memories are important? After enough time, inevitably, you forget the essential parts of yourself.

(I should say at this point that I was just barely out of college and knew very little about the world, I was a kid playing with action figures. Memory and memory loss are complicated things, and at the time I didn’t fully understand that.)

But it planted the seed of memory-as-fuel for my world. Which eventually evolved into “the world itself has memories”, which further evolved into “we can tap into the world’s memories to view portions of the past as they actually happened.” Asterisk.

Asterisk, because we don’t all remember things the same way. We don’t remember all things the same way, either. What are the details the world chooses to forget? What memories become warped or distorted by the passage of time?

So that is part of the premise for Mnemonic: Cracks in the Mirror. You’re going to this place of memory because it allows you to commune with an imprint, a vision, or your ancestor in a significant (or maybe insignificant) moment of their life.

And as you go through that exploration, as you “remember” things and recontextualize things and revise your memory of things, you’re also doing that work with regard to your character. Because your character’s story exists in the context of this exploration.

During last night’s playtest, at the end of character creation I had nothing but questions written down about my character. I knew very little about her. I *discovered* who she was through the memories she encountered, through her engagement with the other characters.

The memories of my character’s ancestors, revealed in the present, helped flesh out and contextualize the memories from my character’s own past. Revelations in the present expose and clarify the past.

Think of a memory from your childhood, that you might have repressed or forgotten or simply ignored, that then suddenly fell into sharp relief when you discovered something about yourself in the present. You’ve been looking in the mirror for years—decades—and never saw yourself.

Suddenly that memory cracks the mirror, it struggles to the surface, it says LOOK AT ME I AM A PART OF YOU AND I AM IMPORTANT.

If it’s a happy memory, then great, carry it with you, live your best life.

But if it’s not happy? If it’s hard? If it’s painful? If it reveals something you think might be dangerous?

That mirror is still cracked. And once you see those cracks, it’s hard to ignore them. It’s hard to keep them secret. It’s hard to want to.

But it’s worth it, if you ask me. It’s worth shattering the mirror, worth cracking the egg, worth seeing what’s been hiding inside you all along. I promise you it’s beautiful. And it’s never too late to see that beauty in yourself.

I hope you buy my game. I hope you play it. I hope the experience is meaningful to you. I hope it doesn’t cause you pain. (Use those safety notes, they’re there for a reason.)

I hope it helps you want to see yourself. To want to crack the mirror. https://mnemonicrpg.itch.io/mnemonic