Memento Mori: the Deep Dive

Everyone gets about 1000 months to live.

This is a life changing realization I had a few years back. It hit me so hard that I wrote about it. It was a gaze-into-the-abyss moment for me, and for many readers. If you don’t click through the link, the highlights of the piece are that hundreds of those months are already gone by the time you’re old enough to appreciate there’s a limit to them. And there will inevitably be some there at the end where you won’t be doing a lot, probably. So what will you do with your few hundred “good” months?

1000 months is my memento mori.

As of this writing, I’m on month 668.

Just about 300 “good ones” to go.

I’ve been holding off on writing this deep dive of Memento Mori for weeks. We started a very strong campaign here, drawn by the promise that a complete experience is five to seven sessions long. Then life happened, and kept happening, and here we are stuck halfway through our campaign. Tick tick tick, my last few hundred months are dribbling away.

When I write my deep dives, it’s as a creative endcap of the game. My creative rhythm is to put it all on the table while we play, take that experience, and wrap it up with a bow. Then it’s time to move on to the next thing with a clean slate. Unfinished campaigns feel a little like wasted time because of this! Which is stupid, time with friends being creative is never wasted, and yet. And yet.

Memento Mori, from Italian publisher Two Little Mice (of recent Outgunned and Household fame), arrived last year. It’s a gorgeous production that immediately drew me in. The premise of Memento Mori is that it’s 1347, you’re in Europe, and you’ve just caught the plague. Instead of dying like a third of Europe did, you become marked by forces unknown to pursue your final, impossible dream. As your body and mind waste away, you transform into something unrecognizable and powerful. The mark also grants you the ability to pass between the veil between this world and the next – but the next world is not the afterlife, but something far stranger.

This absolutely killer hook has been living rent-free in my head for months.

Gaze Into the Abyss

Memento Mori’s game setup takes a while to get to. The game comes in three books, but you have to really internalize the first book – that is, the main game text – for the other two to make sense. Before you get to the meat and potatoes of how to set up your campaign of “five to seven sessions” according to the writers, there’s a nice encapsulation of the real-world history and knock-on effects of the Black Plague. They cover social impacts, politics, wars, the whole shebang. If you were the kind of kid who read history textbooks for fun (couldn’t be me), this is great stuff.

Then you have to get through a primer of the game’s cosmology. Because of course nothing about the world is what you think it is! Yes, there’s a plague, mortals are dying, so sad. But there’s this whole other parallel world called Beyond the Veil. Think the Upside-Down from Stranger Things: a nightmare kingdom that looks like a hazy half-remembered mirror of our own world. This is the place from which human mythology and folklore have emerged since time immemorial. Elves, trolls, draugr, chimera, gods and monsters: they’re all somewhere Beyond the Veil.

Ruling over Beyond the Veil are four Princes, and there’s some elaborate scheme or conspiracy or whatever they’re all pursuing while ruling over their minions (they mostly exist to thematically organize all the critters and peoples Beyond the Veil), but mostly all this exists to rationalize the dark fairytale your campaign will eventually land on. There are some similarities to Free League’s Vaesen aesthetics.

Memento Mori is meant to be run as an anthology of free-standing campaigns, each six-ish sessions long. There’s a lot of material to draw from. But for your first game: pick a spot in plague-ridden Europe, figure out why the characters are together, and throw them into hell.

Corruption All The Way Down

Mechanically, the core conceit of Memento Mori is that as your body and soul are corrupted, the corruption transforms you into something very strange indeed. Being Marked means you’re immune to death; the powers-that-be find you (and your dreams) far too valuable. But you might become so corrupted that you become a monster.

So we start with a Mark. It’s a literal mark on their skin formed by the plague. There’s a library of Marks in the book, and premade scenarios come with bespoke Marks as well. Each Mark is defined by six keywords. Those keywords guide all the corruption that’s about to befall the character.

Characters have four stats represented by organs: Nerve, Cerebrum, Heart and Viscera. Then you have a central stat called Blood, which is a very short track you’re constantly filling and emptying to track your corruption. And finally you have a list of intangibles: your Name, your Bonds (memories and key lessons drawn from them), and your Virtues (professional knowledge, more or less).

Everything on your character sheet is subject to being corrupted. They all start with 1 white d6 (bonds have 2), and the organs get a couple extra dice distributed during character creation. Then, as bad things happen to your character – missed rolls, damage, consequences – you start transforming those white dice into black dice. Those black dice are both more powerful and more dangerous, 6es giving 3 successes but also corrupting you.

The first time the player chooses to corrupt an organ, their character gains a Stigma, a bit of body horror or mental illness that also grants an ability. You might grow leathery wings so now you can fly, or literal stigmata on your hands where your blood gives people plague, whatever. It’s entirely up to the players to invent both the Stigma and its effect. But don’t make it too powerful, because it’ll evolve into something even more powerful and horrific eventually. Those leathery wings might grow so powerful that the wind they generate can flatten a building. We’re talking big, melodramatic transformations here. Balance is for mortals.

Your intangibles can also get corrupted, each one granting a Gift that also will grow over time. Examples from our own game include the power to set someone on fire until they tell the truth, or the ability to extrude a shroud of darkness that hides everything inside it. Again, this is all up to the players and GM to negotiate, based on the keywords of the character’s Mark. Those keywords get crossed out each time a new gift or stigma appears. There are long lists of examples of both gifts and stigma in the book as well.

The most interesting bit to your intangibles getting corrupted is how they change your character in other ways. Your name, for example. Hardly anyone had a surname in 1350 but almost everyone has an epithet. “Frose the Strong” or “Stinky Helena” or whatever. The first time your name is corrupted, you replace your mortal epithet with something grimmer and darker. Frose the Strong might become Frose the Bonebreaker. The second time your name is corrupted? That’s right, you lose your given name and are now known only by that grimmer, darker epithet. That nice blacksmith who got sick? Yeah he’s now The Bonebreaker. All memories of Frose disappear from the world.

Gameplay is largely driven by these transformations: chasing them, defining them, using them. As white dice become black, those black dice are swingier, 1s canceling out successes and 6es counting as three successes…but also granting even more corruption. It’s a slippery slope! The first couple black dice are no big deal, but once you’re rolling three or more of them the odds of corruption just keep going up.

Choosing what to transform is also meaningful, both in terms of mechanical gameplay but also values and aesthetic. Our priest, for example, let literally everything but his organs corrupt because he didn’t want to have visible stigmas. These choices also impact the campaign’s endgame.

The Friends Who Rotted Along The Way

Our plague-ridden heroes, obsessed by impossible dreams and given the power to perceive and enter a dark fairytale land, are organized under a “binding pact.” It’s the core premise of why everyone’s together, what makes them a group and not just wandering freaks. The main rulebook doesn’t provide a lot of guidance here, but book three, Ex Velum, has six ready-to-run group setups. Honestly I didn’t understand the potential scope of the game until I saw these. The pacts range from soldiers returning home from war, to a coven of witches, to a ship’s crew, to a castle under siege. We chose a group sent by their noble to investigate a town where the dead have been seen leaving their graves. Spooky!

The impossible dream element turns out to be core as well. It’s meant to provide some play guidance for the players even while the dreams are meant to be impossible to fulfill. At our table for example, a doctor wanted to cure death and a disillusioned crusader wanted to murder his lord. Cosmologically, your dream becomes an obsession as part of being Marked, juiced beyond reason by the powers-that-be because they need dreamers for their plans.

Campaign Design and Vibe Alignment

Once we have our dreamers and their binding pact, the GM builds out the rest of the campaign. It’s a lot of front-loading, and it feels very trad-inspired.

Campaign planning derives from an Omen the group experiences upon receiving the Mark, and the process of creating it is so interesting. The players start by being told they’ve had an Omen, but not what it was. First, what was the name of the event it foretold? We were using the premade Pacts from Ex Velum so it already had a list of potential events. We chose “The Ball at Court,” for example. Then they decide on a location where this event will take place. Again, from the Ex Velum setup, we chose “on the banks of a fog covered lake.”

After the players have decided these elements, they work on a list of five “effigies” (yes there are a lot of terms of art in Memento Mori), symbolic concepts derived from everything they’ve worked on up to this point. So, not just the event and its location, but their own dreams, the secret they all share, everything. We worked up a list of about 20 ideas and chewed on them until we got our five. The GM then weaves those five effigies together into the final vision everyone receives.

This is maybe my favorite, albeit subtle, bit of design in Memento Mori. The exercise of negotiating specifics, then offering up abstractions, then pulling those all together into a final aesthetic provided really powerful vibe alignment.

Grimmer Than Grimm’s

Anyway, the campaign planning. I had such a hard time with this, I think mostly for trad railroading reasons. The rules as written indicate that the story will move from milestone to milestone, each time with a clear path forward to the next step in the story. That’s so railroady that I shunned it for days. My solution was to come up with milestones, yes, but not require they be addressed sequentially. Just take away the rails and turn them into Apocalypse World style fronts, right? They’ll get to them whenever it happens.

The other thing I struggled with was the requirement that whatever situation they’re headed into require that only the PCs can address it. That is, problems that criss-cross between this world and Beyond the Veil. A being Beyond the Veil needs something from our world, some inciting incident that started Beyond the Veil has affected our world, stuff like that.

This is where leaning on fairy tale structures works really well. Monsters regularly escape into our world through temporary fissures, so it’s not hard for an intelligent wolf-thing to slip across, eat someone’s grandmother and wait for a child to arrive. Or for an evil little elven trickster to steal away a baby, or a troll to block up travel across a bridge, whatever.

Those are all great places to start. Given the speed with which the characters corrupt into earth-shattering monsters themselves, the scale of the campaign will necessarily ramp up quickly. This is so great in play, with small time problems growing into bigger problems and then, shit, you now have to face down the court of one of the Beyond the Veil princes or something.

Meanwhile all this has to be thematically and aesthetically related to the Omen the GM created! It was a big, but rewarding, creative load. It took me most of a week to pull it all together in a satisfactory way.

Not The End

The campaign itself is a combination of exploration, investigation, overcoming challenges, fighting monsters, and hitting milestones toward the grand finale. But the finale is not the end of the game. Instead, there’s a final tallying of corruption for those who made it to the end, and a denouement of what happened to each character’s Dream.

If the character somehow reached their Dream on their own, then they move on to the Epilogue. But if they didn’t, they have their own little scenes where they finally take a swing at achieving their impossible Dream. Working through those scenes, the player takes all the dice on their sheet, white or black, 18 total, and decides how many of each to roll in each of the three final scenes. It’s very abstract, yes, but it’s a nice way to either show them achieving the impossible or being sucked into something worse than Beyond the Veil.

The Epilogue is a final reckoning of whether they fall to the plague or not (assuming they didn’t get sucked into hell). They roll all their Organ dice against a difficulty based on how corrupted their organs were, and then they roll all their bond and virtue dice the same way to see whether they’re human or not. You might survive and become a creature from Beyond the Veil! Metal!

We’re Ruined! Let’s Do It Again

This point bears repeating: I think Memento Mori is meant to be played as an anthology of campaigns. The setting material throughout all the books is so vast that it’s simply impossible to get to more than a fraction of it in six-ish sessions. Europe is a big place as well, with just so many possible locations to set the game in and so many possible holding environments. The scope of the game is much, much bigger and more replayable than I understood just from reading it.

The second book, Codex Gigas, is the primary setting text. I think you can get enough from the first book to run the game, but man…Codex Gigas really blows the top off. There’s a deeper look at the cosmology of the game that opens up a lot of anthology possibilities, 40 or so beasties reinvented from folklore and mythology into gross Beyond the Veil things, magical plants and gemstones for crying out loud? You can totally slip these into your setting and amp up the supernatural quality of the “real world” side of the game.

Ex Velum, the third book, not only has those premade binding pacts, but includes a whole optional Tarot-based system you can lay atop the game. Drawing from a single, never-to-be-reshuffled deck of just the Major Arcana, players can pull cards in lieu of rolling dice. These add a lot of additional detail to each conflict, which can add some creative load to the GM, but they’re nifty, and the book itself is printed with upright and upside-down versions of each card. There’s even a system for influencing the session 0 effigy discussion with a card draw, or performing a full reading to create the campaign framework itself. I’m not persuaded it actually works, given how hard it was for me to design our own campaign. If your brain likes pattern recognition and random creative inputs, well, give it a shot.

Highest Marks, Major Warnings

I cannot recommend Memento Mori enough. Mechanically it’s straightforward (one system for everything), advancement is not only fun but central to the game, the setting itself is just incredibly rich. But I will say it is grim and dark. I tried to make our game, like, hilariously, melodramatically grim. You can also play it straight but wow allll the trigger warnings. Potentially the most unsafe game I can think of, honestly, played in that mode. Not sure I would put it on the table at a con with strangers unless everyone knew we were going way over the top.

Sometimes my personal 1000 month memento mori would become very prominent in my mind as we played. Every town is dying, every city is dying harder and faster, how could anyone live this way? By having dreams to make our months bearable, however many we may have left.