Mindjammer RPG: The Mindscape

One of the great pleasures of writing the 2nd edition Mindjammer RPG has been being able to sort out all my thoughts about the Mindscape, the interstellar communications and data storage medium of the New Commonality of Humankind. It’s like a far future successor to the internet – a vast virtual space which almost every citizen of the Commonality is connected to by the “Mindscape implant”, a biotech neural interface. It allows for all kinds of abilities – not the least of which is technopsi, or technological psionics.

The Mindscape has been part of Mindjammer from its very beginning – indeed, it’s the reason for the existence of the Mindjammer starships themselves – sentient starships which travel throughout the Commonality, updating the Mindscape and keeping it current. Writing the Mindjammer novel let me refine my thoughts about the Mindscape further, including pinning down some of the parameters of technopsi, exomemory, thoughtcasting, and the boundaries of “thanograms”, the memory engrams of the dead stored in the Mindscape which are used to assemble new personalities for synthetic beings. In Mindjammer 2nd edition, I’ve been able to dedicate an entire chapter to the Mindscape, and I hope you’ll enjoy what you see!

Today’s preview is a bit longer than usual – five pages from the Mindscape chapter. Also, a lot of it is description rather than rulesy stuff – but I hope you’ll find it interesting. It covers things which have never seen the light of day in rules form before: the halo, the aggregation of a character’s Mindscape-enabled abilities, which can be hacked and queried by skilled intrusion specialists; memoplexes, the strange things that happen to your personality when you can “remember” the exomemories of other people – including fictional ones; and gestalt language – the transhuman successor to human language, with its powerful applications. Ever wonder what gestalt controller Monika Taimanishev from the Mindjammer novel could do? Read this…

The final chapter contains lots more – notes on imposalities, sentinels, technurgy, fictionals, chronodisplacement, and Mindscape instances, and many other applications of this exotic aspect of the Mindjammer setting. If you want to push the boundaries of what your Mindjammer character can do, if you want to explore the transhuman aspects of this massmind technology, or if you just want to burn someone’s brain with the power of your mind, then check the Mindscape out.

Let us know what you think – here or at our Google+ Mindjammer community. Hope to see you there!

Cheers,

Sarah

This week’s art preview is by the wonderfully talented Jason Juta, whose artwork features throughout the Mindjammer roleplaying game.