Mnemoclave publishes roleplaying sourcebooks for gamers and GMs who want to add a new twist to familiar gaming experiences. We specialize in obsessively researched, imaginative, and occasionally peculiar resources that depict the details of near-future societies as seen through a hard-SF lens.

Our current project is a tabletop-RPG adaptation of the Utopian Confederation series, which is being simultaneously developed as a retro computer game by Cognitive Firewall LLC. Utopian Confederation is an “alternate future” RPG in which the island of Utopia described in Thomas More’s eponymous book actually existed – and eventually led humanity to fashion a peaceful, joyful, and unified global society that now, in the 22nd century, stands ready to take its first tentative step toward the stars – with the launch of a generation ship on a mission of scientific inquiry, spiritual exploration, and prospective colonization to the planets of the nearest star system, Arcana Centauri.

Our books are designed for people who love pondering every aspect of those not-quite-here but almost tangible worlds in which social robots serve as our coworkers and intimate companions, in which you don’t know how far you can trust what you see or feel or remember, because it could all just be a byproduct of your neural implant or illusions fabricated by a neurohacker. Worlds in which self-evolving computer viruses, nanorobotic swarms, sentient cryptocurrency, and other artificial life-forms linger in dark alleys and scurry across the Net. In which battles over access to neuroprosthetic enhancement, life extension technologies, and immersive VR utopias are fragmenting humanity into new strata of haves and have-nots. In which traditional human businesses struggle to compete with militarized megacorps and companies whose AGI CEOs need a millisecond to plot out thousand-year strategies that no human mind can fathom.

We do our best to merge two different spheres: those of passionate gaming and cutting-edge research. During the week, most of our authors work as professional scholars, futurologists, or management consultants whose studies of emerging technologies and the ongoing ‘posthumanization’ of society have been published in academic journals and by outlets like The MIT Press. But they’re all diehard gamers at heart, and when the weekend rolls around they get to throw aside their ‘real’ work, grab their rulebooks and character sheets, and immerse themselves in their favorite RPGs. Mnemoclave’s aim is to give such writers a chance to gather up all the ideas that were too esoteric or farfetched for more respectable publications, drop them into the game-alyzer, give it a spin, and see what comes out.

Our inaugural product line is the Posthuman Cyberware Sourcebook series, whose first volume offers an introduction to the use of neuroprostheses for sensory, cognitive, and motor enhancement and clarifies distinctions between posthuman and transhuman cyberware. It isn’t simply a tale of artificial eyes with telescopic night vision or non-humanoid cyborg bodies but also a blueprint for the development of neuroprosthetically enhanced imagination, emotions, and conscience and the creation of human-synthetic hive minds. The volume considers neuroprosthetic devices’ human hosts in their three roles as sapient minds, embodied organisms, and social and economic actors to explain how cyberware can be employed either as tools for personal empowerment and liberation or mechanisms of enslavement and even ‘zombification.’

Future books in the series will explore human-computer fusion and the processes of cyborgization; neural implant design; the emerging threats of brainhacking, bodyjacking, and digital-biological malware; information security mechanisms for neural implants; the cyborg as an enhanced professional operative; neuroprosthetically augmented organizations (from megacorps to military units); and the ‘neuroprosthetic society’ in both its utopian and dystopian flavors.