Role-Playing Games | 

   Short review: amusing concept, especially for one-shots, and some very nice mechanics and some very bad ones, but not particularly well-adapted to the game's concept. If you like game hacking, get it, otherwise leave it on the shelf.

   It's fairly close to Niven & Barnes's _Dream Park_ novels, or Pat Cadigan's _Mindplayers_ - playing a character in semi-organized dreams. That's mostly a meta-game excuse for the background, since any genre can be plunked down into it, often mixed genres, with characters from any other genre. On the few times I've run it, I've found it can absorb a lot of munchkinism and wish-fulfillment before breaking, but it's hard to maintain any kind of SOD with it.

   Physically, it has two forms: the original box set with three small white booklets (this packaging seems oddly familiar, heh) and a number of unbound sheets, or a full-size RPG notebook. Apparently the book version has more examples and art (there's almost no art in the boxed set, and what there is is cheezy dot-matrix MacPaint output), but is otherwise the same. The boxed set is only 100 pages total, including a GM's guide and sample adventure... brevity is the soul of wit, as Polonius said.

   Mechanically, it's a very simplified and yet baroque Hero - generic powers where you define the in-system effect with character points and then describe the special effects, but the powers are fairly limited. You can modify your character in play, using up your dream points. It uses only d10, mostly for percentiles.

   There are three character classes: Gadgeteer (ANY kind of tool-user - Conan is a Gadgeteer, as is Foxbat), Alterationist (shapeshifter/martial artist), and Invocationist (mage/priest/hacker), which have some limitations to enforce that tone, but mostly just have different costs for different powers, and they get one free level in one of the three skills.

   The stats are Imagination, Confidence, Ego, Reputation, and are all generated diffently and rated on their own scale, I suspect just to annoy players. There are three skills: Reality Control (Invocationists), Accuracy (Gadgeteers), and Defense (Alterationists). All other skills and stats are either special effects of powers or just character description.

   The combat and task resolution systems are percentiles, and require more math than you'd expect in a game about dreams (damage = (100% + (Attack - Defense) * 10%) * Xd10 <shudder>), and it uses a hit point system with no in-game flavoring, though HP are based on your current Dream Points, so as you spend them to change your character you get weaker, which is a nice setting-enforcing mechanic - if you alter too much in lucid dreaming, the dream gets insubstantial and you fade out of it.

   The adventure is not great, but does show how to get characters into a new dream adventure and how to organize one.

   Overall, I'd give it a Fair on the FUDGE scale as presented - many games would love to be this good. Many others are much better. If you want ideas to scavenge, though, it's Great.

   There are three supplements for Morpheus:

"Stuff Dreams Are Made Of"

Background information on the Morpheus Park and rules expansion.

"OPERATION: Hitler!"

"Dreams of Steel"

Adventures, by all reports fairly unimpressive.

	Morpheus "The Roleplaying System of the Mind's Eye"
	(c)1989 Devin Durham
	Propaganda Publishing
	proppub@ldd.net

Last modified: 96Dec03
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