Morpheus: The Roleplaying System of the Mind's Eye! (Boxed Set) (1989)

Designer's Notes

First off, thank you for buying this game! It represents over three years of work, including a considerable amount of play testing by a large number of people.

One of the key results I was looking for when designing Morpheus was to have a playable, enjoyable game that was very full without forcing the person who wants to play to read 50 book with 150 pages each in them. I think that I have achieved this. The idea to base Morpheus on dreams was made from the very start and the entire game was designed around dreams. Initially, Morpheus was strictly a two player game, where one person would set up the "dream" and another person would travel through it. This worked well enough but lacked the excitement and fun of multi-player games, and so I began looking around for ideas to help incorporate multiple players into a single dream sequence. Eventually the Morpheus "Mind Park" was formed, and things really began to move then. Although in the Mind Park you are not truly dreaming the adventures that you partake in, it does all exist in your head, and the level of imagination you can muster is a key factor to your survivability. Because you adventure in computer generated worlds that exist only in your head reality kind of has the tendency to go flying out the window, and this opens up immense possibilities for the gamer. When writing the rules for Morpheus, I did not try to simulate reality at all, which is why I don't need as many rules as most of the other games. The rules you see are merely guidelines set down by Gaming Central at Morpheus, not an attempt to duplicate the real world on paper. This is why you won't find immense tables dealing with the amount and kind of spells a second level prist an cast ... I simply didn't need them.

Referees should find themselves totally free to create what they will. The only restrictions put on a Referee is that he be consistent, and make the game reasonably fair and possible to win. Other than that, he can do pretty much whatever he wants. If a refereee wants to make a wizard that can turn people into frogs 4 times a day with no chance of missing, then so be it!

Also, the possibility of playing characters that are not necessarily connected to the adventrue that they are participating in is very interesting to me, and to everyone who has played. I happen have a character called "Mr.Big" who is sort of pseudo 1930's gangster, and he has been in adventures in fantasy/magic worlds and it was a lot of fun! Most of the natives perceived him as an eccentric but powerful wizard with some odd habits and a funny accent.

In any event, enjoy yourself! The things that you can do with Morpheus is almost endless and I hope you have fun with it for a long, long time!

(Verbatim from Designer's Notes in the boxed edition)