IMPERIUM5 offers an experience centred on existential doubt, technological espionage and high political tension. Far from a mere accumulation of futuristic implants, the game stages a post-biological humanity that has traded its flesh for synthetic bodies powered by plasma. That transition came at a terrible cost: the Quantum Crash erased the history of the planet and the individual memories of billions of living beings.

Around the table, the narrative is built on the gradual discovery of hidden truths. The game rejects the traditional model in which the game master knows everything in advance while the table gropes in the dark: here, the game master discovers the revelations as they go, by reading the scenarios and following the initiatives taken by the Entente. The mechanics sustain this constant friction through the reality dice, which measure how the environment reacts, and the entropy die, whose rolls tip without compromise towards a dazzling opportunity or a major complication. Survival is not just a matter of firepower: it demands preserving one’s identity against the alterations of reality.

Colonisation, the fall and the ReBorn pact

The planet has not always been this maze of towers and circuits. Humans came to colonise this world several centuries ago, bringing with them a technology that defied the imagination, before the Quantum Crash shattered it all: networks destroyed, memories erased, civilisations beheaded. To ward off outright annihilation, the theocratic organisation Mû imposed the ReBorn, a founding pact ratified by the surviving powers. Through its administrative arm, the General Administration, Mû restructured society from top to bottom: methodical distribution of populations, planning of resources and a monopoly on the ReBuild, the technology that regenerates destroyed bodies in plasma vats. Under the pretext of guaranteeing civil peace and the well-being of all, the ReBorn above all locked the survivors into a programmed routine in which the past no longer has any standing.

The Stacks, the Nobles and the artificial ecosystem

The original ground of the world has vanished beneath the Stacks, a colossal pile of urban and industrial strata spread over kilometres of height. In the deepest levels, where the air grows heavy with toxic particles, live the Morlocks: biological communities endemic to the planet, marginalised and resistant to the plasma model, who live off the looting and recycling of the technological debris left behind by the colonists.

At the top of this edifice stand the Pyramids. These megastructures, five kilometres across at the base, are the exclusive sanctuaries of the Nobles, singular survivors from before the cataclysm, endowed with immense privileges and disconcerting quantum powers. In the skies glide the Mantas, gigantic collectors, living or mechanical, tasked with draining pollution from the air and gathering residual plasma, while the silhouettes of the ancient Titan Ships recall the scale of an outsized civilisation. Throughout all of this matter flows the Wave, an energetic and informational medium whose abyssal strata still hold wild algorithms and consciousnesses from the world before.

Five Imperiums vie for this partitioned world. Alpha dominates the media flows and the virtualisation of consciousness. Dreadlim imposes its authority through military discipline and a heavy arsenal. Deadlidus shapes civic ideology and mass indoctrination. Solarium pushes back the limits of nanotechnology applied to plasma. Kalab weaves the web of espionage and invisible surveillance.

These nations avoid the open wars that would destroy the planet’s infrastructure and instead wage a muffled predation centred on allegiance and the census of their populations. At the summit of each empire watch the Archontes. These mythical figures, preserved in inviolable sanctuaries, guide their respective blocs through cryptic impulses and pursue designs that no one can decipher. To channel the frictions of this permanent rivalry, the General Administration oversees an organised crime ranked into strict categories, using the crime syndicates as unofficial regulators of the grey zones.

Instead of playing mere henchwomen or anonymous mercenaries, the PaT* form an Entente. They play operatives who have seen through the illusion of the ReBorn and who act as an independent cell, recognised by the powers as a genuine geopolitical force on the ground.

The characters are rooted in complementary backgrounds and skills. A table might bring together a former elite soldier of the Dreadlim, versed in urban combat and assisted armour but haunted by missions erased from her service record; an archaeo-hacker from the Stacks, able to plug her consciousness into the forgotten frequencies of the Wave to unlock forbidden data caches; a nano-bio-engineer from Solarium, a virtuoso of plasma biology and clandestine bodily reconfiguration; or a defector investigator from the General Administration, master of institutional arcana and social manipulation, who rebelled after finding mass disappearances in the civic registers.

The Entente is no accident: the characters are bound together by a shared founding event, whether an incident shared during a ReBuild, the discovery of a proto-technological artefact or a blood debt incurred in the lower depths.

The PaT* do not endure the universe: they are the foundation and the engine of the world. It is their choices that determine the course of events, and they build their own stories through the initiatives they impose on the ground.

In practice, the characters infiltrate ultra-secure industrial complexes to steal research protocols or vats of purified plasma. They dive into the hostile mazes of the Stacks to wrest relics from before the Crash from the claws of rival looters. They manoeuvre amid the diplomatic intrigues and hushed salons of the high-altitude palaces, facing imperial envoys or the lieutenants of the crime syndicates.

They are also led to decide to collaborate with unpredictable Nobles in order to pass the airtight locks of millennia-old pyramids. The characters must navigate the dangerous currents of the Wave, secure their bodily backups and face the psychological repercussions of their successive reconstructions, seeking to uncover the secret of their origins without sacrificing their free will.

The universe of IMPERIUM5 is rooted in a dialogue between several foundational works:

Dan Simmons with Hyperion, Ilium and Olympos for the immensity of the architectures, the cosmic enigmas defying understanding, and this aristocracy of Nobles comparable to decadent demiurges wielding an incomprehensible technology.

Philip K. Dick with Ubik for the permanent doubt about the reality of memories, the crumbling of matter and this bodily survival turned into a commercial service run by great consortia.

Ridley Scott with Blade Runner for the visual atmosphere of the Stacks, the night pierced by neon advertisements, the rain on metal hulls and the existential dilemma of artificial beings searching for their own humanity.

Alejandro Jodorowsky and Juan Giménez with The Metabarons for the space baroque, the immensity of the ships and this singular alliance of technological gigantism and implacable rituals.

The role-playing game Mutants & Masterminds for its cinematic approach to action and its handling of quantum abilities that spectacularly alter the protagonists’ surroundings.

The game is calibrated for a table of one game master and 3 to 5 PaT*.

Sessions call for slots of 3 to 6 hours, or more for groups wishing to extend the phases of investigation, exploration and diplomatic confrontation.

While IMPERIUM5 allows short games or one-shot demonstration games built around a precise mercenary contract, it unfolds its full richness in the campaign format. A campaign is a series of scenarios that respond directly to the PaT*’s questions, giving them the framework they need to build the trajectory of their characters, dig up their buried memories and gradually uncover the secrets of the world.

PaT* (Person at the Table): term for a player taking part in the session. In the French original it is deliberately used in the feminine, which places the table’s imagination, choices and responsibility at the centre of the narrative engine.

ReBuild: Technological procedure run by the General Administration, making it possible to reconstitute the bodily vehicle of a dead or wounded individual using plasma and saved memory data.

ReBorn: Foundational treaty and set of organic laws signed after the Quantum Crash between Mû and the empires, framing the reconstruction of society, civic reconditioning and the distribution of resources.

Proto-Tech: Technologies predating the Quantum Crash, of colossal power and able to alter the laws of physics, now used without any theoretical understanding by human societies.

Neo-Tech: Industrial technologies manufactured by the present-day empires, functional and commonplace, but unable to rival the performance of Proto-Tech.

Stacks: Gigantic vertical piles of architectural and industrial strata forming the urban backbone of the planet over several kilometres of height.

Entente: Solidary cell formed by the characters, recognised by institutions and empires as an autonomous mercenary group able to weigh on the established order.

Wave: Global physical and electromagnetic medium that runs through matter, carries energy and links nanites, computer terminals and consciousnesses.

Archontes: Supreme and enigmatic rulers of the five Imperiums, entrenched in inviolable sarcophagi and guiding their nations through cryptic directives.

Morlocks: Biological communities endemic to the planet, relegated to the lowest levels of the Stacks and living on the margins of plasma civilisation.