For many of my classes, I worked on building a world called “Spirie.” The world of Spirie is filled with many people, but not all of these people are created equal. For the past two thousand years, only 1% of Spirie’s population has been able to use the full extent of their brains. This divides the world into two types of people, the freethinkers and the unfree. With this world, I created a tabletop RPG titled Cognition Cavalry.

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I was inspired to make this world because I wanted to explore making a world where typical game NPC behaviour was normal for the population. In this RPG, the players play as freethinkers with full use of their free will, while many of the NPCs are unfree. They do not need to eat or drink; they walk in patterns, and they say lines of dialogue over and over again when asked. They often ask freethinkers to do work for them even though they should be capable of doing it themselves.

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I themed many of the systems of this game around the brain and psychology, as well as playing around with the freethinker vs. unfree theme-ing. To create your character, the players can complete a quiz to determine how freethinking their character is. Having a high freethinking character gives the character more skill points to use, but players can play as unfree if they’d like. Skill categories are themed around parts of the brain such as motor skills, language, etc.