Arthur Boff

Disclaimer

This game should not be taken as a slur or attack on the Catholic Church as it stands today. Nor do I seek to insult anybody’s religious beliefs. Aside from the details provided in the “Historical Overview” section, which I have tried to keep as accurate as possible, this game should be treated as a work of fiction which deals exclusively (and satirically) with the temporal power wielded by the Church in the Middle Ages as opposed to its spiritual authority.

Dictatus Papae is a compact game about the secular power of the Church in the Middle Ages. Players take on the role of scheming, worldly bishops seeking temporal power and riches, as well as the underlings and henchmen they deploy to get their way. There is a heavy emphasis on espionage and intrigue; it is through intrigue and conspiracy that one advances oneself in this corrupt world, and it is through espionage that one undoes one’s enemies intrigues, shatters their plans, and exposes their crimes. Essentially, this is a game about people committing horrible crimes, trying to get away with it, and spying on each other in order to report the misdeeds of their fellow clergymen.

While there were doubtless a good many genuinely devout, diligent, and spirituallyminded individuals working in the Church in the medieval period, the fact remains that there were also a great many greedy people who abused the power given them and pursued worldly privileges over spiritual accomplishments. These abuses would ultimately spell disaster for the Church in the form of the Protestant Reformation, after which the Church never quite regained the power or pre-eminence it enjoyed previously. Player characters in this game are part of this class of hypocritical clergymen who, if their activities become a matter of public record, might well one day be cited by Martin Luther as examples of corruption within the Church. It is vitally important to player characters that they maintain and bolster their air of integrity; failure to do so makes one hated by the public, an embarrassment to the Church, and a political sitting duck. Don’t be surprised if your fellow players’ characters exploit this situation!

Unlike many other roleplaying games, Dictatus Papae can be played in a co-operative or a competitive fashion. In the competitive game, the GM acts mainly as an impartial referee, and allows the machinations between the player characters to be the primary source of action within the game, although the GM should feel free to throw in a few external factors to keep things interesting and to shake up any peaceful status quo that the player characters reach. In the co-operative game, the GM’s role is inherently more adversarial, since the GM has to devise challenges and adversaries for the PCs to overcome; however, GMs should retain the spirit of impartiality proper to a referee, and should resist the temptation to massage events in order to produce an “interesting story”. This game is intended to be just that, a game, or at most an interesting simulation of medieval espionage, not a vehicle for creating stories.