Jared Sorensen first expanded his ideas for a
live action role-playing game into his first rule set available to the public, the
Memento Mori Theatricks (1996) LARP for
Vampire: The Masquerade. Sorensen registered memento-mori.com on March 26, 1998 initially to serve as the home for the game
Pulp Era (1998), which he designed with James Carpio and Jon Richardson, and about two years later he would start to use the site to host the majority of his games and ideas for games. Sorensen had added roughly 20 games and game ideas to the Memento Mori website by 2001, although many of them were unfinished and unplayable. Sorensen produced
Schism in July 2001 to be the first of five "mini-supplements" that would publish for
Sorcerer, and as his first commercial book he initially made the 36-page black & white PDF available on his Memento Mori website. Sorensen moved toward making Memento Mori a professional publisher by late 2001, and focused on three completed games by releasing commercial PDFs of
InSpectres (2002), the
Mad Max-influenced game
octaNe (2002), and the b-horror movie game
Squeam (2002), and along with
Schism, they became the foundation to make a commercial enterprise out of Memento Mori. For the next two years, Memento Mori sold PDFs using the indie field innovator Forge Bookshelf. Memento Mori also began to publish PDFs by other authors, including
Against the Reich! (2003) by Paul Elliott (an expansion for
octaNe), and
Le Mon Mouri (2003) by Sean Demory. Sorensen paused role-playing game production through Memento Mori as he redirected his creative energy to development work for
Dungeons & Dragons Online (2006) and
The Lord of the Rings Online (2007). ==References==