Everything you need to know about Mementos but were afraid to ask—Part 2

We are back to talk more about our Mementos collectibles game. Our last post discussed what they are and their general purpose. This post will walk you through the technical steps for creating one.

Making a Memento

So Mementos kinda look like stickers. Sort of a throwback to sticker trading of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. We build a set of Mementos inside of a Memento Crafter, and every event at Remarkist has its own Crafter, which the host can access at the bottom of the event’s detail page.

Mementos are always associated with a specific hosted event, and its main host always releases them. So if you’d like to drop a Memento-set, you first need to schedule an event. And since anyone can host an event, anyone can create a Memento set.

Each event has only one slot available to release a set of Mementos. Hosts don’t have to use it, but if they do, that event page essentially serves as a vending machine for that particular Memento—it’s where collectors will first acquire (or mint) an edition from the set.

So how exactly do we create one? Why would we? And what would make a particularly appealing Memento? Let’s take a closer look.

Title

Mementos are a form of creative content, so you’ll want to give yours a title that draws the kind of interest or curiosity that a book title does. Keep it short and to the point. Include humor or inside jokes that most of your attendees or the broader fandom would get. Consider a title that feels exclusive to the fandom or your attendees—that draws members together under the banner of something they know well enough to get immediately.

Be very careful, though, to avoid copyright or trademark infringement. This title should be your creative work and completely transformative from the content it may celebrate. Don’t include character names or the names of unique creations within a story or intellectual property you don’t own.

For example, if your Memento was dropped at a watch party for Disney’s Bambi, don’t call your Memento “Bambi’s Courage.” Bambi is a trademark of Disney and represents a copyrighted character in a Disney-owned work. Rather consider calling it “A Deer’s Courage.” Use general nouns, concepts, or themes in your titles rather than proper names or unique creations from the story. Remarkists create commentary about the underlying aspects of another person’s creative work. Those underlying aspects do not have proper names and aren’t owned by anyone.

Description

This is where a host can get especially creative with their writing. Use the description section of a memento to share your reason for creating it. Give your Memento historical context that will resonate with curious digital archeologists decades from now. Or use the description field to create riddles and puzzles for attendees to unlock deeper secrets of your Mementos. You can use this description field to write a thought-provoking essay or analysis about the event and its content. You can expand those ideas into fictional explorations of its themes, like stories and poems.

Consider a series of Mementos that weaves a tale over many ultra-short chapters. Use this method to give your attendees an additional reason to return for more. But again, if you do get creative with some fandom-inspired fiction, focus on tropes, themes, and general elements. Avoid using copyrighted content within those stories, such as names or unique creative elements from the original work.

Visual Style

The look of a Memento is three parts: An icon, a background, and a border. Pretty simple. And it’s that simplicity that can make them absolutely beautiful. Again, they look like a sticker. Our icon catalog includes thousands of simple emoji-like designs covering just about every concept you can think of. And if we don’t have something you’re looking for, you can always design it and upload it to our icon catalog for you or others to use (we get into icon submitting in another post).

So when designing a Memento, it’s best to start with the icon and no background—your border always starts as a default black. Knowing what kind of icon you’ll be working with can help you pick the right color for your background and border.

For example, you might consider contrasting your background color with prominent colors in the icon. You can do this by keeping the background the same color as your icon but making it much darker or brighter. Or you can use complementary colors—if your icon has a lot of blue in it, consider picking a color from the opposite side of the color wheel, like orange, yellow, or red. Choose your border the same way. Look for small color accents in your image to guide you, or contrast your border with your background.

Picking the right color/image combination will help your Memento stand out. And if you’re unsure, ask other Memento makers to give you some second eyes.

Passwords

To claim a Memento edition, collectors must provide a correct password, which hosts distribute during or after the event, often in creative ways that inspire play and participation. Those keys are a special kind of content at Remarkist. If done right, these passwords can be puzzles that provide your attendees with hours—nay, days!—of “fun.”

Passwords can include any Unicode character found on a phone or computer, anywhere in the world, in any language pack—even Emojis. Passwords can include spaces, which means they can be passphrases. They are always case sensitive, meaning a capitalized letter is treated differently from an uncapitalized one. And they can contain all forms of punctuation. But take care with this last point. Some forms of punctuation look very similar to others but are considered different in passwords. Take, for example, an apostrophe. Some keyboards default to the curved one ( ’ ), and some give you this straight one ( ' ). If you use an apostrophe in your password, consider that some members trying to crack your puzzle may simply be using the wrong apostrophe because that’s what their phone or computer is forcing on them. They may be hitting their head against the wall for no reason, having essentially cracked it but to no avail. There are several punctuation marks to be careful of, especially those that are auto-corrected. An ellipse can be either three periods or a single ellipse character. The password would distinguish the two.

Number of Editions

You’ll want to choose the number of editions that can be claimed in your Memento set. The lower that amount, the rarer your set will be. When your attendees claim your memento, their edition will have a number based on the order in which they were claimed, so lower editions are often coveted since they suggest the owners cracked the password early.

Density

All Mementos are crafted using our in-game KRNL token. A host creating a Memento for an event must spend some amount of KRNL to bring the Memento into existence. The amount of KRNL spent across all editions in the set will determine the density of each Memento edition in that set. 

For example, if you are creating a set of 100 Memento Editions and spend 100 KRNL on the set, each Edition in the set will have a density of 1 KRNL (100 KRNL ÷ 100 Editions = 1 KRNL per Edition). If you create a set of 25 Memento Editions and spend 1000 KRNL, each Memento in the set will have a density of 40 KRNL (1000 KRNL ÷ 25 Editions = 40 KRNL per Edition).

Why does density matter? Well, just like our treasured keepsakes in the real world, Mementos are perishable. They crumble over time like the greatest past works of art and literature. How fast or slow they degrade depends on their density. The lower the density, the weaker the Memento and the faster it erodes. The higher the density, the longer it takes to erode since its rate is slower, and there’s more to erode. Some Mementos can crumble to dust within a week, while others will take years or even decades to disappear.

This degrading aspect of a Memento requires its owner to spend KRNL to restore it. Depending on its density, restoring might be needed regularly, occasionally, or infrequently. Most of the KRNL spent to restore a Memento goes to its creator and becomes a form of micro-patronage that eventually offsets the cost they spent to create it, helping them fund even greater works in the future.

But if a Member decides not to restore a Memento and they leave it too long, the Memento will eventually crumble to dust and disappear from Remarkist entirely.

One way to think about density is the material the Memento is made of. A Memento with a density of 1 KRNL is like a little badge made of onion skin. That thing will start to crack and crumble in days if you so much as touch it. Whereas a 10,000 KRNL density memento is like a little diamond, it’ll take thousands of years to degrade… yet it is still degrading slowly but surely.

A Memento’s density determines one of 5 Memento Classes: Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, and Legendary. As the names suggest, these titles are a quick way to determine the rarity of a Memento. As of this writing, most Mementos are Common Class, with only a few Rare Mementos in existence. Epic and Legendary Mementos have not yet surfaced.

Here are the density ranges and their corresponding rarity:

1-99 KRNL = Common

100-999 KRNL = Uncommon

1000-9999 KRNL = Rare

10,000-99,999 KRNL = Epic

100,000+ KRNL = Legendary

But most of all, the density of a Memento determines its power to boost your KRNL harvests. We’ve talked about harvest-boosting before. In short, Members can showcase four Mementos in their profile. Various configurations will increase the amount they earn from attending events. In general, the higher the Memento density, the higher the boost. Memento boosting counter-balances the cost to restore them.

Crafting Fee

In addition to the amount of KRNL a host puts into a set of Mementos, they must also pay a crafting fee. That fee is based on the Mementos' density and the number of editions in a set. The lower the number of Mementos, the higher the crafting fee.

This fee is meant to add extreme difficulty to low-edition sets, making them even rarer on the system. It also discourages member cliques from using their KRNL balances to build extremely powerful Mementos that give them an unfair boost advantage over others.

Composability

A Composable Memento is made up of other Mementos—meaning those who claim it will need to use certain Mementos they have collected from that same host in the past. Doing so will actually meld those mementos into the new one, like a Voltron of Mementos. Those smaller parts will disappear from the Memento catalog, and the new Composable version will have the density of all the Mementos that were used to claim it—along with any additional KRNL added by the host.

To create a Composable Memento, you just need to switch on the feature in the Memento Crafter and designate at least one other Memento you previously crafted as a requirement to claim it. Although to make it “fun” (i.e., challenging), you’ll probably want to choose several. The Crafter will display their total combined density. You will still need to add at least one additional KRNL to craft the set, but this Composable Memento can get most of its density from the ones used to claim it.

For example, you might decide to host an event series of eight episode watches over eight weeks. Each week you drop a Memento to commemorate that particular watch. You don’t spend much—perhaps 200 KRNLs across sets of 10. So these weekly Mementos would have a 20 KRNL density, which isn’t a lot. But on the 8th week, you drop a composable Memento that also has ten editions and also costs 200 across the full set but requires composing the previous seven your attendees collected. The base density of this composable is 20 KRNLs, just like the others, but it also includes their density: 20 x 7 Mementos = 140 KRNL. So the total density of this final Memento is 160 KRNL, which is considerably stronger than the others, slower to degrade, and a better boost.

Composable Mementos are a great way to reward loyal holders of your past, lower-density Mementos, some of which may have been a struggle or expensive to upkeep. They provide a good reason for your collectors to keep polishing your earliest, weakest Mementos. If you show them that you’re an active, playful Member with ideas and plans for your future events, they’re likely to expect a Composable is on the way. Give it to them. A “thank you” for believing in your ideas and creativity.

And that’s it. That’s really all you need to know to build your first Memento. And the Memento Crafter walks you through most of this anyway.

But it doesn’t end there. Once you’ve built a Memento, you’ll need to drop it, and your attendees will want to claim it and use it. Move on to Part 3 of this series for information about the approval process and permissible content creation. In future posts of this series, we’ll talk about how to release your Memento and all the things your collectors can do with it at Remarkist.