Planning a new campaign!

[adam500]

Long time no see forum. Some of you may remember me from a Campaign thread AGES ago (or right now, if you have a TARDIS) which lies incomplete, and it's incomplete follow-up. Well.. I'm hoping lightning doesn't strike three times.

I have an idea for a new dwaitas campaign, and wanted to fish for some ideas and opinions. See if I'm crazy or if my idea might work.

So the premise is that a band of people wake up in a strange place. None of them remember quite who they are or where they're from, but they at least retain some of their skills (first aid, knowledge, etc). As the situation worsens it becomes clear to them all that they have to work together to survive, and in the end they'll gain a means of travel which one or more of them may have limited understanding of... and be off to other adventures with an over-arching goal of discovering their identities.

Obviously if I let the players do normal character creation it takes some of the mystery out of this, but I'm unsure whether they will accept randomly assigned pre-made characters either, so a happy medium to solve this issue would be nice.

I also need to figure out how disparate figures (including possibly a Time Lord/Gallifreyan) wound up in this situation, and why. Who removed their memories? Are their memories even really gone, or is their poor recollection a result of shifting timelines surrounding each of them?

Has anyone ever tried anything like this and have insights, or does anyone have any thoughts or ideas they could share?

[Escher]

The characters have all had their memories erased because…


1. They are all Time Lords and used their Chameleon Arches to transform themselves into human form.

How did they escape Gallifrey? Why transform themselves?


2. Memory Worm. They had their memories erased by being exposed willingly or unwillingly to a Memory Worm.
Why? For What Purpose? To protect themselves, someone or something? To hide?


3. Time. Their memories were erased/altered through a temporal effect after some calamity or purposeful event.
This happened because…who knows?


4. They didn’t lose their memories, because the characters are:

-Clones, Robots or constructs of some kind.

-Part of a dream.

-They are all aspects of one character's psyche (The Doctor?) and ‘reality’ is within that person’s mind. Personally, I'd go with this last one, just to see the look on your player's faces when they realise the truth.

[Catsmate]

Interesting premise. I haven't done anything along these lines, except for a one-off CoC scenario (C7's  My Little Sister Wants You to Suffer) but it's been done in a few films/books (e.g. Corwin and Jason Bourne), though usually just the protagonist is amnesiac. ST:TNG did it rather well in the episode Conundrum, where the entire crew dad their memories erased by Sinister Aliens

As for character creation, you could get each player to create a character that's played by another player, or if you can have them created by others entirely. Or have the players select some proportion of the skills but not their background.

Are you planning to introduce a TARDIS, or similar vehicle, or will the PCs use some other device to travel? Something like the Matrix used in the old TimeLords RPG for example? It was a small device (an unusually dense icosahedron) with telepathic control that allowed time/dimensional travel by teleportation.


Sources of the amnesia.
1. Memories accidentally erased by some alien device.
This could be the result of a previous (forgotten) adventure, perhaps at the moment of their greatest victory the object of their quest was responsible, a Key to Time level artefact perhaps or some other piece of Clarketech that uses a telepathic interface.

• Perhaps one of the "party" is in fact their antagonist, a Master like villain who's also lost his/her memories and now joins them. Will he have an epiphany or return to his evil ways?
  
• Maybe the powerful artefact is still in their possession, without it's possessor knowing what it is? Perhaps it deliberately erased their memories to hide itself from possible misuse.
  

2. Memories deliberately erased.
Conundrum used this, for a specific reason that probably won't fit a Who campaign. But of course it could be modified. The main questions are Who and Why. What's the purpose behind the erasure?

• Perhaps the party is being manipulated, memories erased they're being used to perform a quest for a major villain (Master/Rani type) little knowing that the clues they find are being planted and one of their number is a traitor...
• Maybe the leader of the part erased their memories; they'd discovered something that has to be hidden from the universe (perhaps one of those stray bits of Clarketech that litter the Whoniverse, the Hand of Omega for example) and took the desperate risk of erasing all their memories. ST:TNG also used a variant of this in Clues
  

Or the group may be (relatively) normal humans (perhaps including a George and a Time Lord scion) who've stumbled over something and had their memories erased by Torchwood or similar. This has more of a modern day conspiracy thriller fell to it though.


3. Malfunctioning gadget
Maybe it was all an accident. Perhaps their TARDIS is on the blink and a telepathic circuit malfunction caused the problem. Of course they now have to figure this out, and also restore their memories. Preferably to the correct person.
The EU novel Timewyrm: Genesis used this in the opening chapter as an excuse for an exposition scene; Ace found herself completely unaware of her identity and her relationship with Doctor⁷ and the TARDIS.

• Maybe it's linked to the TARDIS's telepathic language translation facility and the longer they're away from the TARDIS the more they recall. Didn't one of the FASA scenarios feature a TARDIS model prone to such problems?
  
• Likewise if your go with a Matrix or similar device it could also be problematic, after all Designer tech is good but it's several billion years old.
  

4. Time reaction
You suggest the lost memories might be the result "of shifting timelines surrounding each of them". I like this and I've used something like it myself, especially for a couple of characters who were accidentally erased from history while still existing (they just lack parents, births and similar). Gandalf was one of them.
Perhaps the party were caught in the backwash from time altering, still living without actually being born. A good excuse for distributing a few points worth of Feel The Turn of the Universe and Vortex perhaps.

• I recall one time travel TV series that featured a portal linking the then modern day to a period decades earlier; the protagonists didn't know that one of them had 'previously' travelled into the past and was stranded there, moving forward in time the slow way. He manipulated events, even causing a couple of people to be born just to help him. Maybe the party are leftover from such manipulations of time?
  
• I borrowed some of this from Heinlein's The Number of the Beast; when the universe hopping party return home they find that the universe has erased them.
  

One last point, don't forget the impact of artificial memories, diaries, journals, blogs, tablets, cameras et cetera. These could be useful in directing the players (or manipulating them) but might short-circuit things. Perhaps the effect tat caused the amnesia also fried them.


Hope this helps.

[Catsmate]

Sept 16, 2014 10:48:21 GMT Escher said:

1. They are all Time Lords and used their Chameleon Arches to transform themselves into human form.

How did they escape Gallifrey? Why transform themselves?

Possibly a field research group of junior Time Lords, or even mere Academy students, who were away from Gallifrey. They were hidden by their mentor who realised it was their best hope to survive.

Sept 16, 2014 10:48:21 GMT Escher said:

2. Memory Worm. They had their memories erased by being exposed willingly or unwillingly to a Memory Worm.
Why? For What Purpose? To protect themselves, someone or something? To hide?

I'd forgotten about the Memory Worm. Torchwood had Retcon and Azmael selectively suppressed/erased the memories of Romulus and Remus using a device referred to in the Sixth Doctor Sourcebook as Amnesia Discs.

Sept 16, 2014 10:48:21 GMT Escher said:

3. Time. Their memories were erased/altered through a temporal effect after some calamity or purposeful event.
This happened because…who knows?

I like this option. There's certainly precedent in Mawdryn Undead.

Sept 16, 2014 10:48:21 GMT Escher said:

4. They didn’t lose their memories, because the characters are:

-Clones, Robots or constructs of some kind.

Interesting. I hadn't thought of this, though it's pretty popular in SF. Perhaps the process that created Jenny was involved? Or they're unknowing Auton/Dalek/Sontaran duplicates. Or Flesh.

[starkllr]

As far as generating characters, I have a thought. A few years ago, I was in a campaign (near-future World of Darkness-ish) where all the PC's started off as normal mortal humans, and in one-on-one prologue adventures with the gM, each
PC had a supernatural experience (turned into a vampire, discovered they were psychic, etc). The GM gave us the option of choosing or letting us get surprised by whatever he chose (with some veto power - I didn't want to play a vampire or werewolf, but anything else was fair game, for example).

You could let your players design their character as far as appearance and some skills, what they have in their possession when the game starts, etc and then surprise them with their identity (maybe basing some of it on what they tell you they're wearing, carrying, etc when they wake up as the game starts).

[Catsmate]

What did you think of the Time Heist episode? Possible source of material?

[Catsmate]

Interestingly the new series of Castle uses the amnesiac protagonist mechanism as it's backstory. Richard Castle was kidnapped (apparently) on the way to his wedding at the end of the last season and reappears floating in a small boat, sans two months of memories. OK it's clearly an attempt at a unifying theme for the series (as the previous seasons used the murder of Beckett's mother et cetera) but it was revealed in the second episode that Castle himself may have requested the erasure of his memories, for reasons unstated.