Adventure starter: Amnesia

[Sporemine]

The world brightens, warming the area around you. You slowly open your eyes, light flooding in. As you begin to sit up. Without even being aware of it, your hand instinctively moves to the hilt of your weapon. You sit up to see the sun streaming through the empty town, illuminating the charred husks of the houses that once stood there. As you are observing this you realise you have no idea who you are or how you came to be where you are. By some strange force you are drawn to the center of town where you see several other people like yourself. They are all confused but still drawn to the small carving set in the center of the town. The carving is familiar but you can't figure out why. As you reach the carving you look down at your hand and see the ring. Everything goes black.

Hello people,

The new adventure that i'm currently working on begins with the characters waking up in the middle of the street in abandoned and burned town.

They remember nothing.

All about their past has been blocked. Their friends, family, memories. Even their names are lost to them. All they remember is how to fight to survive. After waking up, they are drawn to a small stone carving, set on a stone in the center of the burned remains of the town. They black out.


I need feedback

-Sporemine

 

[Nail]

I've done something similar.

Total amnesia, starting at the *bottom* of a huge dungeon....and they have to get out.

It's a neat premise. As I went with it, here are the design questions I ran into (in no particular order):

• What stages will the PCs go through as they discover themselves?
• Do the PCs dream of their former lives? What other ways can their former lives be communicated to the PCs?
• How much do others know of their past lives?
• At what level will they "know everything"?
• At what level do they have to be to defeat the Big Bad that caused their amnesia, etc?
• How can they make allies, and yet the allies not tell them "everything"?
• How will the PCs know who to trust?
• What's the final payoff?

 

[Silverwave]

You do realize the amnesia thing is an awfull cliché? It's nowhere near original. Now, nowadays "original" is a lost word since everything have already been made, there's a way to take a cliché and turn it into something interesting. You should ask yourself : how can I suprise my players with this.

Forget about making one of the player character the vilain behind the scheme... already done hundreds of times.

Forget about Total Recall kind of scheme where the PCs removed themselves their memories and find pieces of clues that lead them to regain their memory and finish the job.

Forget about a cataclysm or a god's action that removed their memories.

And please, don't make them clones or reincarnated/resurected.

Think of something more interesting. I'm not or great help here because I've no idea how you can make this interesting, but there must be something!

 

[Neubert]

I don't necessarily think that because it is cliche that it shouldn't be used. Especially if it haven't been done in your group before.
While I agree with you Silverwave, in that nothing is original anymore, then I actually found several of your "ideas" to be interesting, simply because it is not something anyone in my group has tried. It is becoming increasingly harder to be original and I think there may be too much of a focus to give players something they have never seen before in all aspects of the game. If you have a great adventure idea in mind that requires the use of a cliche, then go for it. I don't think we need to reinvent ourselves every day.

The questions by Nail are very interesting, and the last question made me think: "What is the payoff of this start?".
In order to use this, you need a reason for the characters to have amnesia and a payoff for the players. It sounds like you already have that, as you mentioned that their past has been blocked - could you elaborate on how and by whom?

 

[Pale Jackal]

I agree with Neubert. One thing you might want to do is ask your players if they mind doing "the whole amnesia thing." After all, if everyone's okay with meeting in a tavern, sometimes it's just easier to do it that way. (I could also see some players disliking the amnesia plot device: in some ways, it removes control and means the PC can't have any real history to draw on.) Finally, the twist or pay-off doesn't have to be great, though you should try to give it some thought. Even if the twist is fairly predictable, there's a lot to be said for good execution.