You wake up with no memory, now what?

[Abstraction]

We just started a new game this last weekend. I'm the DM. I didn't prepare anything because it wasn't sure what the game would be. So, I pulled out an idea that I had mulled over. During character creation, I started up with essentially this:

You wake up to a light, cold rain falling upon you. You are in some kind of meadow. You open your eyes, look up and see blue sky and clouds. A voice ten or fifteen feet away says "You're finally awake. You all are late sleepers." The speaker is an older human man, grizzled with thick hairy arms, bushy hair and a salt-and-pepper beard. You realize that you do not know where you are. You don't even know who you are.

The rest of the game session was just character creation, so that was as far as I got.

So, the characters awake on a mountain island with their memories taken from them. Why?

Some ideas of mine:

Everyone on this island outside the mountain wakes up every morning with no memories.

The guy is another "captive". He's been awake for hours and has had a look around. Also, he has a few things carved into his skin as a way to remember things from day to day (seen Memento?)

The characters should have some way to recover their memories within about three sessions or so before they get sick of the idea.

So, any ideas to help a guy out?

 

[Slife]

Throwing out ideas here:

Pixies can cause memory loss. Swarms of evil (Half-fiend?) pixies could work
Perhaps they only lose memories when they sleep...
There's also some moss in the EN world Creature Catalog that erases memories

Maybe their memories aren't erased, but stolen...

 

[Harmon]

One of the ideas I had for a campaign started with everyone in heavily damaged clothes, armor, weapons that were once Masterworked and now are dinged and damaged to the point of being use able.

THe wizard finds that his spellbooks are damaged and torn, with a few 9th lvl spells as well as some 5th and such with almost all the first level spells.

Eventually the party would discover that they were adventurers some thirty years ago, became powerful enough to take on some Lesser God-ling creature and no one had heard from them sense.

During the battle with the critter they got hit with some mind wiping power and cast out of the godlings realm, due to the fight the baddy was trying to regain power enough to make his move on the world again. The PCs would of course make their move to stop him (least I hoped they would).

It was just an idea I was gonna try, but not gonna happen now.

 

[Voadam]

New incarnations. They are ancient heroes incarnated into mortal flesh, called back from the great wheel of time by a druid who needs them to fight a great evil he himself cannot fight. Have the druid be a physically wasted Str 3, Con 3 Dex 6 wreck of his former self from confronting the evil. He used a True ritual to call them back (Relics and Rituals) and is now mostly there as a source of knowledge, direction, and healing for the party, as he is too broken to directly confront the enemy.

Now give them a chance to make 14th-20th level characters with heroic backstories. Their former selves. Occasionally run flashback games of their high level mythic former selves for a night or when only part of the group shows up.

 

[ruleslawyer]

Er, wow! That rocks!

 

[Shemeska]

I've used something similar in my campaigns before:

Campaign #1 - one PC began the game waking up with no memory and only a sword and his clothes (and a glowing gem in his ankle) in the gatetown bordering upon the Gray Waste. Recovering his memory and what actually happened to him was interwoven with the plot for the next year or so.

Campaign #2 - all the PCs woke up on a cold metal floor in a maze-like tunnel system (in Acheron), the faint odor of Styx water in the air, and no memory of how they got there or who the other PCs in the room with them were.

_____


Amnesiacs are a yummy plot device, and you've got something interesting in the works here. I like the other guy being a 'captive' as well, but it's always fun to play with the PCs notions and perhaps lead them to think that he might know more than he does, even if he doesn't. Perhaps he was behind it all, whatever is going on, but has lost his own memory as well and now the experiment is running blind. It might be fey, it might be fiends, it might be a group of wizards behind it all... the PCs might be dead already. Lots of ways to go with it.

Let us know where you eventually do go from here.

 

[WayneLigon]

I've done something like this a couple times. Some ideas:

There is something on the island that eats memories like we eat food.

Their memories had to be taken from them, or Villain X would be able to find them via telepathy. Villain X wants to kill all of them very, very badly and another group or person desperately needs them to stay alive for some purpose.

 

[Delemental]

The island destroys memories. The longer you stay, the more of your experiences and 'self' you lose. Stay too long, and you essentially become a sort of living zombie. Several nations send their worst criminals to the island as the penultimate form of punishment. The old man could be associated with the PC's, or a random criminal who has been there for less time and thus still remembers a bit more (but could have less than honorable intentions).

Why are they there? The PCs were former great heroes, as described in other scenarios above, but they came to the island on purpose. They had learned something so great, and so terrible, that they had to purge themselves of the knowledge, perhaps for the good of the world.

In the short term, they have to get off the island before they lose too much memory and their sense of self dissolves. Long term, the PCs go about trying to figure out why they were on the island in the first place... eventually leading them to relearn the terrible dark secret and the fact that they chose to go there.

 

[BOZ]

There's also some moss in the EN world Creature Catalog that erases memories

Maybe their memories aren't erased, but stolen...

indeed! the whole party got attacked by a colony of Obliviax and lost.

of course, they wouldn't be total amnesiacs, just lose the memories of the past 24 hours... but if you wanted to, say, create a super-obliviax that completely drains all memories, you can do so...

 

[Frostmarrow]

The characters are in fact modern day Americans who has been tranferred from our world to a magical kingdom. Such transferrence is of course extremely rare and a side-effect is complete memory loss.

The old geezer has been told in a prophecy that heroes will come from beyond and rid the magical kingdom from the evil self-appointed tyrant who now rules this once so beautiful place.

The only way to recover the memory is by using skills and have flashbacks about using the same (or equivalent skills) in our modern world. For example: Bob uses healing on a comrade and suddenly sees light green robes and red crosses in his mind's eye.