Help me build on this scenario idea

[Tonguez]

The PCs go through a portal 'to another world' and on searching the area come across strangely familiar items and nearby human(oid) bones. They look through the items (and identify the bones) and suddenly realise that the bones they are looking at are their own remains!

What happens next? How did the bones get there? What adventure is in store? Have you ever started an adventure with the PCs discoverinf their own dead bodies?

(NB this idea came to me in a dream and probably involve modern timetravellers, however feel free to use what ever setting you wish to develop the scenario)

 

[STARP_Social_Officer]

If it were me, there's a scenario I'd explore. I'd use a similar plot device to that in Doug Naylor's "Last Human", which was a (darker) Red Dwarf novel.

I'd have the PCs stumbling upon the bodies of all but one of them, the corpses having been dead a shorter time (say a few weeks). They haven't travelled in time, but crossed into a parallel universe. In this universe, things are basically the same...except that one of them has suffered some different past that has caused him to become a murderous psychopath. His counterpart has murdered his comrades (you can decide why), and it's their bodies the PCs find.

From there, you could go wherever you liked. The evil version of the PC could cross over into the PCs' home universe, causing trouble there, or the PCs could pursue him across the parallel universe and discover alternate versions of others.

If you really wanted to shake things up, you could have the evil version replace the real PC, played, of course, by the same player. That's always fun.

The problem being, of course, that there are cliches you may not want to wander into with this scenario. "Evil duplicates" are pretty staple and you might not want to go down that road. One way of avoiding this would be to avoid the "evil" moniker. He's not "evil" so much as "different" - he killed his colleagues, but not out of malicious intent. He may have an evil alignment (and killing several people probably counts as an evil act), but you could define him more by his personality and outlook than by his alignment.

Just a thought or five.

 

[Turanil]

How did the bones get there? What adventure is in store?

Well, since they are in another world/dimension, lets say that there is a problem of "phasing." When going through the gate (if it is the way they came in this different world), something wrong happened, and now their souls aren't in the same place and time as their bodies. As a result their bodies acted as zombies and thus were easily slain (or died by accident, whatever). Now their souls cannot interact with the material world, but there is many spiritual beings around there that will interact with them. In any case, the PCs must find some memories of before their death, and find a way to get back into their bodies before the death occur. Of course, when they do so, and are able to not die, they create a time paradox that hurls them back into their own dimension.

 

[diaglo]

make the bones the old(er) edition version of themselves.

 

[Li Shenron]

Read the Philip K. Dick short story "The skull"

 

[robberbaron]

Nice Mindf*** idea. I'm jealous.

The best I could do was send my players 300 years into a future where one of them was being worshipped as an evil god (he was LN).


But seriously, how about having the person who killed them be their best ally in their world and have their greatest hope of getting back home as their world's BBEG.

Nice bit of turnabout. Might be too cheesy, though.