Campaign Toybox
The Story: You wake up with no memory of who you are. It’s a cliché, but it works. The issue is not so much keeping the problem interesting (everyone loves the puzzle) as keeping the solution interesting – that is, the why as well as the who. There are lots of possibilities. Accident or deliberate? Deliberate is less likely, as few schemes benefit from erasing someone’s memory, especially if there’s a way to get it back (which you should provide, people like their mysteries to have answers). But it does add to the intrigue. Accident however, allows you to start the game in almost any situation. Trauma tends to blank minds more than head injuries, but when you need a macguffin, you justify it however you can. Magic and/or alien mind rays are your friends, but a bowling-ball-bonk works just as well.
Whether accident or deliberate, there must be a way to reconnect without simply wandering around the world asking people if they know your face – but it has to be more complicated than just looking at your wallet and going to your house. That means somebody needs to be looking for you or care a lot that you are gone. However, with your more narrative systems, you don’t need to have sorted all of this out in advance (see below). To increase confusion (and thus extend the length of your game), there can be lots of people looking for the amnesiacs, for various reasons. And all of them can lie. Not necessarily with much purpose, it’s just a good idea to lie when you can, and since the amnesiac can’t call you on it, you’re safe. Of course, if you want them to trust you, lying a lot is a problem, but who else can they trust? And remember that everyone can lie to them. Cab drivers can swear they know their faces just for a big fare. Muggers can promise to take them to their house, only to set them up for an ambush. Which is to say: don’t forget all the little things you can’t do when you don’t know who you have no identity at all – no license, no papers and no way to get money besides steal it, because you can’t remember your friends, your bank or your PIN. You keep the players occupied with these little things while you work out answers to the big things.
Style and Structure: Here’s the gimmick: since the players don’t know who they are, their character sheets are blank. That’s step one. Step two is to take Freud to his logical conclusion: all you are is what you do. Succeed at a climb roll? Then you have a good climb skill. Roll well to convince? You’re persuasive. You’ll need to tailor this to your particular system, but most of them will have some measure of degree of success or failure. You then take that measure, and translate it into a stat level. So if you roll three successes, that might be three points in a stat, or six points to spread across the stat and skill that were most likely involved. With a roll under system, if you roll a 61% then from now on, your skill in Spot Hidden is 61%. And so on.
Obviously, this is very random, with all the usual problems extreme randomness can cause. Unfairness will be an issue – if you roll well you don’t just get a good session, you become a more awesome character (although only for the session, this should just be for a one-off). However, you can use that in the plot – if you have lots of skills, you’re much more likely to be somebody that important, powerful or dangerous people want to find (this is known as the Jason Bourne Reversal). Unless you build-in some kind of synergy mechanic or use very broad stats, weird combinations will happen – someone really good at acrobatics whom can’t climb walls, for example. Either justify it, handwave it, or make a few notes on some synergy rules.
Some parts of a system are never rolled on, but simply bought up to a certain level. These can still be used in this system by letting the players choose when needed what to spend their X points on. Really need a place to crash? Spend the points for remembering where you live – but then you won’t have the points later for having allies. This is where those background elements of the character’s lives mentioned above come from. Since these choices can have a real immediate effect on solving a current problem, they feel very weighty, even if they draw you out of your immersion. Meanwhile, the fact that every time you do anything at all you will learn something permanently about yourself – ah, you see – that’s where the fear comes from…
PCs and NPCs: The other thing about this method is the PCs will only discover things about themselves related to what they do. If they are, therefore, running across town hunting for their identities and being chased by foes, they are going to learn about those kind of skills. Choose a system and character types appropriately – if elves have a Cuddliness rating that is rolled when around unicorns, you need to have unicorns feature, or be content that it isn’t going to come up. This is why spies and adventurers are good for this sort of thing – they have a general spread of social, physical and technical skills that apply to a wide range of situations, strongly suited to waking up in a strange environment with no contacts or resources. Focusing on these kinds of characters means that by the end of the adventure, 90% of the character sheet will be filled out, instead of 10%.
While you want all your spies to feel different, beware the exotic character types or abilities: if players don’t think to ask, it won’t come up, and you don’t want to have to shove unicorns in front of them to remind them to ask about them. Unique abilities will be, in fact, impossible – if a good enough roll reveals something only elf eyes can see, then everyone in the group has a chance to be an elf. Since everyone has access to all abilities at all levels, you’ll want a decent amount of stats so there is a spread across your players. Of course, too many stats leads to trouble, with players potentially running into a sports store, gun store or ninja weapon cache and picking up every single thing and attacking with it, hoping to end up with more skills than anyone else. But remember, if it isn’t dramatically important, they don’t get to roll the dice. The other way to mess with the format is to try and do the massively unlikely, like defeat a hazard through scrimshaw, just to find out what your scrimshaw skill is. Let them – and make it a plot point. Scrimshaw Ninja would be an awesome film.
Plots and Villains: As mentioned, the hook is not the problem, only the payout is. Eventually you’re probably going to end up with international espionage and/or organized crime. This is, however, where your mind rays or magic spells can help you – not only do they let you skip over the problems of real-world science and unlikely coincidence, they throw extra spice into your explanation. Obviously if your setting is already high-magic (D&D, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Eureka) magic/superscience will be the expected cause but then the question becomes what kind of magic. Mixing it up is one thing, but don’t shoot for the moon with some extremely over-the-top or amazing scenario involving demons or the end of the world; people buy into the cliché knowing the formula and don’t need to be amazingly surprised by a twist explanation. The fun is in the formula itself. Don’t overthink it.
Sources: The Bourne Identity is a book, a TV movie and a Hollywood film, and all of them are good fun, and there are many other works that follow very similar lines. There are more in the crime and action genre too, going back to noir classics like Nightmare and Spellbound, and to modern action flicks like Memento and Unknown. In sci-fi, you’ve got the awesome Dark City, Paycheck and even Robocop, in drama you have things like Amateur, The Changeling and The English Patient, in romance you have Overboard, Desperately Seeking Susan and 50 First Dates. Amnesia is used in TV shows a lot, for one-off fun (Smallville, Buffy) to entire premises (Samantha Who?, John Doe, The Dollhouse) and is a staple in soap-operas (as parodied in Futurama’s All My Circuits, where everyone has amnesia!). Amnesia often covers times where the subject is programmed or controlled, leading to themes of destiny and self-awareness, so we have things like mind-control in The Manchurian Candidate, and implanted memories as with Total Recall and Blade Runner. That can provide that extra spice mentioned above.
RPGs: Things like James Bond or Spycraft are probably too detailed, and while it actually features a chargen system based around choosing what you’re good at during a heist, Leverage is probably too simple. Something in the middle like Call of Cthulhu or World of Darkness seems about right. Memory loss can play a big part of Changeling: The Lost, Mummy and Orpheus, to name just two. I first came across this idea in the old rules for FUDGE, so I think FATE and its associates would fit well, and it would make an awesome start to a Dresden Files game. Eclipse Phase, Transhuman Space and Shock deal with the appropriate SF mind-programming stuff and there’s an old game called Psychosis which is a one-off campaign about just this premise, and deserves a look for thinking way outside the box long before indie games were fashionable.
