featherynscale | Geek Talkin': Amnesia Campaign

Forgive me for a moment, I'm going to descend into some role-playing geeking.

triadruid and I are putting together a D&D campaign. Our first game is this Friday. We're building a house world to play in, which is my favorite part of the process. I have a fascination with building conflicts: religions that disagree with and distrust each other's aims, political factions who squabble for power, races or classes who occupy a preferred status and races or classes who struggle for representation or dignity beneath them, and so on. It's stuff that the average PC may never see, being too focused on their own issues, but it's there, and it's happening, and at some point my players will at least have an opportunity to get involved in some of it. There are very few things that happen in my world that I couldn't (if necessary) explain. Even though there are any number of wizards, the phrase "A wizard did it" will almost never pass my lips as a DM, unless the wizard had a damned good reason for doing it.

The campaign is going to be a bit unusual, in that the players will be given pre-made characters, who will enter the campaign with amnesia. They will have suffered some trauma, and a large part of the game will be the characters trying to regain their identities and learn their own story. They will, of course, also be occupied with the business of heroism, saving the land from Certain Doom, and solving the problems they inadvertently create along the way. In fact, there is quite a bit of backlash coming for them from the act they just completed before Shit Went Bad, bringing them to their current state. So that's fun.

Setting up a game in this way requires us to do quite a bit of backstory on each character, determining not only where they come from and what their family is like, and the usual character creation stuff, but also the things that they have done since beginning their adventuring career. We have to know how they came to be travelling together, what kind of people they are, how they react to danger, who they love and hate, where their loyalties lie, and so on. Of course, they've suffered enough mental shake-up that some of those facts will probably change as the players take over, but that's okay.

The point is that I have come to love this set of characters in the process. Their little portraits begin to look like the faces of old friends. This means considerable trouble for the players. It is a well-known fact that I can't love people without having first discovered the ways in which they are troubled or damaged. In fact, I seem to love them for their flaws as much as for anything else. In this group, there was enough trouble and damage to go around to ensure that I could love each and every one of them. Players:

agrnmn,

capriciouslass,

kittenpants,

liquidfun and

orcjohn, you can consider this your warning shot. :)