I have a campaign idea: The characters all wake up in a morgue in each their little slab. They're rescued from the slabs by Fletcher, who takes them down below to his street-doc-clinic in the basement, feed them and clothes them.

He tells them that they were brought in 6 hours earlier. A bum had found them naked in a dumpster and had alerted the police. The doctor with the ambulance had thought they were dead and delivered them at the morgue. Fletcher will admit that he was about to strip their bodies for cyberware, when he found that they had woken up. Seing as they are John Doe's and about to be incinerated in a short while, he might as well make a profit on them.

Fletcher is the autopsy-doctor at the morgue. He has a profitable side-business as street/ripper-doc and uses the opration-theatres at the morgue to perform surgery. He has a series of recovery-rooms in the basement, where the characters can stay for a while.

The characters don't remember anything about themselves. No names, no I.D., where they live what they do, who they are. Nothing.

This is the setup; now could you brainstrom some ideas as to who they are and why they've ended up in this predicament?

and what you'd do if it was you?


Adhoc

Heh. SNES Shadowrun RPG, anyone?

1)The memory wipe implies they know something they shouldn't but why not kill them? Either it's like Total Recall where the person is expected to follow a desired path to get their memory back OR they are being hidden like in Night's Pawn from someone else who might know if they were dead, but can't track them if they are just having their memory wiped.

2) Their minds were scrubbed as the back lash of some big time magic, IE's great dragons, maybe something on one of those big magic areas like Devil's Tower or Crater Lake. The question would be what, and does nayone else who survived know about them, not want them to survive? Or maybe some corper thinks they know what's going on and wants the info-and won't believe them when they say the don't know. possibly some quest on behalf of a great power to get their memories back- of course that quest could send them after the corper that thinks they know.


#1 is going to be more corporate. #2 will be more magical.

They were hired to guard a rather large shipment of laes coming out of the Tir and into Seattle, and to sit on it for a few days until the buyer showed up and all the details were arranged.

Someone tried to rip them off and in the ensuing attack on the safehouse where they were keeping it, the containers broke and all the laes was released. Since the runners were nearest it, they got hit the hardest and got a kind of toxic shock from the massive overdose. They took so much in they were mistaken for dead.

The attackers scooped up what was left of the laes and sanitised the rest of the building to cover their tracks. And on the way back to their place, they stripped the bodies of the runners and pulled into an alley to dump the bodies out the back of the van.

That leaves you with some options. If you want you can go the shadow route and have it just be a job gone bad. You're players will probably be expecting something really exotic, so you spread the clues and innuendo around, but at the end of the day they're just ordinary Joe's/scummy shadowrunners that got beat. Nothing special.

The other is to go the exotic route. Maybe the Tir wants to know who ripped them off for a large amount of their chemicals and wants it back. Likewise the Johnson that hired them for protection could be pissed if she thinks they've done a runner with her illegal pharmaseuticals and are planning to sell it themselves. Maybe the people that attacked them hear that they're still alive and figure if they can grab them, they can maybe find out who hired them and how they got her hands on some very valuable stuff like laes, hoping to set up a regular thing for themselves?

Edit: And the whole mistaken identity schtick can always be good for a laugh in these situations. Lots of missleading clues and blind alleys to send them down.

They really are corpses. The morgue is really a shedim breeding ground. The bodies were brought in just as a new batch of shedim were 'born'. The fledgling spirits posessed the freshest meat they could find - the runners' team. Give the whole team the Amnesia flaw, and possibly even an allergy (to explain why their wounds never seem to heal quite right).

Have the runners hear 'voices from beyond' throughout the campaign. These voices slowly feed them the truth - they are undead horrors, little more than slowly-rotting zombies. The coroner can patch them up with spare parts (at a price), but it's only a matter of time before they fall apart completely.

Do they succumb to their true nature, or can these damned souls somehow be redeemed? Will they find a way to stay 'alive' (blood magic, voodun, cybermancy), or do they try to go out with a bang?

Too many possibilities to list. I'll just say for now that I like it

I have these possibilities so far:

The characters were poisoned and they were meant to die from the poisoning. The poison placed them in a coma and had the unfortunate effect that it wiped their memories. The poisoners stripped them of all identification and dumped them. Maybe it was intentional of the poisoner for them to survive; he disobeyed orders. But why?

The characters are on training. The block on their memory is an anchored/masked spell that stays in place untill they find out who they are. They were meant to wake up in the dumpster and make their way from there. All that is needed is who it is and what their normal role are.

The characters wasn't found in a dumpster. Fletcher is working for the organisation that wiped their memory; his job is to keep an open eye on them. Two possible answers to why they were wiped: 1) they were from the same organisation and knew too much. They wiped their memories so that they still could work for them, but couldn't reveal sensitive information; 2) they worked for another organisation and was recognized as assets, that needed to be brought under control. The friendship with Fletcher is a way to get control over them. Both of these options require that they are prime runners and some sort of cover-story have been constructed for them to find out.

They're discarded clones; unfortunaly this doesn't explain why they have skills or cyberware.


Adhoc

Depends. Will there be a talking skull?

Too many possibilities. A VR run comes to mind, as does a really bad BTL trip, pre-natal LSD flashback, or simply role-playing the Hand of God rule as an astral experience (yeah, your group just bought it and you all just blew all your karma, but if you wanna actually come back to life with a bit of karma left, there'll a couple of things you've gotta do first...).

The team was actually the experiment of some corp. They have been given a new breed of nanobots that can heal their wound almost instantly. They suffered from some mental side effects (including the memory loss) so the corp took them out the back in an alley and shot them all. They stripped the bodies and left them in the dumpster. Unfortunately for the corp the nanobots worked a bit too well and the team survived (maybe not all of them?) and were delivered to Fletcher.

This way you could tweak the dice rolls and have them all take less damage from things but as the nanobots slowly break down they become vulnerable once more. You could even have them start out almost invincible, things like bullet wounds healing over or reattaching a limb etc. but then have the "revert" to normal just when they think they are figuring it out.

Once the corp finds out they are alive they are in for some serious problems.

Well, it sounded good in my head at least.

-Strobe

sounds like wolverine on a bad day

How did that old Dark Conspiracy Novel start: "Tycho Caine woke up in a body bag. Things went downhill from there..."

Basically the main protagonist was a professional killer for a "demon" and was captured and brainwiped by the "good guys". Some stuff went wrong and the lost the guy while comatose, he was picked up by some organleggers and barely woke up in time. The idea was to get him over to the "good" side.

Two options here:

a) The group was attacked with some bio/chemical/nano weapon and left for dead. All the weapon did was some minor brain damage (mid/long term memory) and a temporary coma

b) The above plot might work for a group (former Azzies?)

Birdy

Why do I keep thinking of the end/begining of the movie Memento when I start thinking of plots that start like this?

Weird....people keep mentioning computer-games I have't played or movies I haven't seen.


Adhoc

you never played the SNES shadowrun? or planescape:torment?

well, in the SNES shadowrun you wake up in the morgue, newly "dead", brain fried from gangers, nothing known about yourself....

in planescape torment you wake up in a morgue, "dead" once again, with a flying skull at your side, knowing nothing about yourself you must make your way through the zombie-infested morgue....

I ran this campaign once before...

In my campaign, they were actually clones. The originals were still out there shadowrunning or doing whatever. They guys were being cloned for parts as part of a DocWagon contract, but a technician mistake in the lab failed to include the brain-retardant chemicals. Actual, functional clones were created instead and force-grown into adulthood. The technician realized this near the end of the process, and wanted to cover his mistake. He labeled them "non-viable", cut life support, and threw they out with the trash, assuming that their hearts would not yet start on their own.

Unfortunately for him, the same brain-retardant chemicals that prevent formation of personality also prevent the body from operating heart and lungs on it's own, thus creating a reliance on the life-support systems. These guys, fully formed, just started breathing and beating on them own when he pulled the plug. The technician never noticed.

They wake up on the morgue slab after somebody found them in the DocWagon trash and figured they were discarded parts clones -- which was true. The street doc figured he'd harvest them, but lo and behold, they are alive. Now he doesn't know what to do with them.

Being clones, they know nothing about nothing. They didn't lose those memories -- they never had them. When they first woke-up, they were like infants in adult bodies. The street doc implanted persona-fix chips in their brains just to give them the basics -- speech, a functional grasp of reality, etc. Now they're up and mobile, but who are they really?

--K