So. The basic concept:




The technology is of course the first rollout of experimental SIMsense, and what has happened is pretty obvious to those in the know: A group of runners just got some seriously glitchy sims, ran them in hot sim, and got their brains rewired.

Basically a bunch of pre-awakening actors are waking up in 2070 with no clue what is happening, new bodies, and bounties on their heads from the local corpsec.

Has anyone run something like this before? Any thoughts or suggestions?

Also, running 4E. Because I am a man of wealth and taste.

I ran something not a million miles away for a group:
Campaign start date: October 1st 2055
Characters awaken in the Chicago containment zone, a few hours after the cermak blast takes out a bug hive. All the characters are suffering from amnesia, induced by the EMP blast from the nuke - thus all have no character sheet or character information to begin with, no knowledge of skills or background, and no idea on setting.

Character setup
All characters start at base attributes of 5, before race modifiers
All characters start with English, and Tibetan at 5, with R/W at 3 using up their language points
All characters start with athletics, stealth and Lama-Pai-Ha (a magical based martial art) at 5
All characters must be physical adepts, mages or shamen, and must start with no cyber/bio wear and essence 6
All characters start with no more than 5,000 nuyen's worth of personal effects.
All phys-ads have 8 power points to spend, all mages/shamen have 55/75 spell points to spend (full or aspected). Magicians way characters start with (points X 8 spell points)
All characters start at grade 1, with masking and having taken Oath as their first grade ordeal. All start with karma pool of 1 and 5 good karma.
Characters have 25 points to spend on knowledge skills
Characters then have 30 points to spend on additional active, knowledge or language skills, or on racial costs.

I ran this for a bunch of story based players, and had them bouncing around the world interacting with key events - playing a Shadowrun version of the History Monks from the Discworld. So, they were there at the start of Bug City (then had to escape), Helped Morgan find Dodger, delivered a coin of luck to the presidential campaign room, just before the elections (so it could be gifted in the will) - a load of "key" moments - but never in the limelight, and quite often not knowing what they were doing until it had happened, at which point it suddenly (hopefully) made a lot more sense.

There are a few different ways to do an amnesia campaign.

One way is for the GM to make the character sheets. As the game progresses, the players discover their attributes/skills/qualities/Magic/'ware/etc and fill in their sheets. I've been a player in a game like this and it was an absolute blast. One advantage is that the GM can balance all the character sheets and make them as realistic or optimized as they want.

Another way is to have it be a blackbox game, in which the GM makes all the rolls. The players never discover their numerical stats but can either 1) infer them based on how well they do at something, or 2) the GM can broadly describe how comfortable/familiar the character is at doing something. So now your ratings are "not too shabby" and "null persp" and "dumber than a bag of hammers", etc. Some players love being liberated from the dice; others feel like there's too much of a disconnect, because they're no long sure if they're good at something or if they just got lucky (or the reverse: do they suck at something or was it just an unlucky roll). I'm just now starting my first game of this type so I don't have much personal experience yet.

From FuelDrop's concept, I'm not sure how much room there is for player input into sheets or if they're just discovering what the GM has already established.