Posted by seaofstarsrpg
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I was reading along my feed and encountered an article on cursed monsters for Halloween (article here if you are interested), nothing very exciting or innovative, but it did mention medusa and, specifically, their ability to turn people to stone and how, once they are stone, you can do whatever you want with them.
What a great setup for the start of a campaign: the character “awake” fresh from the middle of combat with a medusa and find themselves . . . in a quiet garden? On pedestals? How much time has passed? What is the world like that they are awakening to?
The set-up is nice as the characters already have ties between them and need to work together to find out what has happened and what the world has become in their absence. Are they remembered as heroes? As unlucky venturers? Or not at all? (What a blow to the ego.) Depending on how much time has passed, they may still have surviving friends and allies (or enemies) waiting out there to be rediscovered.
However, the characters out of time is a trope that can be used in most settings.
For fantasy, travel to other planes where time runs at different speeds. A classic effect of visit faerie, you think you are gone hours but come back days, months or even decades later. Or a magical time trap or gate could knock the characters into the future. What better way to get the heroes out of the way than to send them to the future? There are also not small number of stories of great heroes put to sleep, awaiting the right moment to awake to save people from a great evil.
In science fiction, there is cryosleep, and other forms of suspended animation, time dilation from near light-speed travel, stasis effects, or even time travel. All of those can place the characters in a world that is obviously their world but one that has changed, possibly beyond recognition.
If you are playing superheroic games, you can use all of the above and more! I had a character from the 1960s who was tossed into the modern era because their power interacted badly with a hero’s time magic!
Of course, there are also less disruptive ways to achieve a similar effect; memory wiping (technological or magical) can place the characters in the same position without wrenching the timeline into new shapes. As both magic and technology have ways to mess with memories if you want to go the quasi-amnesia route for characters who feel out of place. Memory manipulation also gives the player the opportunity to entirely reinvent the character’s personality and beliefs, a classic character evolution arc, if they so wish.
I have had an idea for a Shadowrun campaign arc that starts with the characters coming back to consciousness sitting around a coffee table piled with their tools of the trade. Each person recognizes the others as allies, but cannot remember anything else. Not their name, not the other characters’ names, where they are or why. Each character has a set of physical characteristics, some of which the player chooses, others of which are clues to finding out who they are. While I like the idea, I mfeel it would be difficult in execution and I have never had a group that I thought would want to dive into such a situation, so it sits on my mental shelf, neglected. Until now! So, use it if you think it would be fun.
For the Game Master, if you are using established characters and moving them through time, you will wish to consider the players’ ties to the setting as it is. This is probably not a good choice for a campaign shift if the players are heavy invested in the world as it is. But it might be a good way to return to an abandoned campaign with characters the players want to revisit. Or as a way for a player to bring an old character back into play with a new group.
Readers: Have you ever played characters who were displaced from their original time? Or one who had lost their memory? What about in a game you have played, have such characters shown up? Game Masters, have you used these or similar ideas in your campaign?
Notes: Just playing around with interesting ideas for characters and campaigns. One must write as inspiration strikes.
There are some games built around this kind of framework such as the Morrow Project and Year of the Phoenix (both science fiction). Do you know of any others?
Image upper image from Pikist and the lower image is from ChROnoScOpE WOrLd and both are in the Public Domain.
https://seaofstarsrpg.wordpress.com/2025/10/30/to-sleep-perchance-to-dream-lost-characters-as-a-campaign-point/
http://seaofstarsrpg.wordpress.com/?p=27180