niconini's page

I did something similar to this, so I'm gonna give the same advice I gave myself:

Make sure your players are okay with this! For a lot of players, backstory is something they consider "theirs" and get real upset at the idea of the DM tinkering with it. Even a partial backstory like your idea. So definitely explain the concept, how the PCs amnesia and where they come from is important to the story, but their backstory needs to likewise FIT the story, so you might have to take liberties with things.

Now, like I said, I did something similar. I warned my players that I would likely majorly mutilate and chop around backstories, just to keep the "discovering the truth" element sharp. So I wanted very barebones stuff, and in most cases, I got it. All my players were onboard, but at the same time, one did go a bit more detailed. While I was able to change a couple parts of his without making it unrecognizable, I had to take a different approach to really give the "big twist" that I was putting in all the others. So with that character I ended up changing the entire class they had prior to amnesia (nothing in the AP says they have to re-learn their old classes!).

I did also ask for a secret, a thing that would interact with the backstory (or not) and be in a sealed envelope shown during session 1 so everyone would know it wasn't pulled out of thin air when it was discovered later on in the game. My group hates retcons.

I can post some more detailed stuff, like what I did with backstories, but I won't clutter up the board unless you want it. Hope some of this helped!

Thank you this was incredibly helpful! I've talked to a couple of the players and so far they are down with it. They have never been the type to actually go too in depth with their backstories, and I was always the player to go way in depth with them, so they were fine with me writing the majority of theirs.

I would love to hear how you handled their backstories, if/how you tied them into the story and such. I have some ideas already but anything else would be helpful, thanks!

I have been playing pathfinder for about six months now, listening to pathfinder podcasts for about a year, and playing 5e for the last two years. I am preparing currently to run strange aeons with a standard four person party and I am thinking about writing some of the PCs backstories for them, but not really telling them much about themselves. Since their lost memories are a huge part of the story, it seems like it would be interesting to have them tell me a bit about themselves (where they're from, their early childhood, and their current personalities/motivations/goals) and then write most of their backstory for them. I just think it seems like the amnesia aspect won't be as interesting if they know their backstory but simply have to pretend to not remember it, or if they simply don't remember the last year or so when they were working for Lowls. Any thoughts on if this would go well would be incredibly helpful.