Purple Dragon Knight
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James,
I'm fascinated by the concept of Hermea. I've DMed (mostly in the Realms) since about 1988, and when I got the chance to play (as a player!) the Second Darkness campaign, I carelessly threw away the DM mantle and signed up on the spot. However, the old DM habits are hard to ignore entirely, and at some point I was trying to convince a fellow player (who plays the same PC he was playing in our old Realms campaign, yet without a real explanation or elaborate background story or reason :P) to have his PC be from the nation of Hermea, with a twist...
You see, I was toying with the concept of clones at the time. Via the clone spell, I was suggesting his PC could be part of the Hermea Grand Experiment (i.e. clones of this PC littered throughout various different prime material planes, outer planes, Golarion nations, etc. by the one of the Gold Dragon's favorite archmages perhaps), yet linked together so that only "one" copy of his PC is ever active at any one time. Therefore, if clone 54, in the Forgotten Realms, dies, clone 284 in Golarion activates, etc., and so on... The trick is that each clone, once it activates, has no memories of its previous life (or the other clones' lives): they all start at age 30, with the same stats, but they start in different environments. Each clone's entire life is monitored from afar by the said Gold Dragon's pet archmage, and a full report is given to the Dragon upon the clone's death (the whole process being carefully archived). One big giant social experiment to provide more human behavioral data to the Dragon, perhaps to shed some light on the presence of absence of inherent nobility at the core of the human spirit, etc. (i.e. was the original copy of this PC a noble knight? was he a hardened criminal? can the environment you find yourself in truly shape who you are or are we born with an inescapable destiny ahead of us, one that cannot be changed whether you are born rich off the coast of lush, fertile lands or born dirt poor in some desert wasteland?)
Your thoughts on this subject, and how they could be adapted to a fantasy setting such as Golarion, would be appreciated!