Interest check for Evil Hat's "A Penny for My Thoughts" Storytelling game, no mechanics, no GM. Three to five players, potentially PbP-able. Text-only or Voice-only. "You are a patient at the Orphic Institute for Advanced Studies, where I oversee your case. We are a private research hospital dedicated to the treatment of disorders that traditional medicine has deemed incurable. Recently, you suffered a traumatic shock that caused a rare form of memory loss called profound retrograde amnesia; in other words, you experienced a total loss of memory. You have no conscious recollection of your life prior to this event. Although we have had remarkable success in treating many forms of amnesia, your particular case has proven intractable. We at the institute believe that this trauma was caused by some action on your part, and your mind has created a barrier as a way of protecting you. On an unconscious level, your mind is unwilling to let itself heal. We – that is, you and I – had discussed various possible treatments, and you decided that your only option was an experimental drug called Mnemosyne . This chemical creates a connection between the unconscious minds of those who take it – in essence, it allows someone else access to your memories. This connection is very weak, and if a healthy mind were to try and see into yours, your memories would be drowned out by that person’s own experiences. In the case of someone with severe memory loss, however, the mind is quiet enough to hear the echoes of another. To take advantage of this, we have developed a treatment in which patients with your condition help each other recover their memories. Upon deciding to undergo the procedure, you were kept at the institute until two to four additional patients with similar conditions could be found to assemble a therapy group. The treatment also required removing the memories you had built while at the institute, which is why you do not remember me or any of our conversations. For that I apologize. If we are successful, however, this small amount of confusion will have been more than worthwhile. You are now ready to begin what we believe will be an effective cure for your amnesia. If all goes well, you will remember everything about your life." ----------- You play as a patient with severe retrograde amnesia caused by an unknown trauma. You and a few other patients take a new drug called Mnemosyne, which allows you to explore the subconscious of the other patients and help them recover their lost memories. It's a hard game to explain, because there are no real mechanics and the story is created on the spot, improv-style. Also as in improv, you cannot say "no" to the suggestions of the other players. That means THEY shape your character's backstory, and you fill in the blanks. Over the course of the game, each player rediscovers three memories that they've lost: one happy, one sad, and finally the memory of the event that caused the amnesia. I find the idea to be really interesting and I would love to get a couple other players to try it out. If anyone is intrigued, I can try to explain the game more and we'll see if it goes anywhere! The Evil Hat website linked above has a lot of free pdfs you can read to help explain the game. ----------- "Two women and a man, all dressed in white jumpsuits, sit around a table with a bowl of pennies in its center. Each of them has a small stack of pennies and a printed form. In front of the older woman sits a scrap of paper with the words “a taffy stretching machine” written on it. “… and my father looked down at me and said, ‘If you don’t want to ride the roller coaster, you don’t have to. You can wait here in the candy shop while your brother and I go,’” says the older woman. “I was scared.” As she speaks, the remembered terror creeps into her voice. Her expression suddenly goes blank. She turns to the man. “ What did I do or say then? ” she asks, offering him the single penny in front of her. The man considers for a moment, his brow furrowed. Staring at her, he replies, “You said, ‘No, I want to come with you.’” She turns to the younger woman. “ Or was it… ” she begins, offering the same penny. “You stayed there in the candy shop, chewing your taffy,” the other woman says. She pauses before speaking again. “ Yes, I remember now. I said, ‘No, I want to come with you.’” She hands her penny to the man. “And I had a fantastic time. It was so thrilling, so wonderful. That’s when I knew what I wanted to do with my life. And that is what I remember. ” She smiles as she writes on her sheet of paper, “When I think of taffy stretching machines, I remember how I discovered what I wanted to do with my life. I’d never felt such a sense of purpose before.” After she finishes, she takes a penny from the bowl. “ A penny for my thoughts, ” she says."
