Learning About Yourself

A little feature that got me all excited for some reason, in the next version of Anamnesis you'll be able to learn a little bit about why your own character exists.

At the beginning of each game, we'll be told by the "Bio" screen that we're an unknown entity with an unknown past and told which renascent we will have to seek and earn their trust to learn more. More than half the times, this will be an allied, non-bonded and non-starting renascent, but it could as well be an enemy one.

If we want to know about our past, we'll have to either recruit or capture and befriend the specified renascent and most likely get them to like us enough through positive actions staying at home, at which point their "Hang around with" action will temporarily become "Learn more about yourself from". Choosing this one time action will give us 1 of 3 pieces of information about the player character's past and grant us an Insight, except for the last one that will instead give us 2 Insights.

Each new player character will have a random past to make them more interesting to discover, but the actual past is just there for the sake of flavour. The game does have to make a few distinctions to keep these pasts slightly coherent, so they could have other implications in the future, but I'm not in favour of determining important things for all cycles from the start at random.


I also tweaked the free consolation Insight at the end of each cycle to require a player to spend at least 107 weeks in said cycle rather than the previous  much easier 70 and I'm shelving the idea of choosing enemy renascents as nemeses for now. If something like that happens, I'd like it to be a more emergent process rather than a determined one, allowing players to make amends or antagonize everyone with their actions instead of just making one or more of them become enemies forever.