The Nameless One

The Nameless One is a fictional character from the Black Isle Studios role-playing video game Planescape: Torment and is the main protagonist of the story. The character was voiced by Michael T. Weiss and created by Chris Avellone. The Nameless One is a heavily scarred immortal, who, when killed, may suffer severe memory loss.

The being now known only as The Nameless One is one of the closest things the multiverse has to an immortal. Precisely how long he has lived or how many reincarnations he has had is unknown, but judging from some of the contacts he has made (Lum the Mad, among others) he is probably at least several thousand years old, and a former "incarnation" notes that he has died several thousand times.

Planescape: Torment begins in media res, with the character awakening from his previous death experience, on a Mortuary slab in Sigil, without his memories. He sets out on a quest to regain his lost memories and discover why he is immortal. He slowly learns about the varying personalities of his previous incarnations, and the influence they have had on the planes and the people that surround him. The character has an expansive back story, spanning thousands of years,[3] through a multitude of incarnations, benevolent and evil.

His place of birth and early history have been lost, but at some point he committed a horrible crime. The precise nature of this crime is never expressed directly, though it was clearly severe enough to damn his soul even if he spent the rest of his life doing nothing but good. Hoping to avoid the horrors of an eternity in the Blood War, he sought out the night hag Ravel Puzzlewell and presented her with the challenge to make him immortal, planning to spend the rest of his existence trying to atone for what he had done. As payment, he presented her with the riddle: "What can change the nature of a man?" Judging from his current appearance, he was likely around thirty at the time. Ravel's immortality ritual succeeded, though rather than granting him eternal life, Ravel simply stripped away his mortality (likely in addition to other enchantments that regenerate his body.) To test her ritual, Ravel immediately killed The Nameless One, and when he recovered, he had lost all of his memories. He no longer remembered the crime that caused him to seek immortality, or that he was immortal at all, or his own name.

Over the centuries, The Nameless One has taken myriad life-paths. According to Morte, his longtime companion, his personality often changes with each death. He has been virtually everything, from mighty wizard to petty thief, a paragon of virtue and a heartless villain. This merges nicely with the game conventions of giving the player the choice of which class to level and which attribute to gain. Breaking withDungeons & Dragons rules, the Nameless One can switch classes at any time just by talking to one of the members of his party (fighter, mage, or thief). At the beginning of the game, The Nameless One awakens in yet another incarnation, remembering nothing of his long and complex history. This time around however, he finally possesses the ability to recover from death without a memory loss. Several options present in conversations with Nordom  and The Transcendent One  make it quite clear that The Nameless One retains all of his memories gained since the beginning of the game.

As it may become evident to the player, if The Nameless One is killed in the game, he will arise from death where his body was brought; the location is dependent on the hero's location at death, and can be anywhere from a metal slab at the Mortuary to a bed at an Inn.

Early in the game the Nameless One can learn how to speak to the dead- a useful skill. If he chooses to be a mage, he can learn spells from Ignus  and Dak'kon . What is especially ironic is the Nameless One later learns that he taught Ignus and created the Unbroken Circle of Zerthimon: therefore he's being taught spells he himself created.

Each time The Nameless One dies, another innocent person in the multiverse dies to fuel his resurrection . This other soul becomes a shadow and travels to the Fortress of Regrets on the Negative Material Plane for a time. The energies of the Fortress and the Plane give them power, and the oldest shadows have grown far larger and stronger than they were before. Eventually, some escape (or are released) and attempt to track down The Nameless One and slay him in revenge to the torment he has put them through, however unwillingly.

A popular theory among fans is that The Nameless One is actually Zerthimon, creator of the Githzerai  faction of the Forerunners. His unknown "great crime" was causing the division of the Forerunners. The theory that the protagonist is himself Zerthimon is bolstered by the fact that near the end of the game, one the protagonist's previous incarnations, the Practical one, says he created the Unbroken Circle of Zerthimon, the "Bible" of the followers of Zerthimon as a forgery, and that he doesn't know or care whether it contains truth or not. However, the developers have flatly denied that he is Zerthimon.

In the official novelization of the game, which is only loosely based on its plot, The Nameless One was a human being, who made a pact with the BaatezuFhjull Forked-Tongue - an NPC met late in the game -, offering his service as a soldier in the Blood War in exchange for his town being spared. He then sought a way to become immortal to avoid the Blood War entirely, and all of his most recent struggles are in fact the culmination of the machinations of Fhjull to claim The Nameless One's soul. In the book, The Nameless One's ability to remember memories from prior incarnations (beginning with the one that wakes up in the Mortuary) is due to being dosed prior to awakening in the Mortuary with a special elixir derived from the waters of the River Styx by Fhjull Forked-Tongue.