I ran a similar idea in modern time. I wanted to play a human replica droid, but the GM didn't want me starting with a character that powerful. I agreed with him, but still wanted to try it out. What we eventually compromised on was an HRD with a badly damaged memory. I began roleplaying the character as he woke up next to the destroyed remains of an unmarked light freighter. He had no memory AT ALL of his past, and all of his skills were scrambled and not remembered.

The way the GM and I got beginning skills was to assume that the character used to know the skill, but had to roll to see whether or not he remembered it. To remember, he rolled his base attribute against a difficulty number. If he lost, he has no memory of the skill. If he won, the difference was converted to dice and pips and added to his base attribute.

This was further complicated by the fact that my character could only initially learn specialties (i.e. when remembering his skills, he had to learn a certain number of specialties before he could combine them into a skill, with the lowest dice level as the new skill setting). Also, he could not choose to remember a skill; he could only make a remembering roll when the skill was actually needed.

This made for some truly great roleplaying possibilities. Because this HRD knew absolutely nothing about himself or his skills, they slowly became known through the process of character development. In addition, it gave the GM a lot to play with because no one just leaves a multi-million credit HRD just lying around. In addition, part of the scrambled memory was the droids directive list; orders that the droid had to follow under any circumstances and were a part of him. The GM got to make up a few rules about my character that I did not know about beforehand and inflict them on me as playing-in-character as the game progressed.

This example is rather specific, but it may give you some ideas.

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