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Hello all, once again I have a question for the masses. This time I'm trying to create a fair mechanic before my game this Friday for the plans a wizard PC of mine has. Lets begin with some background.
My 2 year long campaign is reaching its close and the 16th level PCs just went up against a very powerful wizard trying to complete a ritual that would bind a huge amount of energy from Carceri to himself. The ritual required the life forces of many, many, many insane people for there to be enough energy to complete it. Well the PCs took quite some time in forcing their way to the wizard and so he was less then a round from completing it when they managed to cut him down. Now the PCs are chasing down more of his kind in a very well fortified underground volcanic fortress and my PCs realized something...they are seriously outmatched. One PC is dead already, and the other is MIA (he ran away from an ambush which killed the other and the party can't find him) and the rest of the party is made up of fighter types and a single wizard who is running out of spells.
So here is where my wizard presented me with a plan. He is a 10th level Shadow Adept (Forgotten Realms PrC) and thus left behind his Shadow Double at the location of the ritual. I have already told him that the lifeforces are still lingering there before moving on to the after-life and he intends to use the energy while its still there. Basically he wants to channel the life energy through his shadow double and use it to cast arcane spells. I've warned him that this will cost him as he is using the raw lifeforce of insane people to power them and he has accepted that he may very well be permanently damaged by doing so.
So what mechanic should I use to represent the corrupting affect of this way of spell casting? I was thinking that the spells should give him a corruption score equal to the spell level and that when he reaches certain scores a nasty thing happens to him. As he continues to build up a score worst and worst things occur. Any ideas?
-Daldolin
Here's some thoughts:
Instead of just using the simple spell level, I would use caster level x spell level. That way, casting high level spells is more costly and dangerous than low levels. The character can also chose to lower the caster level to incure a lower penalty (e.g. 5d6 fireball instead of a 10d6 one)
So how does it work? Every time the mage casts a spell, his insanity score (IS) goes up. after resting, the score could decrease by his caster levelxhis highest spell level.
His score will of course rocket in no time.
One of the penalties should definitely be wisdom and charisma drains. Maybe these could become permanent after a certain threshhold. As for in game effects, this could be represented by the PC talking to himself. Perhaps he also has a weird twitch (or two). And an evil eye. definitively an evil eye. &-)
I'm also thinking alignment shift. A lawfull character shift to neutral and later on to chaotic. Once the character is chaotic, nastier things start to happen. Of course, a character who's allready chaotic just jumps right to the nastier stuff.
Ok, I've posted enough. I have no idea what the system should look like, so this will be all of my ramblings for now.
I think Chef's Slaad had some good ideas. I'd probably tweak it so that resting doesn't recover any points at all; you have to atone in some way and have Atonement cast on you -- possibly repeatedly.
I'd also make it an expanding scale, so the first effects show up when you take a single point of insanity, then a second effect at ten points, then a third effect at maybe fifty points, then a fourth at 100, then every hundred after that. I'd probably give Wisdom damage as a start, but leave Charisma alone. The character would receive all sorts of in-game effects... Personally, I'd probably prepare a bunch of notes of things that only that character sees/hears, so as the character goes crazier you can start handing them notes saying, eg, "Why do they keep staring at me? What are they hiding?", etc. Give the character random insanities too as they hit higher insanity levels. Compulsions work great in this case -- after casting a spell, the character must spend a round washing his hands before he can cast any further spells -- if he doesn't, he's not psychologically capable of casting spells. Stuff like that. Or the character starts really hallucinating -- maybe treat it as an illusion that only the character experiences, giving him a save to disbelieve the illusion as normal, causing damage as normal, etc. Nothing like fireballing a non-existent orc to make the rest of the party really nervous about the crazy guy in their midst. :-)
Also good ideas. And much more coherent than mine!
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this is a very interesting thread. i've been trying with my npc cultists of shar to create a mythal based on the shadow weave and this feedback is all i needed to decide on side effects of this kind of mythal especially since i plan to run it in an adventure modified from the City of Shadows in Dungeon#117.