What if my PCs go insane?? (Wake of the Watcher, Spoilers)

[Rakshaka]

Anybody else have any PCs go insane from the Sanity mechanic in Wake of the Watcher? Right now, two of my four PCs are halfway there. They are getting ready to

spoiler:

face the Colour out of Sapce

, and my PC sanity scores are as follows:

Sanity Scores:

Dhampir Magus: 4/10 sanity points remaining.
Cause of loss: Dimensional Shambler (early appearance in Carrion Hill) and Slugspawn Eruption
Human Oracle: 8/10 sanity points remaining.
Cause of loss: Spawn of Yog-Sothoth
Human Bard :8/12 sanity points remaining.
Cause of loss: Slugspawn Eruption, Hounds of Tindalos
Human Fighter: 7/13 sanity points remaining.
Cause of loss: Otherwordly artwork in Mansions before Feldgrau, Shantak

Given a couple bad rolls, I could see the spoilered monster driving a couple PCs insane, and there's more to come. What makes this interesting is that except for Ardis (which is miles away) there's no settlement in Ustalav that has higher than 6th level spellcasting services... Which means there's no cure for mental illness in Ustalav except in one place. By the time they complete the module, they still won't have access to Heal since the Oracle is on a different spell progression, which means the entire plot gets hijacked to deal with the character's debilitation. Personally, I think it's cool to play a character with a drawback, at least for a few encounters, but I'm afraid afflicting a character with mental illness might be too destabilizing. My options seem like the following:
1)Forced retirement- The PC can't adventure anymore and spends their career dealing with their illness.
2)Integrated Dementia- The PC has the affliction, but only manifests during stressful situations. (Because if anyone has ever actually ran the spell Insanity nothing destabilizes a game more than forcing a PC to continuously roll confusion effects outside of combat.
3) Mad until Cured- The PCs deal with the normal effects but are able to find their way to a sanitarium (an actual, working, not-housing-evil-experiments, place of healing. Those do exist in Ustalav, right?.. Right?!) From there, its coming up with some sort of mechanic for mundanely treating mental illness. (which should be possible, otherwise there wouldn't be any insane asylums in Golartion that actually worked without an 11th level Cleric)
4) Hand-waived with Heal And then there's that. The least exciting of the solutions. Why have a mechanic in place only to have it washed away by finding a scroll of the spell somewhere. Also, I'm a little reluctant to start making scrolls of this spell super available if the next module has a TON of undead. This is the solution I am least likely to employ.

And then, there's picking the Insanity for each PC.. Anyone else use experience anything similar when running this module?

[Pan]

I really wanted to but my players cried foul, "insanity is not PF/D&D!!!11!!one!!1!!!" One player was cool with it so we are playing it out. Currently The halfling alchemist/bard is slowly going insane while she tries to procure as many books of ancient knowledge as possible. The other PCs have been too busy to notice. I get to cook something up when we wrap up the AP next month. The players want to keep going to level 20.

I prefer something that your players can live with when it comes to insanity. The AP really doesn't afford stopping for mental treatment. Also, it sucks to have a character taken away unless its cool with the player. Be careful of the affliction table too. For instance, multiple personalities can be a real fun way to role play out insanity. Amnesia turns a PC into a commoner mechanically and it is on the same table. Chalk me up as loving insanity in role playing but not a fan of current rule systems for PF/D&D.

[Rakshaka]

Yeah, Amnesia and Psychosis seem like they would make for an unplayable character. Of the four remaining:

Mania/Phobia: I could see this being linked to either vermin (from the slugspawn) or dimensional traveling (from encountering the Hounds of Tindalos and Dimensional Shamblers).

Multiple Personality Disorder The question becomes, what other personaltites get inflicted by the encounters with Outer Beings and Stranger Things? I could possibly see a "Hunter" persona coming forth within a character, someone who doesn't speak and only fights for bloody survival during combat. Also, the Fighter in our group will most likely have the opposite of this since he repeatedly refers to his "Uncle", the Playerss backup character in case this one dies, a Summoner and member of the Esoteric Order of the Palantine Eye. Having him take aspects of his "Wise Uncle" due to mind-bending encounters might work.

Paranoia: I think this will most likely get used if enough PCs fail saves against Confusion and other effects before the end of the module. I could see being attacked by your own allies having mental consequences, especially if under the duress of alien horrors.

Schizophrenia: This will come from those who fail their sanity checks against the Colour out of Space and The Dark Young. Anyone who glimpses such horrors should question the nature of reality to the point that it debilitates them.

I plan on drawing out the beginning of Ashes at Dawn, so I think I'm going to have the characters actually play out their madness, using the rules for curing it in the GMG. Alternatively, I'm going to institute a house rule letting anyone with a Heal skill attempt to aid the afflicted person by spending an hour talking them through their madness. In this way, If they can match the DC of the Madness with their Heal check, I'll allow them to Aid another on the PC's sanity check (+2, or +4 if the role-playing is really good).

I'm actually looking forward to this now..

[Keep Calm and Carrion]

Lepidstadt offers 7th level spellcasting, and Karcau offers 6th. Of course, both of those are further away than Ardis! Closer than those three is Kavapesta, which was left out of the Rule of Fear setting book, but Bishop Bahulameta Ulametria is listed as a level 11 cleric...of course, as a pillar of the Pharasmin Penitence, she might be peculiar about relieving others' burdens.

Kavapesta description from Paizo's editor-in-chief F. Wesley Schneider:

Kavapesta: The largest city in Amaans and a holy city for Pharasmins, Kavapesta is a somber place possessed by a dour variety of religious fanaticism. The city takes its name from Mother Kavapesta, a Pharasmin missionary and teacher whose sermons on perseverance and suffering laid the foundations for the philosophies today known as the Pharasmin Penitence. After the priestess's death, her followers began the construction of Cryptgate Cathedral, which through centuries of renovations and expansions would become the largest church and monastery of Pharasma in the nation. The effort of constructing this monument and the tombs beneath brought droves of pilgrims to the banks of Lake Divirmis, which the faithful eventually renamed Lake Kavapesta. With the cathedral's completion, the assembled congregation lingered on, hoping to create a community based on the tenets of their faith. This community grew slowly, finally becoming the city known today.

Yet a city needs more than faith to survive, a fact the people of Kavapesta stubbornly defy. The foothills around the city are poorly suited to farming and the lake is tainted by poisonous minerals from the Hungry Mountains. A few mines in the surrounding hills scrape tin and coal out of the earth, though one has to wonder if the coin won from these efforts is worth the lives lost to cave-ins, choking maladies, and more mysterious disappearances. But worst of all are the plagues, the rampant sicknesses that seem to boil up from lake Kavapesta once a generation and burn through the city like a field fire. Scourges like the Whithers, Tol's Voice, and, most fearfully, the Black Breath have killed thousands in their beds, with lesser scares and reemergences occurring every few years. But the people claim that their city is blessed - not cursed like so many visitors say - insisting that each new calamity is a test from Pharasma and an opportunity for the citizens to experience ever greater trials, assuring greater rewards after death.

But if you're more interested in having the players confront madness without the benefit of a Heal spell, why not have a side adventure in Havenguard Lunatic Asylum? It's right in Caliphas, where they're headed after Thrushmoor.

Havenguard:

Havenguard Lunatic Asylum: A most unusual hospital
spreads its batlike wings across the crumbling cliffs
overlooking Caliphas. Here doctors seek to see past
legends of fiendish possessions and cursed blood to treat
unfortunates suffering from ailments of the mind. Under
the direction of its founder, the dedicated but locally
slandered Dr. Beaurigmand Trice, the asylum’s physicians
attempt to protect, understand, and heal without the
aid of expensive magical interventions—though many
admit incomplete understanding of the maladies they
treat, or missteps in their more experimental therapies.
Occasionally, the physicians’ treatments reveal unsettling
causes of their patients’ unease, which makes Dr. Trice’s
standing as a venture-captain of the Pathfinder Society
and his hospice’s support of the organization’s members a
frequently employed boon.

[Rakshaka]

I had thought about running a mental institution, but this AP as well as others have given my group a permanent bad image of these facilities in fantasy setting.

NOTE TO AUTHORS: IT WOULD BE COOL TO SEE ONE ASYLUM THAT FUNCTIONED IN EITHER A TOWN OR A MODULE. No crazy secret operations, experiments, abductions, or other things. A place wher people actually get well? It makes one wonder why the things exist at all in Golartion. Between

Some Other AP Stuff:

the one in Skinsaw Murders, the doctors in the Seven Days to the Grave, the one that burns down in Trial of the Beast, and the one in Carrion Hill,

one wonders why anyone would willingly set foot in such a place.. The thought that every single one is a horrible place that just collects people to experiment on is a disturbing prospect indeed and if this is indeed the case indicates a fascinating sapient disposition towards sanity and the insane On Avistan, a fundamental fear of mental illness and its lack of understanding. People might just dump off the insane to these 'butchers' and just walk in the other direction, never looking back. Nonetheless, I know that these places wouldn't be worthy of encounters if they weren't somehow 'bad', but how about a couple places that aren't actually horrifying in the side descriptions? (End Rant, sorry)

Anyways, I'm probably going to play it out according to the rules of removing the madness. With an Oracle of Life and the ability to spam Restoration, it also allows me to chew up the extra wealth that my PCs have acquired from running Carrion Hill in the form of Diamond Dust. Also, it would still mean that the afflicted PCs would experience it for at least one day. Since I'm stretching out the beginning of Ashes at Dawn, I'll probably have easier combat encounters with the complication of insane characters. This could get really interesting...

[Deidre Tiriel]

Actually, there is an asylum in Caliphas, it is the pathfinder lodge there. As far as I know, there isn't anything nefarious going on there.

I removed Amnesia as an option for insanity. The psychosis actually worked really well in my group because one of the characters was a Low Templar and was going through the "evil" side of his character journey.

I gave them an interesting magic item that lets them buy items from Caliphas (1 a day) at a premium, roughly 20% higher than market price.

The encounter came to a head last game, and the group had a blast roleplaying it out. With the help of the introduction of another monster in the dungeon, they were able to stabilize the psycho and will keep him out of it until they can use the heal scroll coming for them in the morning.

It was one of the best roleplaying sessions I've ever had.

[EDIT] restoration does not work. Greater Restoration, Heal, Miracle, Limited Wish or Wish are required to magically remove insanity. The only other option is time and will saves.