Suggestions for an Asylum

[Chyrone]

Hello folks,

For finding a person who speaks Aklo, the group is headed for an Asylum for the mentally insane. Now i've got ideas to put in it for them, but i'm curious if any of you have some nice extra ideas.
This is not intended to be a haunted mansion, but an Asylum that would mess with their minds as much as possible.

Intended setup for now::

-Illusions on staff or patients, making them look like hostiles.
-Illusions making hostiles look like friendlies.
-A magic room which, depending on person, shows them what they fear most.
Sadly, the monk and oracle claim to know no fear. This i tried to endulge via a survey in the city.
-Warded doors that get unwarded when pulling a lever/button. Some of those warded doors are designed to actually keep the dangerous types in, opposed to others out.
-Glamour to mask details of murder.
-Scary patients with various conditions and triggers.
-Notes on certain patients.

[voideternal]

Any background information about this Asylum? What did you already tell your players?

Why are there illusions in an Asylum? If anything, don't the doctors want to remove illusions / enchantments / curses?
Why would you show frightful things in an Asylum? Wouldn't that make the patients become even more insane?
Why is there murder in the Asylum? How is it relevant to the plot?

[Count Coltello]

dotting for interest ...every campaign needs some crazy people

[T.A.U.]

dotting for interest me too!

[Issac Daneil]

I'm guessing you want to capture that Arkham asylum + Silent hill feeling.

[boring7]

All I can think of is joke things. Like the guy who claims he was a high-level adventurer before "the great change of editions."

Someone with a neck scar who claims to have found and grafted onto himself "the fabled head of vecna."

A guy in a napoleon hat, of course.

Things from psychonauts.

Anyway, if the lunatics are running the asylum then you're going to have corrupted treatments like electroshock therapy. Dead bodies at a "party" (tea, birthday, or other). UNdead bodies at the same party. Voices and whispers and screams that lead to empty rooms. And your boring "know no fear" characters all lose levels, because they probably fear that.

Temporarily, of course.

[countchocula]

you should throw a curve ball and have it be a well established asylum with friendly motivated staff...nothing creeps a pc out like a normal non hostile asylm

[HyperMissingno]

I have a suggestion, you could possibly have an alchemist worshiper of Lamashtu dedicated to creating the perfect lifeform and have them attacked by either him or a horribly deformed experiment....only use the second one if your players have a strong stomach.

[boring7]

countchocula wrote:

you should throw a curve ball and have it be a well established asylum with friendly motivated staff...nothing creeps a pc out like a normal non hostile asylm

To be honest, that is the more interesting option.

[blackbloodtroll]

Run by a Black Magga. Chrestomath and Caulborn enforcers.

Derro and Human staff, and patients. Many humans should be good, and working for the "greater good".

Treasure found should include Rod of Wonder, Obliviating Flail, Nightmare Tears, and various Drugs.

Symbol of Insanity, and Insanity Mist Traps.

The Asylum should move from normalcy, to insanity, and back.

In the end, the PCs may actually question if they belong there, or not.

[Thanael]

Where Madness dwells is a free d20 adventure set in an asylum. You could pillage it for maps and NPCs...

[Sevori]

A doctor who "cures" patients by feeding on their madness leaving them catatonic .Or the asylum was inadvertently built over an area that is strongly connected to Leng and the patients can hear whispers from that planes denizens .

[Chyrone]

Issac Daniel wrote:

I'm guessing you want to capture that Arkham asylum + Silent hill feeling.

Sorta.

The group's lvl 3 currently, so sorry for the dotters, it's not a campaign about to start.

voideternal wrote:

Any background information about this Asylum? What did you already tell your players?

Why are there illusions in an Asylum? If anything, don't the doctors want to remove illusions / enchantments / curses?
Why would you show frightful things in an Asylum? Wouldn't that make the patients become even more insane?
Why is there murder in the Asylum? How is it relevant to the plot?

It's a fictional Asylum SE of Harse, south east varisia. All the delusional and more dangerously deranged end up there.

I intend to put a cameo of Hannibal Lecter in it too. :)

Illusions are work of cultists, one whom has usurped position of "warden" and made it all possible. Since the cult is related to the Great Old Ones, madness and insanity are obvious. It's meant to drive any intruders or investigators crazy.

Why would it be bad for cultists to drive crazy people even more insane? In case of the weak, excellent sacrificial and experimental material.

HyperMissingNo wrote:

and have them attacked by either him or a horribly deformed experiment

I've been tinkering sort of a pyramid head-thing to stalk the 2nd floor. Save for it's a tormented patient who can only get temporary relief from suffering if he kills. Like in SH, he's nighly invulnerable. I set him to have DR 10/Silver and a magic resistance. But through notes i'll occasionally slip them hints on it's weaknesses.

The patient they're supposed to "rescue" is an oracle of Dark Tapestry, from maximum security wing. A former char of mine, excellent for a cameo.

At best, i want the characters to feel nervous, believe some (or most) illusions and the two who claim "nothing scares me" to be scared IC,
at worst they should at least be uneasy. Most i can do to one of the two is play into the trauma of torture, whereas i don't have a clue what could unsettle the monk.

Thanks for all the suggestions so far.

[Bongo BigBounce]

Throw in some animated Manacles and StraightJackets that grapple the party while a Haunt or spooky illusion spells their names out in blood on the wall.

[Bruunwald]

Issac Daneil wrote:

I'm guessing you want to capture that Arkham asylum + Silent hill feeling.

Speaking of my favorite nightmare setting, there was an interesting mystery module for Trail of Cthulhu a couple years back, called Invasive Procedures. Never played it, but an interesting read. The author, Gareth Hanrahan, mentioned some inspiration from Silent Hill, amongst a few others.

The idea was a creepy hospital by day that became completely nightmarish and inescapable at night, similarly to the Silent Hill Otherworld. Monstrous nurses walked the halls after dark, and a group of otherworldly "surgeons" (like doctor versions of the Cenobites from Hellraiser) would show up to conduct awful experimental surgeries.

My recommendation would be to combine the idea others have mentioned here, a completely normal asylum staffed with caring people, with a nightmarish version into which it transforms for a few hours each night. Perhaps the staff have no idea the transformation takes place, and consider it a collective delusion of the patients, but the PCs somehow get tangled up in it all.

[Chyrone]

@Bruunwald,

An interesting angle.

[The Epic Dungeon Master]

This is a great opportunity to test your players' response to the grim and macabre. I like the idea that others have put forth with an ordinary staff. However, I would push it further by noting to the more perceptive character that there is an unplaceable hideousness about them. Keep conversations and appearances pleasant and otherwise normal, but emphasize that when talking to the staff, it seems as though something else is listening from behind their physical facade.

Again, as others have said, it is important to think about the setting and the 'why' of things. Your players may still have a great time even if you throw in a seemingly out-of-place zombie or looting bandits, but you create an opportunity for both them and you to walk away with a truly memorable experience with a well constructed story and series of events. It seems obvious that there will be some sort of confrontational force, be it aggressively insane patients, twisted staff with a lust for sadism, or an otherworldly force that has possessed a few of the inmates (it seems like the latter is the case). Make sure to develop goals for your antagonist (presumably the warden). Is he trying to summon an Great Old One or one of their lesser creatures from the Beyond? Is he attempting some ritual that exploits the weak will of the mentally insane? Or perhaps he is possessed by a unutterable thing from the Beyond who is using him as a vessel to herald its arrival. Since you are going down the path of the Great Old Ones, a tribute to the wonderfully insane machinations of HP Lovecraft, consider what elements and themes make his work so potent.

1) There is a long build of suspense.
In the vast majority of Lovecraft's works, suspense is built gradually and over time, with subtle and ambiguous clues that something is not quite right. Often times, the reveal is the climax.
Ideas:

• Note to the players that they feel an unwarranted discomfort dealing with the staff.
  
• The players feel more at ease with the inmates than the staff.
  
• Whispers or commotion is heard from within rooms that, when investigated, are empty and in pristine condition.
  
• You see more staff taking "medicinal substances" than the patients are receiving.
  
• You continually see dead patients being carried to the morgue, and whispers of mass suicide become heard.
  
• The PC's encounter the body of the former warden. Depending on how long ago the take over was, the body will be in different states and require an appropriate clue.
  

2) There is a supernatural element.
Not always. But it is certainly not uncommon. The supernatural element adds to the suspense by introducing something unknown - and we naturally fear the unknown. In Pathfinder and other fantasy settings, this can be hard to use to the same effect as there are already "supernatural" things from our point of view such as magic, elves, dragons, etc. But when you go beyond that and introduce things that are supernatural to our characters, it becomes a powerful tool.
Ideas:

• When the arcane or divine player investigates a supernatural element, take advantage of this to explain that is not magic that they are experiencing, but a power foreign to Golarion.
  
• The players may walk into a room to find blood smeared across the wall in an unknown language (Aklo???), a foetid stench tests their stomach (save or become sick) as they lay eyes upon a freshly gutted inmate sprawled in a ritual circle, but in a blink returns to a normal room with a "healthy" patient inside.
  
• The PC's come across notes between staff that speak of "The Whisperer in the Darkness", or some other Lovecraftian epithet.
  
• The inmates cry out to the PC's to get out before "The Whisperer in the Darkness" (or some other Lovecraftian epithet) comes to take them.
  
• At times the PC's get a glimpse of a staff member/inmate who they just saw as an inmate/staff member. If they try to alert anyone a staff member suggests they get checked out.
  
• The PC's find a secret room with hidden tomes of forbidden and ancient knowledge. (Chance for magic loot - possibly cursed)
  
• One of the PC's hears sporatic whispers in a tongue that he knows he has never heard before, yet somehow understands.
  
• The warden bursts into a writhing mass of horror mid-fight (50% hp, new abilities, fun and dynamic fight). The payers must make will saves to prevent some form of insanity.
  

3) There is an element of unstoppable and impending doom.
Many of the stories that relate to the Great Old Ones are often heavily undertoned with a sense of impending doom. Regardless of the outcome, doom will come. If the evil was halted, it is only temporary. This sense of doom really makes the previous two elements stand out so much more. What is the difference between an Arkham detective and a real detective? When an Arkham detective finds a clue, it is never a relief. If the players were to come across a note that the warden was killed and the new warden is an insane killer, that is manageable. They could apprehend, kill or maybe join the warden. But if they came across a note that warden was killed and replaced by a harbinger for a being of chaos and calamity that has existed before existence? Well, my character wouldn't be sleeping well, regardless of how we dealt with the warden.
Ideas:

• Continue the whisperings from the Great Old One every so often in subsequent adventures, like the threat still remains.
  
• Add a supernatural relic that poses as a threat to all of Golarion if it were to fall in the wrong hands. (Follow up adventure to destroy the one ring?)
  
• A nice, quick monologue from the warden to illustrate the scale of things.
  
• Show hints that the cult has been around before recorded history, and has always posed a cosmic threat.
  

This advice is taking the direction of a very Lovecraftian feel to your adventure, which may not suit your wants or desires, but I hope it at least gave some good ideas!

[Chyrone]

Well, the warden is a cultist who usurped power.
He's creating opportunities for his fellow cultists.

Sure, the party hears some minor info, but not plot related. But several things your Wall of text,lol, mentioned will be incorporated.

Once again, thanks for the extra ideas.

[Bob Bob Bob]

So the most important question here is are you trying to scare the characters or are you trying to scare the players?

If you're trying to scare the players then you need to go back to the old standbys, sound, atmosphere, and danger to their characters (if they're real immersive) or equipment (if they're less so). Fighters who scoff at giants and dragons still flee in terror from the rust monster.

If you're trying to scare the characters then it's all in the descriptions, but you probably still play to the same primal fears as you would for the players. Fear of the unknown, fear of pain, loneliness, enclosed spaces, the dark, heights, blood, the list goes on.

The first step is determining what type of horror you want to do.

For the Saw crowd it's actually pretty simple, combine mechanical traps with Pyramid Head and watch as they desperately struggle to escape, say, a hallway full of bear traps staked to the floor. The best way to do it is to scare them with Pyramid Head, put them on initiative, then put the bear traps wherever they flee to. If someone makes their perception check they have to be higher in the initiative to warn the others, otherwise the other people run right into the bear traps. Then they have to try and pull off the bear trap before they can run away (or just abandon the person who was trapped). None of the traps should be particularly damaging, probably the best thing to make is a trap that causes ability damage and halves movement speed while the ability damage is still affecting them. Something like caltrops. You don't want to kill them with traps, you want to make them feel weaker and more vulnerable. Hunted, as it were.

Gothic horror requires a certain amount of buy-in (because there's a lot of GM fiating), but the basic premise is that humans are helpless, weak, and doomed to lose to the supernatural creatures and their best bet is just to run away. This is covered by Silent Hill 2 fairly well, I believe, given the spoiler that is Pyramid Head's true identity. For Gothic horror you just want to make sure you give the Asylum a lavish (and terrifying) description, the monsters inside (illusions or otherwise) are basically just created whole cloth from nothing. They should be as removed from reality as you can make them (seriously, just go look at any Silent Hill monsters) and can only be defeated by their weakness (which should be thematic). Oh, and none of those weaknesses is "getting stabbed in the face with a sword repeatedly". This also works really well for Cthulhu stuff, just replace all their "weaknesses" with "things that also drive you insane".

Standard horror is just Gothic horror without the helplessness. Include "getting stabbed in the face" on the list of weaknesses. Find some in-game reasons for why things happen (high DR, SLAs, illusions) so the players have more options beyond "run away until we actually make the knowledge check and know how to kill it". Don't go above DR 5 except for the boss so you can just batter your way past stuff, but it's much harder.

Once you've got a general tone set, the second step is details.

Asylum

• Broken down or fresh and new? Broken down gives you the impression of decay, collapse, and destruction, fresh and new sets off anyone with a fear of hospitals and should probably raise the paranoia of most adventurers. You'll want to overplay how shiny everything is just to make sure the players get it.
  
• Cover up the flaws or openly display them? If you leave the bloodstains smeared on the walls and floor the players know exactly what happened, if you mention how there's several coats of paint covering a "mysterious stain" you'll get their imaginations running wild. You can even do this with illusions so the players can see through an illusion or two... only to discover that maybe they didn't want to know.
  
• Built up or built down? A tall building gives it presence, power, basically required for Gothic horror, a building with 4 sub-basements leaves the players feeling trapped, confined, and it gets worse the deeper they go. Players will jump out of a 5th story window (trust me), they can't flee from a basement without going through all the other levels.
  
• Is the building normal or is it out to get them? Do the stairs always squeak when someone tries to sneak (but not otherwise)? Will the window just happen to catch the light to leave the monster in darkness but the party brightly lit/dazzle them? Is the building just a building or is it another monster also out to get them?
  

Patients

• Are the patients actually crazy or just being driven insane? If they're crazy the party probably feels less remorse in killing them, if they're just ordinary villagers that were kidnapped and slowly driven insane you can get a few "what have we done" moments out of it at the reveal. If you really want to play the innocent card you have to make sure the party has reason to, at least, beat up a lot of them. Have the patients rush them at some point or something similar.
  
• Patients are dangerous or patients are harmless? Similar to above, are the patients actually dangerous to the party (and trying to hurt them) or are they just harmless? If you really want to screw with the party make some harmless (and as they later learn, lobotomized) and others dangerous (and just desperately trying to escape before they end up like the harmless ones).
  

Cultists

• Who's part of the cult? The nurses, the patients, the doctors? If the whole staff has been replaced with cultists you can amp up the patient torture, otherwise it has to subtle, secretive. If some of the patients are cultists you can introduce friendly patients (who later betray them).
  
• Are the illusions for the patients or the visitors? Do they drive the patients insane or are they meant to keep things looking normal? If they're for patients then they're horrific nightmares and can screw with the players, if they're for the visitors than they're designed to hide and will mostly be used for misdirection with the players.
  

Pyramid Head

• Real or "ghost"? Is it a real person being driven insane (your current idea) or the ghost of someone murdered who simply body-hops to the next victim? Is it something the players can kill or is it some kind of eternal force of (un)nature? Picture this, the players have finally managed to kill it by stabbing it in the chest with a silver knife after a (presumably) dangerous battle. The rhythmic "CLANG... CLANG... CLANG..." of him dragging his sword after them has ended. As he gasps his last breath the mask dissolves and they see a humanoid face underneath who simply whispers "free..." and behind them they once again hear "CLANG... CLANG... CLANG..."
  
• Specific weakness or general weakness? DR/silver is kind of broad (and I have 1st level characters with silver weapons). DR/(the chains that once held him) is very specific, likely achievable, and impossible to duplicate. It also lets you use them in interesting ways. Maybe the monk ties the chains around their hands, the fighter wraps them around their sword, etc. That way they don't sacrifice their usual weapon to use whatever weapon they end up needing.
  
• Intelligence? Is it animalistic, driven solely by a burning desire to kill, or is it intelligent, hunting, outmaneuvering them, trapping them, closing doors and blocking stairways?
  

Monsters in general

• Fast or slow? Fast gives the immediate, visceral, RUN RIGHT NOW fight or flight reaction, slow invokes the creeping inevitability of death.
  
• Completely normal and ordinary things slightly or slowly turned horribly wrong or things so otherworldly and alien that our geometry cannot describe them? Normal lets you build on the horror slowly, gradually drawing out the terror, otherworldly get an immediate "what the @#$%*%& @#$%&^%$ @#$%".
  

The third step is to take all this and bring it together with the appropriate elements.

• Descriptions. Have these done ahead of time or be good at improvising. If you have the full background done and the general direction you want to take with it it's much easier to improvise for the effect you want.
  
• Sound. Get some atmospheric background music (decide between wailing patients or eerie silence with occasional crickets/cat scares) or just loops of background noise and telegraph the monsters they're not supposed to fight with something distinct and obvious (get a nice distinctive metal on metal clang for Pyramid Head's walking).
  
• Atmosphere. If this is a physical game (instead of online) dim the lights, make sure they turn off electronics, try to quiet other distractions. Depending on how you run the asylum you can also set your sink to slowly drip water. It's not much, but you'd be amazed how on edge it sets people. Maybe include a camera flash to simulate a flash of lightning. It helps to have an accomplice for some of these.
  
• Unless it's some major rules issue that kills someone, never admit fault or second guess yourself while the game is going. By all means try to clear that stuff after the game, but during the game you want to the players to feel helpless and uncertain, you need to look solid and in control to keep up appearances.
  

Then there's the dirty tricks.

• Reverse illusions. Create an illusion of a horrific nightmare room over a perfectly normal, unmodified room. Whoever makes their save will think it's a perfectly normal room, those who fail will see the awful blood splatter/whatever and repeatedly try to convince the others that they're the ones seeing an illusion.
  
• Hide the stairs to the upper levels in patient's rooms. So the main stairs only cover 3 of the 5 floors (or whatever) and in order to find the stairs to continue they have to search every room. This should get more disturbing the farther into the place they go (since hidden stairs means the cultists can do whatever they want to the people on those floors). This also requires the players to sneak around the place, probably at night, to avoid being noticed by nurses/orderlies. If you want to force them to come at night, just send orderlies with them any time they visit during the day (or don't let them visit if they don't know anyone there).
  
• Once you establish the distinctive noises for the bosses (and make sure you repeat them often) throw one in once, by itself, not tied to the boss.
  
• Include one perfectly normal, ordinary thing, lovingly described in excruciating detail and just off enough that it seems important. Maybe some kind of creepy doll. After they obsess over the first few (and nothing happens) throw in one that is important/trying to kill them. Have the others be copies/worship/devotion of it.
  
• Include a trap that casts darkness and blindness (in that order) so when the players are plunged into supernatural darkness they can (hopefully) identify the spell as darkness, but all of their light spells and even leaving where the darkness was cast don't seem to help them see again.
  

Now, none of this will help if your players are snarky, sarcastic, or otherwise don't take things seriously. If that's the case just go Army of Darkness and ham it up like the love child of Billy Mays, Brian Blessed, and William Shatner.

[Chyrone]

Much of the details on both patients and staff have been thought out.
It wasn't about scaring the players, which is easier via irl tabletop, but scaring/unnerving the characters.

Now call me picky, but scaring those two who claimed to be afraid of nothing would be a specific goal.
Atmosphere's been thought out too.

Are things that have DR/silver still hurt by magic weapons?
Like monk fists from lvl 5 up, which would be considered magical to overcome DR

[Bob Bob Bob]

DR/silver is not bypassed by magic weapons, however weapons with a +3 or higher enhancement bonus do bypass silver and cold iron DR. It's a specific pathfinder rule and I think the table is in the back with the DR rules. It's +3 bypasses silver and cold iron, +4 bypasses adamantine, +5 bypasses alignment (like good or chaotic). And everything that does enough damage can still bypass the DR (the classic greatsword, swung by a 10 Str weakling, can still break through DR 10 sometimes).

If this was about silver weapons, that's because a silver light mace is 25 gold, a simple weapon, and well within the budget of many aspiring young adventurers. Best of all, by using a bludgeoning weapon, you don't take the -1 penalty to damage that normally comes with silver. I brought it up because DR/silver doesn't stop me as a player even at level 1, unless you know for sure your players don't have silver weapons it's a poor DR to use for your "must be defeated a certain way" boss.

[The Epic Dungeon Master]

Overcoming Damage Resistance

[Chyrone]

For those contributors thusfar interested,

Yesterday the team surprised me. Now i had made a humanoid freak, PF loose variant to Pyramidhead, stalk the halls while the players were at the morgue. A muscular guy wrapped in barbed wire. I used custom race way to make him, if he hits he'd own the party. With the weapon (large greatsword) scraping on the floor, perception needed was low.

Now here's what i thought they'd do: hide in the morgue, behind/underneath a desk/slab or get inside one of the empty coffins. (Lol)

What they did: well...we run past it. > Ok, stealth or acro rolls. 1 makes the stealth, nice, one flung a 3d6 snowball at it (1 dmg out of 11), the monk wanted to be heroic and take an attack to provide a safe passage.
26AC, 21HP...were it not for the fact i forgot to add the 2-handed bonus, it would've been a kill with 2 nat 20 :/

So i hope, that when they next hear the scraping or see barbed wire man, they run like hell.

Oh, i mentioned the Monk saying she wasn't afraid of anything? She didn't want to pick up a tile engraved with a tombstone...go figure.
I've a room enchanted with an effect like phantasmal killer and let her describe what she sees. But instead of lethal, it'll just compell them to run away if they fail the save. :)