How to succesfully have the PC's go insane.

[Ikeren]

I am currently running a campaign where the PC's are going to be slowly driven insane by the use of their magic, and a later plot will involve them removing this effect. I was wondering if people had ideas for subtle things to do to the party to represent this insanity. I've already had them crash into a "door" which was in reality a silent image, and see odd things at the edge of their vision, but I'm looking for a wider array of creative and interesting things to do to them. I'm thinking about screwing up NPC reactions a little; the party says "Thank you, lord" to a passing noble, and the NPC hears "I hope you die" or something of the like; as well as them seeing people do things like draw daggers and glare at them, but in reality, none of such is happening.

So, any other ideas would be greatly appreciated.

[Sinfire Titan]

Don't? You are forcing a change in character upon them. If we're talking taint here, just remind them that they are being corrupted and let them RP it. If they don't, there's nothing you can do without alienating them.



Don't screw with a PC's character, especially on something like RPing Insanity. They don't take it well.

[Ikeren]

Thank you for the advice. All affects should appear external; ie, potentially caused by forces other than insanity, thus, leaving it ambiguous. At the end of the campaign, I want the question to be if it was actually magic driving them insane, or if there was a hostile force messing with them. Furthermore, like I said, I'll later have them "curing" the effect, though I intend to leave it ambiguous as to whether they were affected at all. I guess the question can be modified to "What would a powerful wizard do to subtly screw with a party in minor and indirect ways?" (Ventriloquism to make NPC's hear the wrong thing, silent images to have people crash into doors, illusions or charms to have random NPC's in taverns behave strangely).


Edit: Also, our group has a history of players going insane for various reasons, characters being mutilated/transformed/etcetera...the most drastic of which was a wizard being turned into a yak-folk --- and this was not my DMing. I think our interpretation is that in the violent and chaotic worlds we play, bad things can happen.

[pixledriven]

Don't?

+1
However, if your players are actually into that sort of thing, then have fun. Personally, I'd be hard-pressed to stay in the game.


Now, If you want some help, I think the best place to go would be your players. Get the meta-game going and let them join in on the fun, instead of just telling them "you hear a noise" or "everything changes from full color to various shades of blue." You might be surprised what kinds of ideas fly your way, and it lessens the "The DM says I do this/act this way" impact on your game.

[veekie]

Passing notes to players who 'see' something the others don't.
Make a secret roll, it doesn't matter the result.

Except sometimes you roll and nobody sees anything.
The idea is for them to legitimately suspect something might be there. At the least you can inflict paranoia.

[kurashu]

Paranoia is better than insanity unless the player comes to you and says, "I want to play an insane character, how can I do this?" I did this once and it was hard to keep the character motivated while playing up his insanity as well.

[Ikeren]

Awesome, thanks for all the advice. Greatly appreciated it.

[The_Mad_Linguist]

Honestly, I'd play it a bit like the scene aspect + fate point system of Dresden.

That is, if players will play along with their characters being insane and not understanding what's going on (making their situation worse), they get points that can be spent to make the situation not as bad as it seems (IE: there never was a third imp - I was just hallucinating it type thing).

Sort of a twisted version of collaborative storytelling.  You as the GM can lie to the players, and the players can force you to be lying even when you didn't think you were.

[veekie]

One  addendum to the note passing trick. Make sure that most of the time the notes are correct and the guy getting the notes is the only sane man. The GENERAL scene is whats messed up.

Except when its not. Basically, mistrust for perceptions is what you can build, true insanity is hard without what TML used, in that you and the players cooperate to produce the right kind of madness.

I prefer paranoia though, since it's hard to tell if you're being messed with or if you're the only one not messing up.

[RobbyPants]

Passing notes to players who 'see' something the others don't.
Make a secret roll, it doesn't matter the result.

Except sometimes you roll and nobody sees anything.
The idea is for them to legitimately suspect something might be there. At the least you can inflict paranoia.

Yeah.  I think inflicting it on the players is better than strictly on the PCs.  This can cause the players to run their PCs as if they were insane.

Unearthed Arcana has rules for sanity, but I've never been really fond of them.  You can take a look at those, but Sinfire makes a good point:  if you implement them, you're messing with people's PCs, and it could get ugly.  Make sure you have buy-in from all of them before doing so.

[veekie]

This can cause the players to run their PCs as if they were insane.

By many standards PCs ARE already pretty insane.

[archangel.arcanis]

The sanity rules Robby linked to are pretty close to what you want. It sounds a lot like you are running a Wheel of Time type game where magic itself is dangerous to use, at least for males in the setting.