Simple. Pick reasons why those guys are in the asylum.

One guy is a rapist, RAPE DUNGEON.

One guy witnessed something horrible like war or some shit, JACOB'S LADDER DUNGEON

One guy was in a concentration camp, HOLOCAUST DUNGEON

"We just cut up our girlfriend with a chainsaw. Does that sound...'Fine'?"

>Call of Cthulhu
>Psychonauts

Fund it. Fund it forever.

Personally, I'd just scroll down a list of mental disorders and spend a little while thinking about how to symbolically represent them, like Gloria's bipolar disorder, or Boyd's paranoia, only much darker, obviously.

Look up as many disorders as you can find to base your "levels" off of.

For example, taking a note from Psychonauts and running an OCD guy whose mind is filled with clocks and counters wouldn't be too bad. Or a dual-personality case where the players have to negotiate (or just avoid collateral damage from) two warring sides.

If you really want to fuck your players up, though? Have one guy be completely sane, but filled with rage at his imprisonment.

>One of the inmates was a beekeeper
>MIND IS A GIANT BEEHIVE
>FILLED WITH BEES

>>13451069
Yeah, I suppose that could work, but I want to represent them in interesting ways. Rape dungeon sounds simple, but how can I make it interesting? I have never been to a rape dungeon so I don't think I could make an accurate judgement.

Ok, that was me being shitty, and I apologise. I guess I just want to come up with something that'll put the shits up my players without resorting to "look at all these mutilated corpses and raped bitches etc". Also I was thinking I'd connect the 5 or 6 guys to the shit going down somehow, but that isn't particularly important.

>>13451118

Think Geiger's Alien. The whole movie is basically about rape.

>>13451103
Now I like the idea of two warring sides. I haven't decided on a time period yet, but I'm sure I can find a war on which to base it. I also like the idea of a sane person, maybe starting to go mad because of the asylum? Like, a fairly normal world but things aren't quite as they seem. Things are tearing at the edges, lots of deja vus, that sort of shiznazz.

>>13451140
Oh, ok. That could definitely work.

Also, what do you mean by a Jacob's Ladder dungeon? I googled Jacob's Ladder and it didn't look particularly scary.

Make sure to include a TWO FEET! TWO FEET!!!!

OP: There's an old amiga game called "Weird dreams"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1rhvFW3Lbo
Might find something good in it, the little girl with the ball is terrifying.

>>13451167
You have not seen that movie.
You must see that fucking movie.

>>13451170
Ahhh I recognise that what's it from?

>>13451167

It's a movie. If you want spoilers for it, say so, because it is an awesome movie that shouldn't be spoilered..

I'd suggest each level having a gimmick based on the psychological disorders of the patients. For example, he bipolar one flips between a world full of spastic, high octane activity, and dead, dreary silence. The most dangerous parts are when things are changing from one to the other, as things that were stationary begin to move at lethal speeds, and things you needed to keep moving (for example, floating platforms) stop.

The schizophrenic one is full of illusions or operates under the assumption that cause and effect is just a suggestion, and so on.

I imagine you'd want this tied into the supernatural influence, so perhaps while dodging the dangers of already problematic psyches, they have to ferret out things that don't belong, which are clues to what is going on.

>>13451188

One anon made a post about his Call of Cthulhu investigator that found out dogs murdered their owner and the only way they could have done it was if they walked on two feet.

Then he failed a sanity check and tried to immediately suicide if I recall correctly.

>>13451211

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/13050054/

Link to archived thread

>>13451199
This.

Thanks for the suggestions, keep them coming. Exactly how scary is Jacob's Ladder? Will I shit my pants? I'm not great with scary movies tbh.

>>13451277
How scary?
Its not gore porn, but its got some gore.
Its not "a skeleton jumps out", but skeletons do jump out.
Its not pant-shitting terror, but pants may be shat.
Quite literally, depending on your state of mind and your personal worldview, your mileage may vary.

For a movie which is 20 years old, its still got it.

>>13451277

More wtf than BLARGHLE I'M IN YOUR FAAAACE, though I recall perhaps some jump scares?

>>13451306
Ok, this sounds cool. I'll check it out.

Anybody know of any other decent sources of inspiration? I've been playing through Oblivion again recently and the Shivering Isles has a few cool ideas. Also the game Sanitarium which you may have heard of. I'm actually basing a lot of this on that game, even though I only played the first 2 chapters :I all I remember is some crazy shit with children whose average number of faces was above 1.

>>13451364
If you want to play up the angles of inter-party dramatics, ideally with snuffable NPCs, watch the movie Cube but ignore all of the lolrandom killing machinery, and pay attention to the people as they degrade over time.

For that matter, watch Event Horizon as Dr. Weir loses his shit. Check out the movie "Bug", which plays a lot with the whole "head games" thing.

And that's just three movies sitting on coffee table right now.

>>13451152
>I haven't decided on a time period yet
If you aren't doing between the wars period you're doing it wrong.

Bump

>>13451432
Yeah, I suppose that would be the most logical, but late Victorian would surely be the most appropriate for an old style sanitarium?

>>13451527
Most sanitariums were hellholes from scratch until they closed their gates. Read up on Nellie Bly's work for details on that, and keep in mind what the time frame she's working with is.

Or, for raw fun, look up "Moniz" and "lobotomy".
Protip: don't use google's image search.
Seriously.

Hey, here's an interesting idea thought:

What would the mind of a brain-dead person look like? Something worth exploring maybe? With supernatural possibilities, this could have some potential.

>>13451563
>What would the mind of a brain-dead person look like?
A space. No other details. If you try moving, you'll begin to run into or trip over stuff, but there is no light or echo so you can't detect them in advance.

>>13451563
>>13451583
Here's a better question: what if there was something hiding in there?
>dee doo dee walking around in an empty mind
>HOLY SHIT ITS A LION GET IN THE CEREBRAL CORTEXT

>>13451592
What about an actual lion? That could work. Kind of like the polar bear in LOST. Inexplicable and eerie.

There's an inmate who has horrible, neurotic, obsessive guilt over something he did. His mindscape is a fairly normal place, with a mystery the psychonauts have to solve in order to resolve him (what did he do? make him forgive himself? who knows). However, certain actions with his mindscape will trigger his guilt. Trying to open certain doors cause everything to twist, darken and OH GOD NO PLEASE I'M SORRY I'M SORRY NEVER MEANT TO FUCK NO CAN'T SORRY PLEASE NO HELP GOD NO PLEASE SORRY I'M SO SORRY FUCK I'M SO FUCKING SORRY NO STOP until they stop doing that or undo what they did. Resolving the mystery may involve forcing your way through this hellstorm to reach the final cathartic clue.

So OP, here's what you do.

You make sure that there are at least 4 dominant crazy people who determine the overall feeling of your 'setting'. When the players first enter the chamber the nutters are in, ensure to mention one word a couple of times, a hook if you will, but this word is a keyword to the grander puzzle of the crazies mental playground.

When they enter the minds of the crazies actual, they are greeted by a sinister looking apparition that demands they go to the 4 different corners of the leaders' minds and collect some kind of additional portion of the second keyword that is needed to unlock their way out of the dream world.

When they finally return to the real world, they find its beginning to represent the dream world slightly, that the apparition was real, and the key words were actually words of power, designed to stop the immortal race of undead/snake/machines that caused the catastrophe to begin with.

Oh shit.. that sounds familiar...

bumpan

>>13451432

But Call of Cthulhu works great in pretty much any time period. That's the brilliant thing about it.

Seven inmates, guilty of seven deadly sins. Not the most original idea, but hey, it's effective.

Also, never explicitly mention that each mind is corrupted by one of the seven deadly sins. Letting you players figure it out on their own makes the difference between a gimmicky game design and a profound game philosophy.

Sloth - someone who is listless and nonresponsive to people: mind is full of faceless people and resembles an old wooden house with no exit.
Gluttony - Compulsive oveeater, players become chained in his mind, possibly also dealing with poison somehow.
Greed - Burnt-out hick obsessed with lottery tickets. Mind appears as a gold mind, with monsters lurking in between you and treasure; the monsters turn out to be little children after you've killed them.
Pride - Lonely spinster, mind appears as a cage with all of your characters loved ones just out of reach of the cage, unresponsive and with their backs turned.
Envy - Man who maimed the woman he loved (unintentionally) and the man that she loved(very intentionally). Mind appears to be full of thieves and robbers that take your player's items.
Lust - A rich woman who lost husbands and lovers, possibly also the lover of Envy man. Mind is full of fuck, literally.
Wrath - Mind of a serial killer, often committed murder due to uncontrollable rage. Mind is full of deadly weapons and traps and himself, out to kill anyone for the slightest offense.

also, check out the catholic seven virtues as puzzle solutions: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Seven_deadly_sins#Catholic_Seven_Virtues

On that page is also demon associations with the seven deadly sins.

capgras syndrome - some or all of those around you have been replaced by impostors or copies, and no-one will believe you.

Bump

This is what I came up with reading this through:

The mind of a blacksmith who made hammers, swords and the lot but he also made special knives and daggers of new and interesting shapes. Like, say, how a glassblow makes a bunch of "normal" things to pay the bills and some works of art that sells for a lot but are very few.
Now, he killed with each dagger/knife someone. He killed about 200 or so over the course of many years in a big city. Each dagger/knife was then sold in his shop.
Now, his mindscape is his shop. The door outside is locked and through the street window you will only see grey shadows of people walking past. In his smithy there's a huge door with gold decorations and made out of the finest wood. Behind is a giant room with podiums with each and every dagger/knife that he's ever made and "christened" along with a nametag. Where the last podium would there's instead a broken podium, an empty nametag and a dagger on the floor.
Now the idea here is that when you touch one of the daggers you get to relive the night that he killed the person (or persons if it was a pair of daggers, "twins of ...." for instance.) but when you touch the last dagger the player who touches it will be placed in the city and have to kill someone, avoid getting caught and name the blade(s).

>>13457927
argh, typos and shit everywhere.

Too tired to care.

bumpin

bump

This thread just reminded me /tg/...

Recently saw Shutter Island and the only part of the movie I liked was when our main character was in Ward C (the hardcore dangerous part of the prison/asylum) and one of the loosed inmates jumps out naked, slaps him in the shouldder, then shouts, "Tag!! You're it!!", then silently runs away into the oppressive darkness.


Best game of tag EVER!!

Bump

You could watch The Cell. It has Jennifer Lopez and it's not a very good movie, but it might give you some ideas. Lopez is a psychiatrist who enters a serial killers mind to find out where his latest victim is kept.

Bump

bumpan

FUCK YEAH Psychonauts. Well you could use a few... maybe an actor's mind, where everybody is playing a role, but it shows they are not at ease in it (for example, the police says "Freeze... please?" and stuff like that), his mind is just a reflexion of his insecurities, but being in the mind of an insecure person is likely to make you insecure about mostly anything (be sure to pass a lot of notes saying they don't believe certain thing, or better, subtle hints given only to certain players, gives more paranoia)

You could also have the mind of an hardcore game who "lost himself" in the games, just enforce the most clichés from violent videogames you can find (a simple cut flows like a river and there are weapon everywhere) only these don't all apply to the investigators, they are not half-immortal, they can't shot someone's finger off while wallrunning, but thoses psychos going everywhere sure can.

Alternatively, take my last example but with tabletop rpg, am adventuring party comes in at random times and murders everyone in the room but the investigators (they were talking to NPCs before that) etc...

For one crazy, you could use scarecrows as NPC's. Their entire world "looks" normal, save for the fact that all the little critters and people look/are scarecrows. Of course, you can't explicitly say that they are scarecrows; you need to describe them as wrong; you know, faces that don't change, marionette-like movements, improper proportions, etc. Of course, you can substitute scarecrows for anything else, like mannequins. Figuring out what they are would be the key to solving the crazy's particular psychosis.

Maybe you can make them a serial-killer farmer who used people as scarecrows, or a sales clerk who went insane after they killed a friend/coworker and hid the corpse in a mannequin, etc.

>>13463568

Oh! With that in mind, maybe you can make one of the people an insane ex-adventurer (or something along those lines), where their entire mind is a sick parody of the whole adventurer lifestyle.

Also, don't forget the little "secret areas" that a person can find that exposes a person's insecurities, fears, etc. Like the female teacher - Mia, or Mio, the one with the 70's theme - in her mind, there's a little room filled with those little wooden horses for children, and if you go into the toy chest, you enter this cage surrounded by fire and demons, whispering accusations that the woman had abandoned them.

This would work really well if you decide to make one mind-scape look really sane. Maybe you can have the insanity become more apparent as the players get closer to the source?

>>13463634
Like this?

>>13463714

Oh yeah, but make them mobile and stuff. Or not, which is just as creepy.

Don't forget the "Ego," or the character representing the person in their own head.

Bumping

>>13463634
I did that once, I simply wasn't consistent with my description, at first by "accident" then more and more by purpose, is seriously freaked them out

Does this thread deserve to be archived? It seems like it should be archived.
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/13451046/
A lot of these are things I would use, if I had any idea what I was doing.

Tagged under: Call of Cthuulu, Campaign setting, Psychonauts

a patient with ganser syndrome. This one probably requires some context, Ganser syndrome sufferers do LOLRANDUM stuff on purpose. Whats 1+1? Fucking 15, stuff like that.


So anyway, you get into the Gansers mind and there are a bunch of riddles and traps and puzzles and who ha, but the point is specifically to do the exact wrong thing for most of the puzzles, to make it easier on your players maybe suggest that they study the different problems with each inmate before they get two knuckles deep into each ones head.

just another thought on movie material, OP:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cell

opinion is split, but I remember it having quite a full on visual style. Could be worth a look.

Other than that, have you played Batman: Arkham Asylum?

There's a couple of levels/sections that are inside Batman's psyche, care of Scarecrow. Very nifty stuff.


Another thought, if you're designing the "levels" around a central mental illness concept, look at books/films/whatever that deal with similar themes.

For example: Paranoia
1984 is THE classic paranoid, dystopian fiction.
So, for a level based around Paranoia make it like Airstrip one: cold, harsh, soviet bloc type architecture, lots of plain concrete, cold winds, etc. Keep it relevant to the time period; e.g. in a modern period, have cameras everywhere, in the 1950s, have cops on every corner, and they're all looking menacingly at the characters.

It might seem obvious, but the descriptions of the details will be distracting to the players, and it's unlikely they'd immediately make the connection between eyes/cameras/police and paranoia.

bump

bumping

additional bumping.

If you want to do some research here's a long list of different disorders
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mental_disorders_as_defined_by_the_DSM_and_ICD