Helm of Opposite Alignment ... Think "A Clockwork Orange"

So you've got this prison which houses the worst criminals of the world. Every raping, murdering, regicidal bastich gets locked up here. But the warden is a man who believes that murder should not be met with more killing. So in his magical research he comes up with his solution: The Helm of Opposite Alignment. Make sure that the criminal's alignment is Evil then slap the helm on his head. Repeat this process for three weeks or so and you'll very likely render a guy who has switched alignments. Release them into the world as good as new and ready to turn over a new leaf.

Lawful governments can do the same to Chaotic anarchists. [Fill in the Blank] governments can do this to [fill in the blank] opposition.

So if the goal of incarceration is to remove from society from a dangerous individual and (potentially) to reform him, what are the reasons magical societies wouldn't engage in this kind of action? Much like in A Clockwork Orange, if the options are the death penalty, imprisonment for life, or the Helm, what keeps prison systems from engaging, or at the least experimenting, with this kind of reformation?

Awesome idea.

Felix said:

So if the goal of incarceration is to remove from society from a dangerous individual and (potentially) to reform him, what are the reasons magical societies wouldn't engage in this kind of action?

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1. Cost. The Helm is a one use item, and costs 4000 gp. The average unskilled worker in D+D earns 1sp a day. It's awfully hard to justify that discrepency. If a country has any hungry or homeless people in cities, farmers in drought, or any other socio-economic issues, nobody is going to look at 4k spent on a criminal as money put to good use.

2. Morals. Many people would consider forced re-habilitation of this type amoral, or counterproductive. If atonement is not earned, is it really atonement? You'll note that this was a topic of discussion in A Clockwork Orange as well.

3. Unreliability. The Helm requires the target to fail a will save. You can't guarantee that.

4. Complete reversal. Remember, it flips both alignments. Depending on the setting, CG might not be that much bettter than LE.

Felix said:

So if the goal of incarceration is to remove from society from a dangerous individual and (potentially) to reform him, what are the reasons magical societies wouldn't engage in this kind of action?

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Well, that depends. I think the biggest thing would be ethics.

You have a world with clerics that can bring folks back from the dead, at least on occasion, right? How much real, hard information on the afterlife does the culture get? In a world where position in the afterlife may depend very strongly on alignment, the question of free will and choice may be a very important one.

And, of course, the question works both ways. Why don't the bad guys go around making new villains with such helms?

A wand of poymorph costs 21,000gp and has 50 charges.

As mentioned, a helm costs 4,000gp. 50 helms would cost 200,000gp.

For nearly a 10th of the price, it'd be cheaper to just turn 50 people into chickens.

I agree that the Helm is a dangerous, risky choice for many reasons. Cost, no guarantee of success, the fact that you are essentially killing the person they are. Well, worse than that - you are killing the spirit of the individual, whereas if you were to actually slay them, they could be revived.

I do see situations where the Helm would be a worthwhile choice; you also have to remember, even most Good kingdoms in fantasy aren't as Modern with civil rights as we might be.

I do see a campaign, run properly and with players who are interested, where it takes on a whole 1984 approach.

On a side note, the old show Babylon 5 had an episode similar. Earthgov had developed a mindwiping process, that also implanted a new personality. They used it to make murderers a part of society, and then they placed them in a monastic order, free, happy, with their new lives and inability to remember the past.

What happened was a family member of a murder victim managed to find the new 'monk' responsible for the murder and killed him out of revenge. At the end, he was too shown this 'mercy' and wiped, being placed into the monastic order with no memory of any of it.

There are all kinds of directions to go with it. Now, using the Helm vs the death-penalty, that'd be up to the flavor of your campaign and the crunch of it. If you execute a rebel, or a villain, there is always the chance, at some point, someone will resurrect them or free them. I played in a game where, the way my character was introduced to the party was: I had once been a dread bandit lord; I was captured, fell in love with the queen, managed to get her to show mercy on me. For punishment, I allowed myself to be locked away in stoneform as a statue, to be freed when the country needed me. Since I was 20th level, it was good for the country, and good for me; far better than death, and all I'd owe them would be this one favor. Well, by the time I was freed, this empire had collapsed into ruin; it was just sheer luck I was found and was intact.

Which raises another good question: Instead of the Helm - although that could be an option for punishment - how about statueform as imprisonment? No feeding, no real space requirements - stack 'em like cordwood. Should be cheaper than the Helm for mass use.

Evil. I know.

The warden can keep putting the helmet on the convict until the magic takes effect, and for extra fun, you can have a special helmet created that does not lose its properties upon a successful alteration of alignment.

When governments are involved, material cost suddenly becomes harder to calculate. For example: If prisoners awaiting their Magic helmets are forced to gather the required minerals as slave labor, how much did the helmet actually cost to create? (Aside from XP).

I think this concept is especially true in campaigns where magic is more pervasive, and society is more like our own. 200 years ago, it was cheap to house prisoners. You throw them in a cold dark cell, and give them a daily ration of gruel. Today, it costs more money to keep a hardened criminal locked up than I make in a year.

So at some point it would be cheaper to perform this alteration than to keep someone locked up. Eberron would be an excellent campaign setting to try this with.

Fun plot points with this concept:

1) An Innocent LG man is forced into switching his alignment and released. He becomes CE, and is the new scourge of the region. (The person in charge of detecting alignments is the one who frames him)

2) The person crafting the helmets has secretly embedded a dominate person spell into them.

Deset Gled said:

Cost

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I don't think the Helm is a one-use item. I suppose this is the text you refer to:


The second clause suggests that the helm still functions after it has changed a person's alignment; it doesn't change his alignment back because it's one charge is used up, it's simply a one-way ticket to an opposite alignment. Are there rulings I'm unaware of that expand upon this text to make it a charged item?

EDIT

Oh, I don't know, maybe the part in the text where it says: When a helm of opposite alignment has functioned once, it loses its magical properties.

*facepalm*

Idiot.

Even so, 4000k for a high-risk prisoner. At some point the incarceration costs would be worth Helming someone, even if you don't apply it to the common everyday muggers you get in jail.

Deset Gled said:

2. Morals. Many people would consider forced re-habilitation of this type amoral, or counterproductive. If atonement is not earned, is it really atonement? You'll note that this was a topic of discussion in A Clockwork Orange as well.

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I wouldn't say it's necessarily atonement that the Helm is going for. A successful Helming would both protect society from an Evil person by removing the Evil; it would also ensure rehabilitation: they would be able to provide a benefit to society. Atonement and the state of their soul would be the prisoner's to worry about.

And naturally I mentioned A Clockwork Orange because of the connection. Though Helming does not quite leave the prisoner as vulnerable as poor Alex. And if you wanted to make sure they weren't at the mercy of their former associates, well, that's what colonial prison colonies are for, eh?

DG said:

3. Unreliability. The Helm requires the target to fail a will save. You can't guarantee that.

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But you can make it statistically impossible for them to pass every Will save. The Helm says that the character must save again if he passes a save, take the helm off, then puts it back on. If it's a move action to put it on someone, then you can force 5 saves every minute. How many minutes of this must pass before you can statistically guarantee that he failed? Not to mention the availability of Detect Evil or the other various Evil-radar magics.

EDIT

You can guarantee that the Helm has worked with a simple Detect Magic. At any point the Helm becomes mundane, you know that it has applied its curse.

DG said:

4. Complete reversal. Remember, it flips both alignments. Depending on the setting, CG might not be that much bettter than LE.

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Absolutely. The Helm would be used judiciously by the prison and target very specific people. Detect Chaos is available as well, you know, so they could easily control for the alignments they wanted.

Umbran said:

In a world where position in the afterlife may depend very strongly on alignment, the question of free will and choice may be a very important one.

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If the purpose of the Helm program is temporal, then considerations of this sort wouldn't matter. At that point it becomes a campaign-specific question of what place alignment has in determining your place in the afterlife.

Umbran said:

Why don't the bad guys go around making new villains with such helms?

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Who says they don't?

der_kluge said:

For nearly a 10th of the price, it'd be cheaper to just turn 50 people into chickens.

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Setting aside for the moment that I disagree that the Helm is a one-use item (EDIT even though it clearly is ), at the very least the Helmed prisoners remain human, if stripped of their free-will to have it returned to them altered. Though as chickens they would be much less costly to incarcerate for their sentence.

Bayushi Seikuro said:

Which raises another good question: Instead of the Helm - although that could be an option for punishment - how about statueform as imprisonment? No feeding, no real space requirements - stack 'em like cordwood. Should be cheaper than the Helm for mass use.

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The benefit that the Helm has vs Statue is that the Helmed individual would have the opportunity to add to society while the Statue is simply that. Additionally, the Helmed individual is much harder to free than the Statue, requiring a higher level spell to revert.

Eldragon said:

1) An Innocent LG man is forced into switching his alignment and released. He becomes CE, and is the new scourge of the region. (The person in charge of detecting alignments is the one who frames him)

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I'm not going to touch the magical abilities to divine innocence, but rather suggest that the use of the Helm be judicious: Evil people (or Chaotic, or Good) are targeted specifically because of their alignment. It would be much easier to weed out Good prisoners who may or may not be innocent, and simply not Helm them.

Bayushi Seikuro said:

On a side note, the old show Babylon 5 had an episode similar.

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I was thinking about that one too.... The difference with the Helm is that memories and non-allignment related personality traits aren't changed by the Helm. The transformation might be closer to the difference between pre vamps, vamps and souled vamps in the Buffy and Angel series. A "helmed" individual would have full memory of his prior evil deeds, though he might think of them as things he did under the unnatural influence of his former allignment and feel a more detached regret rather than crushing guilt.

A party of "helmed" former villains sent out to serve society in a dangerous mission coul be a pretty fun campaign premise actually....

Felix said:

If the purpose of the Helm program is temporal, then considerations of this sort wouldn't matter.

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Because, as we all know, the temporal and the moral/religious/spiritual powers are always quite thoroughly separated? I think not.

You are talking about temporal meddling with the moral state of individuals, in a universe where morality is a palpable force in the universe - in some worlds the powers of the very gods themselves depend upon this! Every single religion and philosophy in the game-world would be highly concerned with such things. Some might agree with the policy, others not. But you can be darned sure that this would be a case where spiritual powers would not ignore what's going on.

Honestly, this sounds like a good plot-hook for a political game. Rather than be a consideration that doesn't matter, it sounds like a campaign-driving thing that very much does matter.