Greetings…
Well, it does sound like the quintessential split-personality character, that has been executed quite well. Of course, pretty much what happens to this character is up to both the player and you the GM. Because so much of the result is going to be effected by the player’s/characters’ reactions.
Once Cornealius realizes the truth about his character, what is he going to want to do? Will he go quietly into oblivion? Will he become resentful and become evil? Will he want to become his own self? With his own body? Will he want to share his existing body?
Now, I’m not a fan of the Hulk, but I think that that comic book would have some excellent ideas on what you can do to this character. Some campaign ideas that come to mind:
- He finds out that he cannot easily remedy the situation with just a simple Remove Enchantment. Perhaps that spell would make things worse. Also, Remove Curse just isn’t going to cut it.
- Rumours and hints that there might have been other wizards who have dealt with this kind of situation. However, they lived in remote locations in far off lands. Getting there is an adventure in of itself. – Do the tomes of Evelyn tres’Cara hold the secret to resolving C/V’s dilemma? (If it’s my game…not by a long-shot.)
- Take a page from the Hulk Cartoons. What had they done to his character? But some of the things you can do (I’d only do them temporarily, just to have fun with the situation):
- Switch the stats, have Cornelius deal with Vargus’s stats/skills; and visa versa.
- Have the characters combine into one being/personality. (a la Voyager Neelix/Tuvok - Tuvix) But that would be one hell of a roleplaying feat.
- Split him into two separate people? This might be an excellent solution in the long run. But I don’t know if you’d want to do that eventually. – To use another Star Trek reference… when Riker was split into two separate persons.
- Ooo... I just thought of something else. What if Cornelius is the unwitting agent of this wizard that originally 'curse' Vargus in the first place? That perhaps this mage had somehow implanted a 'sleeper' personality within Vargus to do something that the original mage is uncapable of. Perhaps infultrate some magickal location where a magic-hating barbarian would be ideal to perform this task. That this third personality pops up at the right time to do some nasty stuff.
If I were running something like this, I would throw out rumours of some wizard named Evelyn tres’Cara who centuries ago had to deal with her own multiple personality problem, that her writings were extensive on the problem and offers her solutions on the matter. – Allowing the players to go off searching for more information by traveling to where she was purported to have lived, and then run a few adventures about having to collect her tomes.
Getting to the region… one adventure right there. Finding out about Evelyn, and searching her ruined keep… second adventure. Learning that some of her tomes that didn’t contain much in the way of magical information (but specifically dealing with her multiple-personality disorder) were sold off to some merchant… third adventure.
Perhaps that 100 year old tome that the cleric was using was one of Evelyn’s books, and that he (or some eager young cleric-assistant) comes back to the party and says he’s been doing a little more research on the problem, and starts telling the party about Evelyn and her books, and a little bit of her history.
But I would definitely be playing up the whole ‘possessed by a demon’ thing so that the character would attempt to deal with the problem, only to find out that he isn’t possessed. But it would seem that you’ve already done that.
The idea of transferring the personality to something like a golem sounds interesting. But I’d say that that is a temporary solution. That finding a body to permanently inhabit would be more desirable, since it seems that any long term use of a golem or whatever, results in adverse effects… ooo… the possibilities.