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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Amaroq" data-source="post: 1857440" data-attributes="member: 15470">a.) How good of an "in character" actor is the player? A good actor might enjoy being given an "alter ego" which "takes over" for brief periods of time; a note passed indicates to him when the alter ego takes over and what its nature or short-term goal is... he can have fun both acting the alter ego, or striving to reach the alter ego's goal without revealing that he's acting out of character, and then has more fun acting his character's confusion when he comes to, whether he remembers the action (but not why he thought it was a good idea) or whether he just doesn't remember what has happened. (We killed the dragon? Really?)  This could also be useful if the player misses sessions frequently - each missed session, you run the character, and he, um, acquires certain things, now noted on the character sheet, with no idea where they came from... and occasionally with somebody somewhere particularly annoyed that they've ended up in his hands.b.) A simple one: character now detects as extremely evil, leading to confusion the next time somebody casts a 'Detect Evil' in his presence, whether PC or NPC. Let them sweat as to what's causing it. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />c.) There's the Tolkein cliche where he actually DOES become more evil the longer he wears it; an increasing-DC save to remove the mask each time - it starts becoming obvious when he detects as evil or refuses to remove the mask.d.) A riff on that: pick some number of hours; the longer he wears it, the more "undead" he becomes, with complete undeath coming at hour N? Let clues build - he starts detecting to 'detect undead', he starts in fear when the cleric 'turns undead'. Eventually, an evil cleric's 'turn undead' might allow it to control him, or he might actually flee his party's cleric... if this hasn't sparked off every warning signal in the book for the characters, he's now refusing to take off the mask, has ceased cooking his food, and is looking over the party with a look that can only be described as avarice.e.) Something somewhere can now "see" through his eyes - pick a villain, and let it build over a number of episodes; let party wonder why their every plan seems to be perfectly planned against, after several narrow escapes from cunningly laid traps.f.) I always enjoyed Lovecraft's creature's which come from the corners. Riffing on that - he's becoming a stronger and stronger focus for things from such-and-such plane to enter his; at first, its just weak things, but the more he wears it, the stronger the conduit becomes, keeping pace with or outstripping the party's level growth... The conduit is strongly enough rooted that merely ditching the mask won't help, and the standard 'remove curse' doesn't dent it either. You've now got roots for a quest-to-remove-the-item series AND a time pressure, when the party learns that one of the powerful denizens on that plane is licking its chops towards the moment when it can come through.g.) Its costing him his soul. Literally. The longer he wears it, the weaker his soul becomes (tell him that, although he doesn't know why, he's now at "minus 1" on all will saves.... "minus 2".... etc...)  Let some NPC discover this, and point out that even True Ressurrect can't recover someone whose soul has been destroyed... "We could just remove the curse, but you would never recover those portions of your soul... but they may be going somewhere (a la magic jar) and if we could only find that item, we might be able to restore your soul and THEN remove the curse." Now queue the quest-to-remove-item from above.</blockquote>

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