Help my wizard go mad!

[Mistah J]

The situation:

The players of my game have been helping an NPC wizard track down and use a powerful artifact that appears once every 100 years. The item is a throne that can be used once, giving the recipient great power, before vanishing again for another century.

What none of them know however, is that anyone who uses the throne goes 100% irrevocably insane - dangerously so. The twist in this current adventure is that once the NPC wizard uses the artifact, he becomes the problem that the PCs must stop.

What I am hoping to get some help on is the exact nature of this insanity, and how it could be a problem. I could always fall back on "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" but I would like to try to come up with something a little more flavourful and unique.

As for details: the party is made up of 5 characters, all 5th level and the NPC wizard is 7th - an ice/cold based evoker. We are using the Pathfinder rules.

Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks

 

[fba827]

Sounds fun.

Initial Thought: Given that it happens once every 100 years, it can't be too over the top in effect or else history would remember it (especially with some of the long-lived races being able to recount how "it just happened") --- so... it can't change a person into a mad tyrant that assumes kingdoms, etc. OR the previous users never got very far (i.e. they weren't very powerful like the mage is, thus, their story never made its mark on history before someone put the person down).

Having said that, thematically, something related to "power" or "law and order" seems very appropriate.

* Does the person become so obsessed with guilt and crime that everyone gets identified as criminal for one far-fetched reason or another .... and he sees it as his responsibility to get that person 'caught' for something/anything.
Ex: A baker sold a family dagger to raise money when his shop was closed. that dagger was later used to commit a murder. The mad mage thinks the baker is as guilty for the murder as the murderer himself but the "law" doesn't see the connection. So the mage takes it upon himself to frame the baker for some -other- murder. Thus, the baker would get convicted and tried for a murder case.


* Perhaps he feels he needs to dole out justice himself, making himself judge, jury, and executioner
Ex: using the baker example from above, the mage would not frame the baker to have the legal system try him. But rather would dole out "justice" himself by either killing the baker or freezing him in solid ice, etc.

* Perhaps the throne makes the user see chaos as the enemy. When combined with the mage's preference for ice/cold, he is turn will start freezing things, people, even entire communities if he gets the time. Therefore stopping the chaos that time and people bring and keeping the community "safe" for the chaos.

* Perhaps the madness makes him believe he is a king himself (perhaps the king that originally owned the throne) and therefore he begins a campaign to gather what was originally that former kings
Ex: The original owner of the throne was a troll king. So the mad mage would try and gather some trolls and try and retake the mountains that once belonged to that troll king. (or dwarves, etc)


(anyway, i'll think about it some more later and add more if i think of something).

 

[Hand of Evil]

Ghost and Kings of the past - The Throne allows past sitters to pass on their knowledge to the current sitter. The problem some of them no longer want to be dead and are fighting for control of the body.

 

[Cor_Malek]

Sanity and insanity are largely based on point of view. Brucy should be called a Hero not a madman for fending off those zombies- it's hardly his fault others couldn't see the decaying flesh, now is it?

Give us something to work with - wizards background, maybe recent goals, so we can tinker with him appropriately.

Out of the hat - the throne granted him (among other things) permanent True Vision, he sees things as they are. Oh, and all people with strong LG aura appear to be, I dunno - Lichs.
Or, he gained terrifying (if a few centuries old) information that all firstborn children in kingdom will soon turn into terrifying demons, and there is no way to stop this transformation other than killing them. He is bound to execute this task and this is what the throne grants power for. (it's was the original purpose of this throne to deal with this re-occurring menace. After the process was stopped entirely 500 years ago, the throne disappeared and everyone thought that's for the last time. Not quite.)

 

[Merkuri]

Like fba827 says, it should be a subtle madness, perhaps even something that takes a while to become fully onset.

I think he should slowly become a paranoid schizophrenic. He starts seeing plots against him where there are none. Perhaps he could even enlist the party's help for tracking down some of these "schemers." The first person he has the party capture/kill for him probably really does have something against the wizard, but the next person's scheme should be a little less obvious. The next person even less obvious, and so on.

Eventually the party is assigned a task by this wizard that seems crazy to them, and when they decide not to partake the wizard decides THEY are the ones out to get him. If they refuse his quest to his face he could even blow up in front of them, causing them to scramble to get out of the way of the rampaging wizard, and once they escape they're now hunted by other people in the employ of the wizard until they can find a way to either prove to him that they're not his enemies (unlikely to happen, since he's insane) or they kill him.

And if you want him to be a threat to the world at large as well he could start seeing benevolent rulers as scheming against him, or entire races, and he could begin plotting genocide. Perhaps when his madness reaches a crescendo he starts to believe that the only way he can be truly safe is for everyone to be dead so there's no one left to betray him.

His power and madness should come from the same source. Perhaps the power of the throne is that he begins hearing whispered voices, teaching him more powerful spells, showing him paths to great treasure, and warning him where his enemies are. But the voices themselves are not sane, or perhaps they're demonic in origin and are designed to drive the wizard insane. In the beginning they whisper helpfully, and he trusts them implicitly. Their words always lead to good things, but as time goes on the whispering becomes more urgent, more frantic, and tells him to do strange things or to turn on his friends, saying they're his enemies.

There's a house in the San Francisco Bay area I visited call the Winchester Mystery House. According to legend, the widow of the famous gun manufacturer was told by a medium that the spirits of the people killed by her family's guns were out looking for revenge, and that she should continue building onto her house for the rest of her life. The house was under construction for nearly 40 years. She kept adding stairways that go nowhere, windows that look onto walls, hidden passages, and other maddening features, supposedly designed to confuse the spirits that were out to get her.

Perhaps your wizard could start doing the same sort of thing with his tower, or wherever he lives. The voices have driven him to keep building and building. Since he's a wizard, some of his house could also extend into other planes or whatnot. When the PCs finally return to do him in they have to navigate this insane maze that his dwelling place has become.

 

[malcolypse]

Give the wizard way more power than he can handle. Since he's obsessed with gaining more power, he begins unconsciously manipulating the world around him to get more power the best way he knows how: every century a shiny comes along that just hands out more power, so he needs to be there. Now.

Time begins speeding up, all over the world. Seasons pass in a week, and the characters seem unaffected by the rapidity that time seems to have gained. What's left of the wizard's sanity has been squished down into a little ball of calm in a mind violently awhirl with more magical power than his frail mortal form can contain. While he's unable to do much more physically than babble and soil himself, he is capable of subconciously shielding the characters, who he is very thankful to, from the majority of the terrible ravages of his newfound power.

Now the players are a smart bunch, so they'll surely figure out that this guy is behind this, and want to do something about it. What they have to do is up to you and them, but when they discuss it for hours they should notice that at the end of their conversation their hair and fingernails are longer than when they started.

I did say "mostly" shielding them, right? I meant mostly.

 

[Sigurd]

You have to know what the new motives of the wizard will be. Lots of people are mad without being powerful enough that anyone notices .

The simple thing might be that the throne brings forth the same powerful archtype every hundred years. The spirit that possesses\warps the wizard is irretrievably insane and wants to die. Anything to stop the cycle of the throne.

I'd be tempted to give over whole class levels to the player and see if he\she uses the powers from those class levels. (Lets see them turn down +8 BAB!) problem is that they might secretly loose a wisdom point every time they use a throne power. Every night they have to roll a save or spend the whole evening wrestling with their inner voices.

At some stage the voices take over but by that time the throne has disappeared.

 

[Mistah J]

Lots of good answers here,

Since someone asked for more details:

The wizard is an evoker - based in ice magic and other cold energy spells. I've been playing him as a logician or high-intellectual to get his Lawful Neutral alignment across. Stereotypically, he has an emotionless or "cold" personality.

I suppose I could just have his madness push these traits into the extreme, so he becomes almost robotic in nature but it seems a little bland for an artifact-induced insanity. Likewise, he could now desire to usher in an endless winter worldwide but that seems somewhat obvious - especially since I don't have much more than "I like cold so you should too" as motivation.

So again, please feel free to lend your ideas and advice!

 

[reciprocalzero]

I'd suggest that the wizard uses his new-found power to stop whatever the current problem is (is that why they're tracking down the throne?), then decides that there's no reason to stop there - he could be creating a real utopia. His ideas on how to do this, unfortunately, increasingly don't jibe with what everyone else thinks of as "better." Sure, at first he cleans up corruption and solves local disputes, but later he's solving land disputes by forcing everyone involved to move cross country, or forbidding the PCs from helping townsfolk with their evil druid problem because they're responsible for mistreating her first. And so on with solutions that are more and more obviously worse than the problems they fix, until the PCs are sick of being asked to "help out" doing the wrong thing.

 

[Cor_Malek]

I'd suggest that the wizard uses his new-found power to stop whatever the current problem is (is that why they're tracking down the throne?), then decides that there's no reason to stop there - he could be creating a real utopia. His ideas on how to do this, unfortunately, increasingly don't jibe with what everyone else thinks of as "better." Sure, at first he cleans up corruption and solves local disputes, but later he's solving land disputes by forcing everyone involved to move cross country, or forbidding the PCs from helping townsfolk with their evil druid problem because they're responsible for mistreating her first. And so on with solutions that are more and more obviously worse than the problems they fix, until the PCs are sick of being asked to "help out" doing the wrong thing.

I'm really with reciprocalzero on this one. LN, the perfect judge, can easily do things perceived as evil by most. Let him dip into eugenics a bit, use spells like charm to make baddies stop any and all aggression (effectively making them defenceless and passive), let him create all kinds of monsters in search of perfect being...

As mechanical part of this goes - the artefact might make him more "pure". His racial bonuses and penalties get doubled (both +and-), his evocation spells get bonus to CL, and he get's vulnerable to his prohibited school, that kind of thing. Along the same lines, his alignment get's as pure as it gets. This wasn't much of a problem for original creators who made sure only lawful good characters would get to use it, "and you can't go wrong with LG!", as they say in Korea.