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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psychotic Jim" data-source="post: 683627" data-attributes="member: 547">Have you ever played Baldur's Gate II?  They have a harsh insane asylum for the magically adept called Spell-hold in it.  The major bad-guy takes control of it and rules the staff through mind-control and locks up all who resist him.  You have to free all of the imprisoned people (both former staff and patients) and make them rebel against him.Also, the 2E Nightmare Lands Ravenloft boxed set has some good stuff of interest, including rival care-takers who approach treating the mentally ill through very different methods- one who is a humanist who tries to take care of and understand the patients and the other who believes that harsh punishment and discipline is the only way to reform them. Also in it, there is the egnigmatic (sp) and evil Nightmare Court which haunts the inmates (and every one else in Ravenloft) in their dreams, bringing woe and insanity to all. They exist in a weird dream domain connected to the dream plane.What sort of period is the campaign played in?  Through most of history, the insane were not treated any better than criminals, kept in shackles and sometimes put into prisons.  I think in fantasy though that this has been represented often. If you can stand a little anarchronisms and want to display insane asylums in a dark but different way than the norm, maybe instead of the usual chains and punishment routines, you could have the staff of the insane asylum have a much different (and creepier) sort of "reform".  Instead of traditional punishments, these would-be humanists instead think that they can reform patients (with or without their consent) through weird therapies- bizaare behavior management and reinforcement techniques, involuntary hypnotism, lobotomies and other drastic brain surgeries (which were actually used to treat the mentally ill in the real world in the early half of the 20th century with often barbaric results), mind-control drugs or control collars, castings of Modify Memory, etc.On the other hand, it might be better to portray the insane asylum as not all bad.  There could be some genuinely benevolent staff there too who believe in being empathic to the patients and actively working and collaborating with them for reform.As for safety guards, you are going to want maybe activatable walls of force and dimensional anchors to keep in the interred and keep-out unwanted guests.  Magic Mouths would also be useful for making the prisoners think they were never unwatched, and permanent arcane eyes would help it be actually ture.  You might want to take a look at the Stronghold Builder's Guidebook for a few more ideas.</blockquote>

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