The Horror
My brother, who plays Guppy, made him a nervous ball of smarts and madness, with a terrible fear of alien abduction, a belief in an alien conspiracy, and constantly plagued by nightmares. In short, after awhile you don't want Guppy holding a pistol anymore.
For game masters, this kind of character is a gift. But it’s not fair that because one player is more willing to play up a weak, fragile, mentally unbalanced character that he should be punished by the harsh realities of the campaign.
The Tower of Sanity collapsed at one point when Guppy was inside a UFO, and he just started shooting – everyone and everybody, including alien Grey corpses and his fellow agents. Agent Hammer knocked him out, but the damage to trust and group cohesion was done.
In a later scenario, the two agents sharply differed over what they were willing to do to defend the Conspiracy. Hammer was willing to kill for it. Guppy disagreed and they turned their guns on each other. Although to their credit, nobody fired (because I was smart enough to have a giant monster show up), their relationship was further damaged. Even after Hammer was forced to rescue Guppy from said giant monster, he no longer felt Guppy could be trusted.
Mind you, the players of these two characters got along just fine. But they were role-playing the inevitable conclusion of a tattered relationship and there was no simple way for me to resolve it. It would take some time and some work.
Because we role-play once a month for six- to eight-hours at a time, someone missing two sessions misses a lot. After that scenario, my brother missed several of the sessions. So we had the breathing space we needed to get Guppy rehabilitated.
But how? Dumping Guppy in a sanitarium wasn't an option, if only because I'd done that already by having Guppy go undercover in his old sanitarium. I was concerned that this was a highly implausible idea until I saw the exact same plot on an episode of Fringe.
The other problem is that it's simply not all that fun. Being locked in any institution is by nature a solo activity (that's the point, after all). I wanted a situation that would deal with Guppy's issues, resolve the conflict between he and Hammer, and involve the characters in a way that felt organic and also happened to involve lots of shooting and running.
The solution was the Cthulhu Now scenario, Dreams Dark and Deadly, which involves a device called the Dreamweb. I decided to mix the Dreamweb, which controls a sleeper's dreams, with the Outlook Facility detailed in Delta Green: Countdown. Here then was our stress testing device, a tool that could be used to create hallucinations in its subject and monitor the results. I bent the rules a bit to transform the Dreamweb into a mental rehabilitation tool and we were off!
But first, Guppy had to be apprehended. During the interval when he wasn't playing, I conducted a mini-campaign with my brother by email. I sent him videos of what it's like to be a schizophrenic and took him through a solo-scenario that portrayed his uniquely warped point of view. I borrowed liberally from Fight Club too. Through this mini-campaign, Guppy was able to role-play his insanity without boring the other players.
Once all the players were back together, it was time to pick Guppy up. They set about ambushing him in a race against another set of agents, who wanted Guppy's team to look bad. Thus he was the prize in a bizarre game of cat-and-mouse, with Guppy as the prize.
The agents them brought him to the Outlook Facility, where they were to remain as guards to oversee Guppy's treatment. This was of course a plot device on my part to keep the other players involved. They soon had plenty to do, because it turned out that instead of the Dreamweb entering Guppy's dreams, Guppy's nightmares infected the Dreamweb. The whole place had a breakdown and the finale ended with the agents having to use the Dreamweb to enter Guppy's dreams, thereby experiencing his insanity, to save him and themselves.
Guppy no longer has his schizophrenic episodes, convinced that there was an alien chip in his head that "burned out" when he was in the Dreamweb. Hammer witnessed what Guppy sees personally and had an active role in his rehabilitation. And the other players go to be a part of both his rehabilitation as well as the inevitable destruction of an unethical facility that had subjected all of them to torture. A character that might have been written off was saved.
Will things go back to "normal," or as normal as things can be in an action horror campaign? Probably not. But I worked hard to find a way to have both Hammer and Guppy stay true to their characters' motivations. Guppy WAS incarcerated and rehabilitated (although the rehabilitation ultimately destroyed the facility). And Guppy did uncover a conspiracy. So they were hopefully both satisfied and can get back to working together to uncover horrors man was not meant to know.
Until the next time one of the Tower of Sanity falls, anyway.
Lesson Learned: Sometimes, a character's flaws can be so bad that it takes them out of the game. Go with the flow and find ways to involve the other players in the character's redemption.
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