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View Full Version : DM Help How to make my players feel like Faust



Rusvul
2020-10-07, 12:38 AM
Hello friends! I have two situations coming up in my game that I'd like to make as morally and pragmatically complex as possible for my players (my table enjoys that kind of thing). The game is Pathfinder, but I've posted it here because the system isn't particularly relevant. The party is also very likely to be in the Shadowfell for the foreseeable future.

Firstly, one player is a witch (a class thematically, but not mechanically, equivalent to the 3.5/5e warlock). At the start of the game, the collective spirits of her long-dead arcanist ancestors served as her patron, but she recently made a deal with an entity of darkness, blindness, and helplessness, who replaced her ancestors as her patron. Along with some cosmetic and mechanical changes, she has a different arrangement: her "friend" deals in favors, and while he always maintains a friendly and polite demeanor, he thrives on making people feel helpless, isolated, blind, silent. He's already done her the kindness of cutting her off from her ancestors' spirits (whom she disliked very much), and I want her patron to call in that favor so as to make her a little less secure in her new patron-witch relationship. Ideally, I think he'd ask her to do something weirdly small and inane, but that has very unpleasant consequences? The entity is subtle, careful, and often kind and honest, but ultimately, wants to cause specific kinds of harm--only specific kinds--just for the sake of causing harm.

Secondly, the party is looking for a way to turn a ghoul back into a living humanoid (or stop someone from becoming a ghoul once the process has started). In this setting, ghouldom is something akin to a progressive disease brought about by cannibalism--if you eat people at all, you run the risk of gaining a craving, and--eventually--all the physical and psychological traits that ghouls have (claws, paralysis, undeath, etc.). I think they're on track to find their solution soon, but I want it to be a solution that feels kind of bad to use--not necessarily untenably bad, but, like. Not great. (I'm thinking of that plot twist in Fullmetal Alchemist, but my PCs aren't nearly as upstanding as Ed and Al, and I'm loathe to take directly from material my PCs have consumed.) Whatever the cost of reversing ghouldom, I'd like it to be 1) morally dubious, 2) logistically difficult, and 3) something that my PCs might consider doing anyway.

Thank you ever so much!

NichG
2020-10-07, 03:14 AM
It sounds a bit like there is metaphysical oomph behind things that society as a whole rejects or frowns on in both of these examples, like something is empowered or empowering because it is a sin (harm for harm's sake), or something can transform an individual because it is rejected by society, and society's traditions and sentiments are able to enforce a supernatural curse against a broken taboo.

So with that line of thinking, the cure for turning into a ghoul would be to normalize the behavior. If the ghoul's closest family member willingly offers a portion of their own flesh to the ghoul to be consumed, it 'cleans' the act. How much flesh determines how untenable this cure actually is - if a few mL of blood is enough, its just mildly squicky; if they need to sacrifice a digit or a limb it'll be horrifying at an in-character level for most people in the setting even if things like regeneration magic exist but could be done in such a way that there was no permanent long-term harm by pulling in those other resources (creating tension between the PCs' OOC 'we can fix this, so just deal with it' and the NPC's 'you want me to ask my teenage daughter to cut off her own arm to feed it to me, what is wrong with you?' reaction). If it requires the actual sacrifice of a life of a family member, it'd be quite severe though in Pathfinder still recoverable.

Or if you want to go more abstract 'this is bad in an existential way but we'll never see the consequences', there could be some ritual which lets the ghoul's growing hunger become an independent entity, in which case you've released a newborn demon onto the world but there are lots of demons already so its not like anyone will notice what you've done.

Both of these end up feeling a bit FMA to me, but it might be different enough?

For the Faust thing, I'd probably double down on that metaphysical idea and really try to create a 'sympathy for the devil' type of dissonance in the player. Make sure the player has access to a lot of information about the metaphysics that suggests that this entity is not as simple as being Evil in a black and white sense, but is composed of specific things which in some contexts might not be harmful, but in this case because of the metaphysical pressure of the collective mode of moral thought in the world declaring them Evil, have been concentrated and compressed in one place and left unmoderated by other aspects, to the extent where it became something potentially quite dangerous if uncontrolled but which could in principle be able to be mastered or used by someone enlightened enough to understand this thing about the metaphysics. You're looking for that combination of 'this isn't as bad as people say' and 'people only think it's bad because they're ignorant' to hit the feeling of Faustian hubris. It may even be that all of that information is actually true - the entity could be productively harnessed and used and needn't be strictly bad - but that actually attempting that has a lot of unforeseen risks and ways that things could snowball.

What I'd be looking for is something along the lines of 'people reject these aspects of themselves, repressing them and thereby causing them to become dangerous (and in the setting metaphysics, corporeal); but accepting them is also dangerous, and seeing the danger caused by rejecting those aspects may hide the danger of accepting them'. The victorious path is balancing the two, and any sort of simplification of interactions with the entity like 'wanting others to be isolated is bad' or 'wanting others to be isolated is a natural human emotion, so we shouldn't reject it' will lead to trouble. Once someone is involved with the entity, rejecting the entity should appear to often have as many consequences as deepening the contact - for every time the entity's influence threatens to prevent someone who is being oppressed or taken advantage of from being heard or getting help, the entity should make sure that there's a visible case where the ability to isolate or remove agency from an oppressor would improve the situation. Again, it doesn't have to be a real dichotomy, but the entity wins in the long term by showing things which convincingly show that sometimes the things it does for harm's sake can be necessary to obtain good outcomes.

hifidelity2
2020-10-07, 03:19 AM
OK for the ghoul problem - how about

The cure is bathing in a holy pond.
The Pond produces magical water that can be used to cure diseases etc
Bathing in it will taint the pond for XX months and it cannot be used to heal people
The Pond is Owned and protected by a good healing cult who would not let you do that

You could always add in rumours of a plague sweeping into the area

Is one persons life worth the risk of the whole area being affected by the plague
Will they have to "attack" the holy shrine to take control of it while their friend bathes

Bunny Commando
2020-10-07, 11:59 AM
Firstly, one player is a witch (a class thematically, but not mechanically, equivalent to the 3.5/5e warlock). At the start of the game, the collective spirits of her long-dead arcanist ancestors served as her patron, but she recently made a deal with an entity of darkness, blindness, and helplessness, who replaced her ancestors as her patron. Along with some cosmetic and mechanical changes, she has a different arrangement: her "friend" deals in favors, and while he always maintains a friendly and polite demeanor, he thrives on making people feel helpless, isolated, blind, silent. He's already done her the kindness of cutting her off from her ancestors' spirits (whom she disliked very much), and I want her patron to call in that favor so as to make her a little less secure in her new patron-witch relationship. Ideally, I think he'd ask her to do something weirdly small and inane, but that has very unpleasant consequences? The entity is subtle, careful, and often kind and honest, but ultimately, wants to cause specific kinds of harm--only specific kinds--just for the sake of causing harm.

Persuade a person he knows to play cards with her. The catch? The person is a recovering gambling addict that will carelessly play and lose almost everything (you may use the same premise with different addictions).


Secondly, the party is looking for a way to turn a ghoul back into a living humanoid (or stop someone from becoming a ghoul once the process has started). In this setting, ghouldom is something akin to a progressive disease brought about by cannibalism--if you eat people at all, you run the risk of gaining a craving, and--eventually--all the physical and psychological traits that ghouls have (claws, paralysis, undeath, etc.). I think they're on track to find their solution soon, but I want it to be a solution that feels kind of bad to use--not necessarily untenably bad, but, like. Not great. (I'm thinking of that plot twist in Fullmetal Alchemist, but my PCs aren't nearly as upstanding as Ed and Al, and I'm loathe to take directly from material my PCs have consumed.) Whatever the cost of reversing ghouldom, I'd like it to be 1) morally dubious, 2) logistically difficult, and 3) something that my PCs might consider doing anyway.

I'll assume that in your setting Remove Disease doesn't work on the Ghoul Fever.

The cure the characters will eventually find works by purging the afflicted person of every desire, not just the craving of human flesh. The now cured person will be able to think and be in a certain way a functioning member of society but will have no drive and more similar to an automaton than a human being.
If the characters choose to spread the cure as much as they can they will soon find that people will start using the former ghouls as slaves, easily persuade them to part from their possessions, using them for dangerous jobs and that's as a start - less scrupulous individuals may very well start administering the cure to healthy people.
But if the characters keep the cure for themselves people will die, killed by ghouls.

Jason
2020-10-07, 12:51 PM
Forma ghoul cure, how about a ritual that will transfer the infection to someone else? Then the players will have to decide if they want to inflict it on someone evil or find a willing volunteer.