player plot: holiday spirits

[cozen]

On Wintermarch 5-6, a number of Riftwatchers traveling back to Kirkwall from the north will be caught by a blizzard in the mountains and take shelter in a foreboding castle that's chock full of spirits. Spirits of regret, specifically, who will show echoes of the things both the current visitors and prior inhabitants of the castle might wish they could have done differently. Due to ✨magic✨, the only way out of the castle will be to go deeper into it to find and defeat the powerful demon at its center.

WHO CAN GO

Anyone! It'll be an open log. The contrivance for getting a lot of varied people into a remote castle is: several different traveling parties returning from a several different errands or small jobs further north will coordinate their schedules and meet up on the road before crossing the mountains to reach Kirkwall, for safety in numbers. That larger traveling party will wind up in the castle together. You can make up what your characters were doing and with whom prior to the plot, or you can keep it vague.

TIMELINE

Characters will be trapped in the castle from Wintermarch 5-6, though it might feel longer on the inside. The log will go up on January 2. Obviously it's a weird time of year, so late arrivals and backtaggers should feel even more welcome than usual.

BASIC SETTING

To help with plotting: this will all be taking place in a dark, cold castle, while it snows heavily outside. Though unoccupied, the castle won't look long-abandoned, with furniture intact, minimal dust, firewood stacked in helpful places, food and wine stores fit for guests, etc. There will be outdoor, wall-enclosed courtyards, if you want characters to touch snow, but the walls will be impossible to climb. The doors and windows that might let them out of the castle entirely will be sealed and unbreakable until they've defeated the final demon that's making all of the weird stuff happen.

GHOSTS

The spirits in the castle are focused on regret and will attempt to provoke that feeling. They'll come in a few different strength levels and varieties:

The weak spirits, located around the outskirts of the ground floor, will only be able to make disembodied sounds or briefly appear in reflections or dark spaces as they reflect back snippets of regretful memories. They won't be very creative and will show things as they happened (or as characters remember them happening, if their memories are faulty), albeit in flashes and fragments that might be too short for other people to understand. They might take on the form/voices of people from your characters' pasts or of your characters themselves.

As characters progress inward and/or upward through the castle, they'll encounter progressively stronger spirits that we'll call medium spirits for ooc clarity, which will be visible for longer periods of time and potentially indefinitely. They'll begin translucent and be able to physically alter the environment or touch people only in poltergeist-like bursts, but they'll seem more solid and more physically powerful as people move toward the central source of the haunting.

These spirits will take on the forms of people from your character's memories. They might recognize and respond to your character as if your character is part of the memory they're playing out—so a pair of spirits mimicking your character's parents could speak to your character as if she's their daughter. Or a third spirit could be there mimicking your character as well. Whatever you prefer.

Spirits on the weak end of the spectrum might be stuck on-script and continue saying their historically-accurate lines regardless of what your character says or does in response. But the stronger ones will be able to do some improv, and will in fact seem to want to. If your character regrets rejecting a proposal, a spirit imitating their would-be fiance might ask them to marry him again—or several more times—until they finally say yes, then respond as they might imagine the fiance would have responded if they’d accepted. Or if your character says no yet again, the spirit might go off on them about what a terrible choice that is, even if the fiance in reality accepted it gracefully.

On the upper floors of the castle's high tower, characters will begin to experience time more like they're dreaming/sleepwalking. The strong spirits they'll encounter here will be a lot like the medium spirits, except they'll seem very realistic—prone to some weird perception stuff, but in a way that seems solid, with characters' abilities to discern what's real and what's not hampered by the final boss demon's proximity and mental influence. These spirits will be doing their damndest to mesmerize PCs with visions of how great their lives could have been if they'd made different choices. Ultimately, some of them will be trying to lower people's guards enough to possess them via promises that they'll be able to make these happy lives a reality; others might be more aimlessly malignant and try to get away with physically harming them somehow, such as luring them near a ledge they can be pushed off of.

The weak, medium, and strong spirits are more of a spectrum than three distinct categories. You can mix and match their capabilities or have some medium spirits be stronger or weaker than others. Whatever's fun.

The final boss demon at the center of the haunting will attempt to persuade a small group of PCs that he can give them a real chance to correct their mistakes, if they let him. See below if you're interested in your characters being the ones to tell him to fuck off.

ADDITIONAL GHOST NOTES

WARPING: The spirits' physical appearances might be warped by memory or lack thereof; spirits reenacting scenes from a character's childhood might be larger than life, to reflect what it felt like to look up at people as a child, or those whose faces characters can't quite remember may be featureless, smudgy, or shifting in appearance. They may exaggerate facial expressions or sounds to reflect how things felt. If your character remembers being frightened by someone who shouted at them, the spirit's voice might be supernaturally loud and their face unnaturally contorted to reflect that subjective experience.

CROSSOVERS: Whenever two or more PCs are dealing with spirits at the same time, there's a chance that the spirit will try to include them both. It might co-opt an onlooker into an ongoing scenario—if the spirit is mimicking one character's mother, for example, it might start addressing the second character as their father. Or it might recognize them for who they really are but try to retcon them into the scenario as if they were there. Or it might try to deal with both of their regrets at once by finding something general they have in common (daddy issues, dead friends, etc.) and becoming a face- and voice-warping mishmash of the specifics as it tries to make them both sad at the same time. Or other things. Go wild.

RANDOM STRANGERS: Some spirits will still be hung up on the worst regrets of the castle's previous occupants. They'll be reenacting those scenarios instead of anything to do with the PCs, though they'll still try to address the PCs directly as if they're the person whose memory the regret came from. There will be examples in the log, so you can use those or make up whatever melancholy horrors you want and mix them in.

HOW TO KEEP SECRETS

You don't have to give away your character's deep secrets on a silver platter. Other options include:

• Keep things vague and fragmented enough that people won't understand what they're seeing (or will have to ask your character about it later to get it).
  
• Have your character deal with both their own regrets and NPCs' regrets so it's impossible for onlookers to know what's their own memory and what's not.
  
• Have your character lie and say their own memories must have come from the castle's prior occupants.
  
• Use the alternate scenarios the spirits will act out to only show what didn't happen so no one knows what really did.

Or whatever else you can come up with.

Silver platters are also a valid choice, though.

FINAL BOSS LOTTERY

In the end, two or three characters will find the powerful demon at the center of the haunting, help each other reject its final offer, and destroy it. This will entail resisting some pretty serious direct mental influence and its attempts to convince them that they can for-real change the past and correct their mistakes if they let it help them. This won't be NPC'd, but I'll tell you the gist and you can NPC for each other. If that sounds fun to you, you can sign up as a pair/group with the people you'd like to do it with, and I'll RNG.

Anyone who doesn't win the lottery can still do similar threads about using the power of friendship/love/stubbornness/spite to help each other resist being drawn in and possessed by the other spirits who will waylay them as they get closer to the central demon. That CR opportunity is not exclusive to the RNG'd group. They're just the ones who get to do it the very last and most difficult time and heroically end the haunting for good.

Comments

[cozen]

Hello! Y'all won the coin flip.

Your group will find the Final Boss Regret Demon bound inside a large mirror, capable of exerting influence but not of physically leaving or harming them (yet). Instead, it will show them their regrets, shifting between the appearances of people associated with those regrets, and try to convince them that it's powerful enough to help them go home (where applicable, particularly for rifters) and correct their mistakes or deliver them to worlds where they never happened.

Time travel is to some extent an established Thing in Thedas now, on top of the possibility of multiverse shenanigans, so this offer isn't completely outlandish. Additionally, the spirit will be meddling directly with their heads, amplifying the strength of those regrets and muddling their abilities to see reason, to try to make this sound more reasonable and more appealing. It will be strong enough that even very strongwilled people who would normally never agree to deal with a demon might need help resisting.

Fortunately, the demon will only be able to focus on one person at a time. (Whether it lingers on one person for several tags in a row or shifts constantly is up to you!) So the other people present can assist in countering its arguments and offers.

This mental influence will also be how the demon attempts to keep people away from the mirror or taking any direct action to attack or destroy it, with its focus shifting to people who try to approach. Dividing its attention will eventually allow someone to get close enough to smash the mirror.

Whether you would like that to defeat the demon or release it is up to you and whether you would like to have an actual boss fight instead of only a boss battle of wills. If you would prefer the fight, the demon will most closely resemble a stronger despair demon. If you wouldn't, destroying the mirror can send the demon directly back to the Fade because of Magic.

Let me know if you have any questions!