[UA] Idea for wards

[Dylan Craig]

An NPC in my campaign is putting some serious reality-whacker wards around him-
or herself, and I got the idea of these wards as five concentric barriers, each
containing a hallucinatory sequence designed to draw off the mentally
unsophisticated creatures (er, IMUAC: Overseers... too intricate to go into
here, but basically a little dimmer than most humans) he/she is scared of. Each
ward handles one of the madness gauges, and the
dream-sequence-hallucination-things (in the style of a Bill in Three Parts)
should take about 20-30 min (game time) to get through and prove difficult but
not imposssible. Two ideas I've had so far are:

Self: Character sheets passed into the middle of the table, then reallocated
face-down. Everyone is playing somebody else's character. The sequence is set in
a house of mirrors packed with nasty Splits.

Helplessness: Groundhog day - or rather, Groundhog carnage festival. The PCs
appear in a tense situation, say a bank stickup, and 30 seconds after the action
starts, a well-armed posse comes in and blasts them to shreds. Cut back to the
beginning; the PCs are alive again, but the big digital wall clock has advanced
five seconds and they now only have 25 seconds until the posse come in...
perforate, shred, repeat, losing 5s each time.

But I am stuck for something non-corny and non-obvious to do for the other three
gauges. Any ideas? 20-30m, can be fatal, should twist your mind in knots.
Everybody is looking at at least one failed or hardened notch per ward and thus
per gauge.

Game's been on hold a while and I want to get things going with a weird bang.

DC

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