Finally the Player Characters are on their way to resolving this storyline! No more Doing the Time Warp, no more ‘oh so there’s a serial Mage killer wandering around, whatever, let’s go hang out at the museum! ‘ They are actually going to take actions that will resolve this season’s arc story. It’s been a long time coming.

I enjoyed working out what they might see in Morgan’s personal dream-space. I had decided very early on when I was designing the campaign that Morgan had enlisted in the army as a young man to escape a bad situation at home. His father had died when he was a young child, and his mother had remarried. His step-father was not a kind man. I liked the irony of his running to the disciplinary structure of the army to escape  the extreme disciplinarian his mother had married after his father had died. Additionally, his being in the army combined with his decision to cut ties with his family made him a convenient subject for experimentation – by the Consillium. The Consillium was trying to Awaken Mages and this newly developed drug, LSD, looked like it had promise. People who took the drug hallucinated, and their hallucinations were not unlike Mage Sight. Under controlled conditions perhaps they could use it to trigger true Awakening.

Their experiments were less than successful.

The results were wildly unpredictable, and those few who did seem to have had an Awakening were… odd. It was as if their souls were not quite connected to a particular Watchtower.  No good came of that, and so the Consillium, in its infinite wisdom, hushed the whole thing up and did not speak of it again.

Meanwhile, the Seers have also heard of LSD and they are thinking that maybe it can be used to lull an Awakened mind back to sleep. As such, the Seers are experimenting too, and the players have uncovered some documentation from Project Lullabye. (the Players know next to nothing about the Consillium’s efforts.)

Morgan wound up caught between the two. He did experience an Awakening, of sorts, and then the Seers caught up with him and tried to lull his soul back to Sleep. They too were less than successful with this, but they did manage to create an alternate personality in him and that personality was able to reign in the more erratic personality byproducts of being tugged between two Watchtowers. That this new personality was a true believer in The Great Eye was gravy for the goose as they say.

All of this gave me some interesting elements to play with when crafting Morgan’s Onerios. This week we’ll cover some of the interesting denizens of Morgan’s subconscious.

Morgan’s Daimons:
You are probably familiar with the cartoon depiction of having a tiny angel on one shoulder telling you to be a good person, and a tiny little devil on the other shoulder telling you to eat the cookie. That is essentially what a person’s Daimons are. As for his positive daimon, that would be his biological father. After his death Morgan’s father took on mythic proportions in Morgan’s psyche. If only Daddy hadn’t died life would have been so much better! Daddy loved me and thought that everything that I did was great and wonderful and perfect. Daddy loved Mommy and made her happy. Daddy loved me and made me happy too. Daddy was the source of all the goodness in Morgan’s  life, or so he saw it, and so what better figure to fill the role of his positive daimon?

Sadly for the players the Seers have trapped Morgan’s positive daimon. In reality Morgan’s father has died, so in Morgan’s Oneiros the representation of his father is locked in a morgue drawer deep in his subconscious. Summoning him from there will be no easy feat… which is how the players met his negative influence.

It would have been extremely easy to have chosen Morgan’s overbearing step-father as his negative daimon, which is precisely why I didn’t do it. Morgan’s step-father is an important character in his psyche to be sure, but I felt that his mother would make a far more interesting daimon for him. For starters, the Players would naturally assume that she was the angel on his shoulder. Figuring that she would have a positive influence on him they might try to deliberately summon her specifically. Alternately if they attempted to summon his positive daimon and didn’t entirely succeed they could summon her instead.

I went for subtlety here. Her negative influence could come across as being a positive one for a time. She would urge him (and the Players if they interacted with her) to be calm, to be cautious, to not do anything rash. This can all be very good advice… if it isn’t being used to lull one into a state  of absolute compliance. Her ‘attacks’ are designed to make those around her lethargic, apathetic, and accepting of the bad things that happen to them.

As I stated earlier, Morgan’s step-father is absolutely a larger than life figure in his Oneiros. He is the man who ruined his once happy life. He wasn’t all that big on dealing with kids in general, and so having to put up with someone else’s kid wasn’t exactly his cup of tea. This poor child would clearly never amount to anything in life because he had the wrong biological father and as such was doomed from the start. Morgan’s step-father is a representation of his crushing self doubt. Step-Dad has intimidation based attacks that cause those around him to cower with fear. He can also summon hecklers to make Morgan (or the Player Characters since they are there now too) feel bad about himself, lose his confidence, and further fill him with doubt. These hecklers commonly take on the form of soldiers in his unit, though they can also be school mates, coworkers, or women he dated depending upon what part of Morgan’s psyche they are being summoned into.

Next week we’ll take a look at some of the key scenes in Morgan’s Oneiros. Remember how the Player Characters told the Seers that Morgan was becoming a loose cannon? We’ll punish them for that mistake. I promise!