Oubliette

✝ Welcome to Crown's End psychiatric hospital, New York City's multi-billion dollar solution for undesirables.
✝ The players have been incarcerated and due to a psychotic break they've been transferred to Crown's End. An island with a renovated tuberculosis sanatorium from the 1930s, now serving as a psych ward.
⸸ They don't know it yet but they've been selected for a new treatment. To survive they must overcome the resulting phenomenon.

Touch Points: Silent Hill, Shutter Island, Maniac

Content Warning: Catholic Blasphemy, Mental Illness, Psychiatric Institutions, Body Horror, Prison Correction Officer Presence, Incarceration

"People don't just snap. There is a process as observable, and often as predictable, as water coming to a boil."

What's Really Going On?

The famous NYC Psychologist, Dr. Rook has purchased access to a Catholic rite, Sacra Vita Nova. He's using the Crown's End patients as test subjects despite the rite's infamy of conjuring sinner dopplegängers.

Treatment

∆ Is it all just hallucinations? No, the dopplegängers are real and can be seen by anyone. They will disappear after 8 hours. The threat to the player is real.
∆ Dr. Rook has done this before. A month ago, in the island's lighthouse he forced the treatment on a patient named Mouse. This resulted in the death of the ward's case manager, Gomez.
∆ Dr. Rook is overconfident, claiming it was a dosage issue and covered it up as derangement on the part of Mouse.
∆ In reality the meds have no effect and Marcus, the ward officer, shot Gomez.

Dopplegänger

▼ Once the rite begins, the ceiling of all interior spaces raises into darkness. Unseen in the darkness, above each individual, a gibbet cage appears.
▼ While indoors, each cage impossibly always hovers above its subject, even between rooms.
▼ As a representation of the subject's mental issues. Each cage contains a monstrous dopplegänger.
▼ There are 2 exceptions, Father Julian and Marcus. In their cases they transform into their monster dopplegänger.

See files for more details on dopplegängers

▼ Keep the cage dormant, hidden and mysterious. Only seen from an item's light. They are not an active threat but instead a clue to the mystery.

If needed have a dopplegänger appear out of its cage to inflict Stress or to push players forward...No one wants to face themselves.

Character Creation

Online Tables

Roll for a mental illness. Emphasize they've been successfully treated for their illness. They're no longer compelled by it.

Ask everyone to explain their First Encounter with the Unknown

Intro

It's afternoon, heavy rain can be heard

Everyone is seated in a circle for group therapy in the Class.

Nurse Maya, is leading. The ward's only other patient Mouse is also present. She is playing a marketing video from Dr. Rook. In the video he says Become your best self, escape the cage. A brief scene shows catholic priests packing pills. The power cuts from the storm.

Maya suggests an activity that requires no power.

Present the rorschach (see files)

After Maya enthusiastically asks everyone to assemble a line in the Activity Center for their medication.

Medication

Incense is burning. A priest, can be seen leaving the pharmacy room.

Through a service window and in sequence Maya hands a small paper cup with circular beige pill. Paired with another cup of dark red bitter juice.

The ward's only correction officer, Marcus, stands ready to check for cheeking (unswallowed meds).

Do not force the pill. US Psychiatric law disallows forcing meds unless someone is a danger or lacks capacity.

Freetime

Allow players each 1 action before sundown. Where they will be ushered to their Rooms for quiet hour.

Sacra Vita Nova

Once locked in their rooms. Father Julian performs the rite in the Class. Then paces the halls of the Rooms, swinging a lit censer.

Sacra Vita Nova has begun

▼ Father Julian and Marcus transform

▼ Room metal doors raise like stage curtains

▼ All ceilings ascend into darkness

▼ Gibbets hang in the silent darkness above all

Details

∆ A hurricane made landfall. Most staff have already taken a boat to the mainland for the night.
∆ The island has a lighthouse and a dock.
∆ In the 1930s tuberculosis treatment was sunlight. As a renovated sanatorium for consumption, most walls have windows with bars. The roof is also glass.
∆ The ward is dark but every 20 seconds a sweeping light from the lighthouse goes by.
∆ No patients were made aware about their involvement in the treatment.

PC Goal

Escape the island or take refuge in the lighthouse.

Locations

Before Rite After Rite

Rooms

▼ Each bedroom has a bunk bed, toilet, sink, mirror and a barred window.

Infirmary

▼ This room disappears, leaving a pit

Yards

▼ All become seemingly bottomless pits. A vertical continuous conveyor of gibbets are in motion.

Mess Hall

▼ A small feeding tube descends from the darkness. Mice and oatmeal continuously flow out from the tube onto the sticky ground.
▼ A strange 3x3 Sliding Puzzle lays on a table.
▼ Leather Apron (1 armor), stained with blood.

Seclusion

∆ Mouse's previous room, a chess set is on the bed.
▼ Mouse's's dopplegänger is here. He is nonviolent and impossibly skinny. Sliding into the toilet when seen (d4 Stress).

Admin

∆ Mouse's confiscated bag of cider prison hooch.
∆ Dr. Rook's office, has his computer and a security camera.
∆ Stun Gun (d6, non-lethal).

Class

∆ A circle of chairs with small paper nameplates.
▼ Blood continually streams down the walls, lightly flooding the room.
▼ Each nameplate has been placed into a cup of wine.
A Chalaf (d8) floats up. Whoever picks it up has a hallucination. They momentarily see someone from their past holding onto the Chalaf in the reflection.

Activity Center

∆ Bookshelf with a bible, Datasheets & Demons 5.5e and Dr. Rook's book, Escape the Cage. Next to a promotional cutout.
∆ A locked pharmacy. Maya has the key.
∆ Crafts for gluing minis, sewing and painting. TV and couches. Chess and other games.
▼ The front entrance is locked. Marcus has the key.

Sliding Puzzle

▼ Small magical wooden board with a 3x3 grid. 8 square pieces, each with an icon matching a room in the post-rite ward.
▼ One square ▧ is missing allowing adjacent squares to slide.
▼ Sliding a square in the puzzle moves the corresponding room in real life.
▼ If any square is removed from the board, the whole building shakes. Take 1 Stress.

Reference Map

Reference map of the ward

See files for the full map

NPCs

all NPCs have the following attributes

▼ Attributes: 10
▼ HP: 6

Mouse

∆ Bipolar grandmaster chess player. Guilty of drug possession.
∆ A month ago he was Dr. Rook's original test subject. Afterword he refused meals for 3 days resulting in being fed through a feeding tube.
▼ Decapitated by Father Julian.

Gomez

∆ Case Manager, handles transfers. and wrote prescriptions for the ward. Was murdered by Marcus. Dr. Rook covered this up.

Dr. Rook

▼ Medical Director for Crown's End. Currently in his NYC apartment, safely watching from security cameras.

Maya Rosa

∆ Head nurse, compassionate, obsessive and overworked.
∆ Blinded to the risk of Dr. Rook's treatment by how much extra funding the ward will win if things go right.
∆ Kept in the dark about Sacra Vita Nova.
▼ Caged dopplegänger is a nonviolent ballerina. The top half of her head is a record player playing classical music.
▼ When Marcus performs Reveal, her dopplegänger cage falls and breaks. Released, her dopplegänger begins her routine.

Father Julian

∆ The authorized theurgist of Sacra Vita Nova.
▼ Transforms into a fully mechanical iron maiden on wooden chariot wheels.
▼ Heavy smoke fills the Room halls. Mouse tries to convince Father Julian to reverse the rite and is decapitated.
▼ Swings the censor in a full 360 degrees. A sharp pendulum (d8) manifests around it. Can be launched like a ball and chain.
▼ A metal hand gestures ICXC.
▼ Can capture a target inside (d8 Stress), releases immediately before the target's turn.

Marcus Price

▼ Entrance key looped on his belt.
▼ Has a latent transformation. First appears normal in a ornate chair, asking "Who told you could leave your room?".
▼ Interrupt the conversation with Maya shouting "that's not Marcus!". Have Marcus get upset, shoot her and frame the players.
▼ The chair transforms to have human hands for legs, which slowly elongate.
▼ The chair reaches up 15ft and pulls them up into the dark by dangling chains. The back of the chair has a human face.
▼ Marcus holds a Gun (d8) and acts twice in a round.
▼ Reveal: an upward warning shot shoots a chain freeing Maya's caged dopplegänger.
▼ Throw: after Reveal, the chair stands on hind legs, throwing Maya's cage (d8). The connected chain above whips and breaks the glass roof. Rain and glass crash down.

Epilogue

The Bureau takes custody of the players. End with an interrogation question from an agent.