Basic Overview:
At the beginning of the week, you wake up in the whitewashed walls of their room in Paradisa Care Health and Wellness Center. You have a roommate, probably someone you haven’t met before, but definitely someone you don’t know well. You are about to ask where you are, and what’s going on, when an orderly appears to take both you and your roommate to the Day Room for breakfast and medication. It’s then that you realize that you’ve been suddenly transported to a mental health facility-and furthermore, you’re stuck there.
The Premise: Cair Paradisa has now become Paradisa Care, and your character has landed there because they have been deemed mentally unsound for whatever reason, and the fact that you’re ranting about having come from a crazy castle? Not really helping. In fact, most of the doctors dismiss this as a shared coping mechanism between patients to help them deal with their situations. They have folders containing your lives that they’ve analyzed, picked apart, and they think they know your character inside and out. What happens next depends on how much your character tries to fight against their delusions and where they’re being held. There is no magic. The journals are ordinary notebooks, and the “castle” isn’t going to give you anything you want by wishing for it. You are all human-the fact that you are a vampire, demon, transgenic, or even a knight of the Round Table, is all part of your delusion and you’re here to seek treatment for it.
What’s really going on, however, is that the castle has taken you and the other castle residents, and scattered you in buildings across it’s grounds. You’ve been separated into 3 smaller groups, and everyone in that group is a castle resident-and that includes your doctors. The character roles will divide up as follows:
The Staff: In each smaller group, there will be 10-15 characters that are divided up into doctors, orderlies, and other staff. There will be about 5 to 7 doctors, that will divide the patients into separate group therapy sessions of about five patients. These characters completely believe that they have been doing this forever, and that this has never been any other way. This being said doctors will be responsible for “diagnosing” the patients in their group, based on communication with the muns of their “patients” and whatever materials are available to them-Wiki pages, familiarity with the fandom, et cetera. I will try to link up doctors with characters that I know they’ll be familiar with to try and make this easier, but I know that this isn’t going to be completely possible, so OOC communication with your patient muns is encouraged. You don’t have to be incredibly technical with your diagnosis, but keep in mind that your character does think he’s a psychologist for the remainder of the plot.
The doctor will also be responsible for posting logs in the log comm for the daily “group therapy” sessions. If you reach a consensus among your group to handwave a majority of the sessions than that’s fine, but it’s recommended to post at least one, just so that the patient characters who are not affected by the castle can get an idea of who’s crazy and who’s not.
The Patients: If your character is taken on as a patient, they will be responsible for passing on a Wiki page on to the mun of the “doctor” character in their group, as well as being in communication with them in terms of a “diagnosis.” Some characters will lend to this more than others-Sam and Dean Winchester, for example, you could probably write an essay about them and their issues (their daddy issues alone would take a week to work out), while a character like Ted Mosby will take longer to work out a reasoning for him to be in a mental institution. Remember that these are fictional characters, and meant to be a little larger than life, so think about what makes the character who they are, and think of what could happen if those things were taken to the extreme. If you are looking for ideas, it’s always worth it to look through the Psychology Dictionary. You will also be responsible for deciding what it was about their canon point that led them to arrive at Paradisa Care-remember that as long as your character has been in the castle is how long they’ve been in the asylum as well. The castle is something they’ve created as their “coping mechanism,” so it can’t be a castle event that tipped them over the edge.
Half the group of patients will be castle residents, transported here with their castle memories intact, and without any signs of actual psychosis. They’re the ones that the plot is trying to convince that they are actually crazy, and they’re the ones most likely to team up and try and find a way out.
The other half, however, are going to be castle residents who are also being affected by the castle and actually mentally ill. If you elect to place your character in this group, they will also believe that this is the way things always have been. They actually lived the normal backstory that you’ve created for them, and the alternate universe that they came from is part of the delusions that landed them in Paradisa Care in the first place.
Opt Outs - There will be the option to opt out of this plot, and those that do will remain in the castle. They will still be able to use their journals as a communication device, and communicate with the others in the castle, but they will not be able to reach the people that have been transported to the asylum. This is the option to take if you do not wish to play in the plot at all, or want to be part of the Rescue Mission. (More on that later on.) For the people who choose this option, life in the castle will go on, as per usual-the only difference being that there will be a lot of people missing.
Gameplay:
Most of the gameplay for those trapped in the asylum will take place in the log comm. This will be the easiest way to give credit for all of those participating in the asylum, because the journals will not be magic, and can’t be used as a communication device. Your characters will still have journals-they were given to them as a therapy tool-so characters can record private entries in them as they see fit-but they can’t use them to communicate with others within the asylum. The logs also do not have to be prose-they can be action spam, to make things easier on everyone, but it would be easiest if all activity took place in the log comm. There are several types of posts that can take place:
Open Day Room Posts: These will be posts designated for complete open interaction between all the patients in a given group. There will be three of these in the first week-one for each group of patients-and will allow you to set threads there for any point during the week. You can use it to build CR at any point, just specify a date and time in the subject line of your comment accordingly. These will be posted by Sweets’ journal, and left open for general patient interaction. When tagging into these posts please remember to add your tag to the post in order to get credit for your participation.
Closed Group Therapy Sessions: Each patient is required to attend one hourly group therapy session daily, and each session is staggered throughout the day-seven doctors, each getting one hourly session out of an eight hour day-it evens out. The groups for these sessions will be pre-assigned before the lost based on CR and whether or not the patient has been affected by the castle-this is about gaining new CR, and we want to have an even mix of crazy to not crazy. The doctors in charge of each of these sessions are responsible for posting the log, and while we don’t require that you do one for every day and most of them can be handwaved, we do ask that you post at least one for the week, for CR building purposes. These logs are closed to the members of those groups.
Closed/Open Solo Logs: These are your normal everyday logs. If your characters start plotting to try and break out of the asylum, or want to meet up with some of their CR that might be in another group, or are just trolling for CR-these logs are more than welcome. Just keep in mind that there is no escape from Paradisa Care, so if you’re going to try and coordinate a failed attempt, make sure you plan through to find an doctor or orderly to stop them.
The Rescue:
Naturally, your characters can’t stay trapped in Paradisa Care forever. Those who have opted out of the plot are wondering where all their friends went-all their nameplates are still on their doors, and their belongings are still there, they’re simply gone. Starting Week Two of the plot, they’ll start to find some answers.
Scattered throughout the castle are three elaborate looking mirrors. Most people walking past them wouldn’t think much of it, but one of the Opt Out characters is going to happen to walk past one of them and see through the mirror and into the Day Room of one of the Paradisa Care units. It will take a little doing but eventually the characters will be able to use a mirror as a portal, and go in to rescue their friends. All opt out characters will have been treated as “delusions” by the doctors and staff-imaginary friends created by the patients to deal with their situation. Their sudden appearance in the building of Paradisa care itself will break the illusion of the mental institution, as well as the compulsions placed on their friends and allow them to bring them back to the castle and to their normal lives.
These rescues will be staggered throughout the second week, so that those who want to play with their character being trapped in the asylum longer can. The final rescue will take place on the Friday of the second week, and the plot will come to a complete end with the disappearing of the mirrors on Saturday.
Characters Involved ( with usernames ): Everyone.
Castle Wide or Specific Character Plot: Castle-wide.
Scheduled Start/End Date: Whenever you can best fit it into the schedule - I didn’t really have a specific start/end date in mind, but the plot would run for two weeks.
Other Information: I know that taking the journals out of the equation does go a bit against how the game is usually run, but I think it will be fairly useful for the plot, given that the point of the asylum is trying to convince people of the absence of magic. Also, these numbers can be adjusted, depending on how many characters opt out or the ratio of crazy to not crazy, but in organizing the plot, I would try to keep things as even as possible.