[Free Your Head] Illumination --when character change is drastic

[StevenS]

I am currently working on a game whose genre could perhaps be best described as Psychedelic Conspiracy -- the models are works like Mike Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels, the Illuminatus! trilogy, and Grant Morrison's "Invisibles".

After a search here, I found someone working on a similar project, that was pointed towards Don't Rest Your Head; and after looking at it, I've taken some of the basic system, warped it  to fit my needs, and am trying to wrap some of the other mechanics around that core.

The core uses three pools (at the moment), as with DRYH -- the three pools are Karma, Coherence, and Flow.  (Karma is, well, karma; coherence is how in touch with one's self and how functional that self is, and flow is being in touch with, for want of a better way of putting it, the Tao¹.)

One of the key experiences/moments in any of the psychedelic conspiracy texts I've read has been the moment of illumination -- whether that came via overcoming tremendous adversity, or by achieving union with the World/God/Way -- and so I felt this should be modeled within the game.

I am thinking that an ordeal-type illumination would be the result of losing all of one's Coherence; just how bad it was, and what the results looked like, would depend on where one's Karma and Flow were when that happened.  While if you brought Flow up so high that it exceeded Coherence, then there would be a union-type illumination.

Either of these would result in a) the upper limit of Coherence being increased, and b) some of the subsidiary traits of the character (currently, "roles" as subcategories/bonus dice to the Coherence pool) being rearranged -- because you never go out the way you came in after something like that.

The difference would come in some combination of a) how those traits can be rearranged, b) who has control over that rearrangement, and c) -- well, whatever else I can dream up, because there needs to be something going on to separate them.

I'm curious both as to people's opinions as to how the responsibility for the change should be divided between player and GM (and group -- there are elements of group-determined effects in the rules) and whether this makes sense as a mechanism in the first place.  I'll probably post more about the specific pools, and some of my other notions, as they become more refined.

In any event -- I'm open to all sorts of feedback, and will answer questions as best I can.

Thanks!





1 I am aware that I'm mixing my mysticism here. Eris forgive me.