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Old 01-07-2019, 12:30 AM   #43
Icelander
 
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Default Re: [MH] Caribbean by Night

Quote:
Originally Posted by hal View Post
You may want to base the sanitarium facility somewhere outside of the U.S. I've heard (don't know how reliable this is) that many asylums either down sized or were shut down over time, which has the effect of having more people on the streets who lack good long term care help.
I'm assuming that smuggling victims out of the continental US will not always be practical or desirable. On the other hand, as the Patron of the PCs is vastly wealthy and influential in the several Gulf Coast cities in the US where the PCs expect they might face this problem, it's not unreasonable to imagine that the Patron already has relationships with a number of mental health professionals.

Having victims legally committed through the intervention of a friendly psychiatrist might be easier and less risky than trying to spirit them away from the police and transport out of the country. Especially if the victims truly are exhibiting symptoms of total mental collapse, combining classic signs of acute PTSD with delusions and various derangements.

Any number of victims, as well as perhaps the less culpable perpetrators, will have failed Fright Checks, usually badly, and will have seen things that officially don't exist, as well as suffering trauma and loss at the hands of these things. The Facade (from the Pyramid article 'Mask of Humanity' by Cristopher R. Rice) means they'll try to rationalize away their encounter with the supernatural, but their denial won't cure PTSD and mental trauma, let alone do anything to help repair damage to victims' or perpetrators' psyches caused by evil spirits or otherwordly beings that have supernatural powers that cause Corruption, derangement or other mind-destroying effects.

The offical explanation for supernatural events will often involve assuming that the lone survivor of a massacre was responsible for it. If a whole family is killed by a playful fae, before the shattered mother manages to impale it with a steel kitchen knife, causing its death because of the iron, and the body of the fae fades away as otherwordly material, the responding police might rationalise the problematic crime scene and impossible story away by assuming that she was a madwoman who killed her family.

The Facade means that prosecutors and courts will be eager to believe any alternative explanation over accepting the supernatural and unconsciously manipulating evidence, let alone its interpretation, is hardly beyond them. So a lot of victims will be assumed by society at large to be murderers and madmen, whether or not things go as far as a trial. Mostly, prosecutors will probably agree to having the assumed perpetrator committed to a psychiatric facility for an indefinite period, which most people know really means for life, more or less.

Quote:
Originally Posted by hal View Post
Perhaps a facility on an Island? If salt has any effect on spirits of magic, it could act as a dampening effect? It isolated the inmates from modern society, as well as helps with keeping them contained.
Just so.

I was considering having J.R. Kessler entirely control a secret facility on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. It's already been established in play that Kessler owns an impregnable compound there, with some of his most trusted employees, past and present, having bought (with his assistence) adjoining plots of land to his house there and built bungalows, for a retreat or to retire in.

It's also been established that the commander of the local police force, for one reason or another, has been prepared to sign paperwork allowing the employees of a private security company owned (through a complex structure of offshore shell companies) by Kessler to carry a wide variety of military weapons, some of which officially belong to the local SWAT and are formally on loan.

That facility is clearly where Kessler arranges to have any irrevocably insane and extremely dangerous people taken, if he can manage it. Which he will not always be able to do. Yes, the PCs will often be operating outside the US, in various areas of the Caribbean, but not always. And once victims or perpetrators become part of the paperwork in any significant criminal investigation or other proceedings in the United States, it becomes unlikely that they can be secretly interned in another country.

So, how do his operatives handle it when they've captured someone in the US, who might or might not be wanted for murder, and who might or might not be irrevocably insane from having touched the consciousness of Something truly awful. Not to mention her two accomplishes, whom the PCs didn't capture, but were arrested by the Galveston PD.

Clearly, the police is going to ignore any truly relevant evidence, that the PCs need to find out more about any information about connections these people might have with the occult underworld, not to mention whether they were merely a small cabal of crazies or belong to any kind of organised cult.

As the PCs decide what to do, it's it's crucial that they have a good overview of their options. And it would be plausible, as well as interesting in a dramatic sense, for Kessler to be the sponsor of a charitable institution, in Galveston or close by, concerned with mental health issues, friendly with the police and willing to provide support to criminal investigations at highly favorable rates. Favorable enough to make it unlikely that the county of Galveston would want to contract with any other medical facility for when they need official psychiatric evaluations.

I'm hoping there is some real-world building, hospital or facility on or near Galveston that I could traduce in my campaign by casting them in a sinister, conspirational light, in violation of all professional standards and relevant laws, even if it is ultimately rationalized as doing the best that can be done in an imperfect situation, as well as for the greater good of saving the world.

I'll try to research the University of Texas Medical Branch on Galveston, as Kessler is already established as a major donor there. Do they have any treatment facility connected to their psychiatric program?

Quote:
Originally Posted by hal View Post
Just out of curiosity, might not the Catholic church run parallel facilities of their own, as they've been around for centuries, and likely have records going back far enough to establish oddities that otherwise gets swept under the rug?
Exactly right.

I had wondered whether to have Kessler and his people closely enough allied to the Vatican, uneasily or not, so that they might rely on their vastly greater resources and influence for this sort of thing. Ultimately, I decided that Kessler could never trust any human institution with as much power as the Vatican enough to make such an allegiance practical. Kessler is aware that agents of the Holy See likely share his goals in the majority of cases of supernatural incursions, but that doesn't mean that he is willing to enter any formal allegiance which would ultimately result in the church having access to all his secrets and weaknesses.

Not when Kessler can't rule out that the hierarchy of the church, as with any mortal hierarchy, might be infiltrated and influenced by Things that come from other worlds, through the Vile Vortices, and whose ultimate goals are incompatible with human life on Earth, at least as we know it.

When it comes to cooperation with the Catholic Church on a more limited basis, Lucien Lacoste (PC), one of Kessler's prized new operatives, is a devout Catholic who in his younger days seriously considered whether he might have a vocation as a priest, and who still has very good contacts with many priests around New Orleans, as well as the Jesuits who educated him.

Quote:
Originally Posted by hal View Post
The question then would be, why doesn't the Church want knowledge of this nature more common if it gives people incentive to depend on the Church more?
The official position of the Catholic Church is and always has been that Evil exists as a tangible force, that its agents walk the Earth and the the Church exists as a bulwark to protect the faithful.

As for why the Church keeps the specifics hidden, that is, in setting, something that Lucien Lacoste, the Jesuit-educated former detective, also struggles with. His mentor and friend, Father Xavier Rousseau, SJ, Professor Emeritus of Loyola University New Orleans, has told him that the response of the church is founded on a series of secret papal bulls and that suppression of certain lore is by direct decree of the Holy See.

Furthermore, that this is not a political move or calculated worldly policy, which they both know not even the church can always rise above, but is in furtherance of a divine vision, vouchsafed unto the Vicar of God on Earth. They must simply have faith, and in absence of the comforting discipline of vows, including the vow of obedience, that Lucien ultimately did not feel called to take, Lucien must make up his mind whether to trust that the Church is more than merely the fallible human institution they can see, that there is a Plan and that the Church is central to that Plan.

However, while Father Xavier is deeply committed to his Church and his vows, he has undoubtedly hinted at much more about secret Vatican business than he is allowed to tell anyone not bound by church discipline, no matter how faithful, and Father Xavier obviously trusts Lucien to make up his own mind on the issue of secrecy. He also seems to believe that while Lucien would always be welcomed as a Soldier of God should he feel called to take vows, perhaps Lucien's refusal to do so and his alternate path to protect the innocent combat Evil are also part of God's Plan.
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Last edited by Icelander; 01-07-2019 at 01:59 AM.
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