Bad Idea Shitpost: Psychosurgery

The idea of translating pharmacology and other medical tidbits into the game keeps gestating in my brain. Another idea that I am rather fond of is psychosurgery.

I had originally started thinking about this while learning about neuroanatomy and the strange types of behavioral symptoms you would get after lesions in the brain or "ectomy" type surgeries. A classic is cutting the corpus callosum that bridges the two halves of the brain, keeping them both functional but limiting their ability to communicate. To a degree, it seems like both halves of the brain retain the ability to think (independently?) but information from one half has a hard time communicating to the conscious mind (one half of your brain has information you as a whole are not aware of).

While I was thinking about barbarian tribes, I thought about a concept where tribe members, as a coming of age exercise, would take a razor sharp "knife blade" of obsidian and slowly hammer it into the skull of the tribe member, right down the middle of the head. The problem is that I was never sure what exactly that would translate to in terms of gameable stuff. Split brain? Disrupted pineal gland resulting in less sleep? Going with a more abstract theme of "gaining insight"? I think having the procedure making the person immune to "blinding" effects might be interesting. Can't see illusions, can't be affected by perception altering things, can't be mindwiped? Who knows, there were enough tribes anyways

That idea was also inspired by a story by one of my Adv. Neurobiology professors. One day a man walks into the emergency room, followed by his brother who is apologizing profusely. Nothing seems wrong; there are no obvious behavioral or psychological symptoms. The problem is that the man actually has a knife embedded in his head. Punctured the right side of his temple and the tip was sticking out the other side. He ended up being fine in the end.

Psychosurgery in this setting (Centerra based, using concepts like wizard vision and spells living in the brain), or any fantasy setting, could be quite interesting. Profane Ape did a post relating to how enchanters can change the mind. Very cool. But I also like the idea of kidnapping someone and fiddling with their brain to do some wicked CIA shit. That was originally the inspiration I used for an order of paladins known as the Black Hand.

The concepts in the blogpost above use "gates", and are generally more abstract. These can probably be used as they are and imported as procedures, but the types of psychosurgery I want to try and implement  are as follows:

• reading "personality"
• toggling wizard vision
• entering psychotropia at will
• telepathy organs (other people with organs are "linked")
• implant/remove spells (basically just carving out that piece of brain or putting one in)
• reading a wizard's spells without killing them
• psychotropic ego retention
• telepathic inception (dive into the dreams of others you have a "link" with)
• reading memories (psychomotor memory and emotional memories easiest, descriptive/information based memories much harder)
• cure/implant phobia
• psychotropic memory retention
• selective memory triage
• telepathic syncope (you can instantly make unconscious anyone you have a link to)
• personality implantation
• cure/implant paranoia
• psychotropic lucidity
• telepathic psychotropic syncope (instantly send the linked into psychotropia)
• memory implantation
• cure/implant hallucinations
• telepathic blindspot (like a false hydra)

These were all made when I was doing my initial designs for the Black Hand. There was a lot of focus on gaining usable behavioral information, gangstalking paranoia, psychotropia, and telepathic links. You don't necessarily need to kill your enemies, you just need to kidnap, gaslight, brainwash, and fundamentally change who they are so that they end up serving your needs without them knowing you exist.

But outside a certain theme of procedures, there's a lot more you could do with this. Things that immediately come to my head are purely neurological phenomena: phantom limbs, personality disorders, implanting (or curing) certain mental illness, removing the ability to fear or recognize fear, remove the ability to feel pain, implanting amnesia, etc... There are probably things with more of a D&D twist to do but I cannot think of them right now; I find that writing about things I know more detail about tends to make them much more literal.

I did make a "magical" item which is actually just a syringe you poke into someone's skull to suck out some of their higher order souls, but besides that (and possibly the dEr0 conspiracy) most of what you could do with this idea feels "less magical". Which is fine. A lot of these procedures are simply impossible with surgery alone, but this is weird fantasy surgery. Honestly I like the idea of it much better when it's just some dude cutting apart your brain.

You could also prompt certain behaviors with triggers/implant strong behavioral circuits. Give someone a "high addiction risk" personality, link that reward pathway to a certain behavior and stimulus, and just wait. People will do insane things for addictions in real life. After speaking the trigger word, Cha save to resist the overpowering urge to slaughter your friends (if you fail you try to kill them and feel orgasmic while doing so). 

Combine some of these concepts with pharmacology and who have something interesting cooking. Maybe a class? or maybe just a large number of weird and hopefully gameable interactions.

It also occurs to me while writing this that you could also use this for NPCs or enemies. While it seems interesting on paper I'm unsure whether it would be fun or useful. Giving PCs the ability to brainwash and manipulate the NPCs in your worlds can be very fun for them, but doing so the other way around might not be particularly fun. Especially if they are unaware; I doubt you can do anything very complex like implanting "kill triggers" for the PCs. This will vary by group and play content but screwing over the PCs without them knowing using these ideas is probably a bad idea.

On the other idea, a paladin suddenly popping into existence near the PCs and talking to them like he has known them for years is pretty interesting. "Yeah, you guys seemed real suspicious for a while there but you've all been cleared. Have a nice day." Of all the ideas from above to use on the PCs, a "ghost in the campaign" is the most entertaining to me. But, like a false hydra type campaign, you could do something more elaborate if you have cooperative players. 

I think one thing that could possibly be fun is if the PCs refused to learn/listen to certain things because they knew that their memories could be read, or took obsessive steps to make sure none of them was alone/asleep to prevent procedures from taking place.

• The paladin following the PCs cannot easily enter a private area because he won't be blinded to people he has not specifically given the right procedure for
• To do procedures, the paladin needs to anesthetize and work on the "patient" for a lengthy amount of time
• Procedures can only be done once a month and need that time to heal. The might also leave scars/markings of performance

Those three conditions actually can give you a lot of leeway for how the PCs might handle something like this. Babbling to random strangers about watching out for a person they don't know how to describe, refusing to be alone or isolated, checking people's skulls to see if they have any markings of psychosurgery.

One last thing: Psychosurgery for non humans. I think it would be fun to be able to learn and carry over things from one organism to another with study time. Like how some birds (or people in this setting) can sense magnetic north. Or, giving your PCs proximity trackers in each others heads. Now when they split up, the will know exactly when the others die. 

What happens if you stuff a piece of dragon brain into someone's head? For the sake of this entire post, antibody mediated rejection does not exist. Or maybe it does, and learning how to overcome the major histocompatibility complex is a specialized form of wizardry or medical-fantastic technique.