Your Bout of Madness episodes

[Corvo]

Hi all!

In the next session, a bout of madness is almost assured: the Beorning Slayer is already Miserable, and they are engaging Tyulqin in her lair.
I got few episodes of BoM in these years, so I'm wondering if someone can tell me about their past experience, so to draw inspiration

[Rich H]

Wish I could help, I have 4 PCs and they've been through about 10 adventures and not had one yet.

[Fenton Hardy]

The Elf in our party had a bout of madness in the werewolf’s lair. Since his Shadow Weakness is Lure of Power and this was his first bout of madness, I had him become resentful of Thranduil for sending them into danger. He tried to talk his companions into leaving, but they refused. Stalking out of the cave, he brooded for a while until the werewolf returned. That snapped him out of madness and his sense of guilt about abandoning his friends compelled him to quietly follow the werewolf back into the cave. The werewolf detected him and turned on him, knocking him unconscious. Fortunately, the rest of the company arrived in time to prevent his death. It was touch and go and nearly resulted in a TPK.

[Deadmanwalking]

Our Hobbit Treasure Hunter had a bout of madness and stole as many of our magic items as he could (note: this was two items) and fled into the night, then encountered what he saw as a beautiful woman and went to her. We chased after him and encountered the spider he was actually approaching (and several more). We killed them, and given his clearly befuddled state blamed the spiders for the whole incident.

Our Dwarf Scholar also had a bout of madness, which basically amounted to running into a tree (the thing he rolled the Eye on) and freaking out and attempting to hack it down with his axe. Unfortunately, the tree was mobile and unhappy. So...that one ended up being a fight, too.

I think the important thing to remember about bouts of Madness is that they should have as much to do with the situation as the character's Calling (though Callling should influence them to some degree). Boromir trying to take the ring doesn't make him a Treasure hunter and all that. A Wanderer or Scholar could go berserk or a Slayer flee battle under the right circumstances. It's all about context.

[panzerattack]

I always try to have the bout of madness kick off at the most in-opportune time for the player.

This link is to a session where we had a bout of madness kick off. I waited until the very end of the session before I launched the bout of madness at the player

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/140 ... od-part-11

[Corvo]

Thank you all!

In all likelihood, the BoM would be triggered during the combat with Tyulqin.
The worst moment to have something like this, but it's in the spirit of the rule, after all.

The miserable Hero is a valiant warrior, but of grim and pessimistic disposition: probably he will despair and flee Tyulqin's lair, cursing Radagast for leading them to their demise.
Or maybe he'll refrain from rolling any Eye rune for the rest of the adventure!

[Majestic]

I think we've only had the two for my son's Elf PC (Falandor). As a Scholar, he started down the path towards the Lure of Secrets. For his first one (Haughty), I more or less told him that he didn't want to go with the party anymore. He just stopped (on the Elf-Path, they were headed East, back towards his home in the Woodland Realm), and the others had to convince him to keep going, as he suddenly seemed melancholy and wasn't really receptive to the others' plans and goals for a time. That one didn't last too long.

But the second time (when he got to Scornful), the party had just been lent the Book of Mazarbul by Dain. The lone Dwarf (Frain) in the party kept it close as they travelled, never letting anyone else even touch it (though the Scholars in the party loved to view it as he read through it while they walked). When he slept at night, Frain literally had the book under him like a pillow. One night, while Falandor was on watch and nobody else was awake, he decided he just had to see what was in that book, and hold it for itself (to really learn its secrets!) So he tried to carefully remove it from under his sleeping companion. Frain awoke, and Falandor was caught with his hand literally in the cookie jar! There was some great role-playing, as he tried to make some excuse for why he wanted to see the book, and luckily they never came to blows over it. But it was definitely fun for all at the table!

[Rich H]

So, albeit a bit tangential to the main thrust of this thread, how many Bouts of Madness have occurred so far in your campaigns and across how many adventures did they happen? Like I said earlier, we've played about 10 adventures so far and not had one Bout to contend with.

[Dunkelbrink]

So far I haven't had any Bouts of madness in my campaign. We've played about 12 adventures in 35+ sessions, and I've even limited the ways of getting rid of Shadow. A few heroes are constantly balancing on the edge, with about 7-8 shadow, but they're conservative with their Hope spends. I really want the Shadow mechanic to play an important role in the game, but in actual play it doesn't really have that impact. Luckily the Revelations of Eye of Mordor has a similar effect of unexpected troubling events.

[uhu79]

I had a journey hazard on the 3rd session that made 2 companions miserable for the rest of the journey, so by only 4 sessions played we've already had 3 bouts of madness. Madness!