This situation came up and I’d love to know what you’d do:
During the score, the characters rob a ghost of her revenge. During entanglement they roll Unquiet Dead, and of course, the ghost comes to their lair and start flipping tables. After failing to dissuade the ghost from lashing out at them, the ghost tries to possess the crew’s Lurk. The Lurk elects to not resist the effect, and now has level 3 harm (Possessed). But umm… now what? Do I assume control of the character until his crew can get him exorcised? Unless something is done about this, the character will die in 4 weeks, right? What would you do / have you done when one of the characters at your table got straight-up possessed by a ghost?
I would ask the player if they would prefer to roleplay out being possessed, or if they wanted to make another character while the crew works on exorcising them.
I’ve inflicted possessed, level 3, before. To our table, that meant that PC couldn’t act without help, except when the possessor approves. So I told them what that meant and engaged in discussion to decide much like Lex describes. I was also was aware that it can be healed and project ideas for exorcision came up. Ps: The possession would be very short lived with a little help. So yea I think you have to take some liberties to make it sting but YMMV
I’d do a low key kind of thing, and have the ghost be a rider. Mostly it sits quiet, until the pc really needs it not to. Then it starts screwing with them- causing random pain, phantom touches, hearing different words than what people are saying etc. it’s trying to get the pc killed, but do it to themselves. Another suggestion: the Tyler Durden. The ghost bots the PC while they sleep, and they die in 4 weeks from exhaustion (h/t Brandes Stoddard ).
The ghost is possessing an occupied body right? The PC can Resist to regain temporary control at least (unless this ghost is magically more powerful than a player controlled Ghost for some reason).
A character in my game is on his way to becoming possessed. I was going to combine the idea of Rabbit Stoddard​’s low key rider with new XP triggers that would strongly encourage high mayhem actions that align with the ghosts desires… Something similar to the vengeance ability.