I love stuff like this. I'm a psych nurse, and my paper for "world religions" was on the similarities between Schizophrenia and Shamanic Crisis.
“For some reason I think it's weird that a water spirit is giving kinetomancy but alright.”
Good point. I tend to associate water with emotions. I’ll come back to that later.
“My question is: So the spirit is IN Nick. Can the spirit be attacked inside Nick? Can its magic be shut off for some reason? Nick should be effected by thresholds, but what about other things - imagine crossing a magic circle and while Nick crosses, Adamsk can't. If other supernatural beings can sense Adamsk, they can certainly pay with him/push his buttons.”
The short answer is what feeds the storyline. I don’t much like the idea of Adamsk getting ‘scraped out’ of Nick by a too powerful threshold, but on the other hand, I was in an RPG recently where when the party retreated to a “safe” protected circle to escape the demonic bad guys, it “scraped” the spirit out of one dude’s enchanted sword, which made for much interesting follow up.
“What if not only Adamsk starts reacting to odd things, but if he starts registering things as "Supernatural threats" when they aren't. The neighbor's poodle. The garden gnome. What is behind it? Is something specifically targeting Adamsk, or is Adamsk going haywire?”
Here you have the classic diagnostic behavior of Schizophrenia; when the individual’s perception of what’s going on is severely at variance with the rest of the culture’s perception. And sometimes it’s “crazy” and sometimes it’s not. I’d encourage setting up both.
Earlier I mentioned water and emotion. What if Adamsk can perceive it when someone “looks” at Nick as in “directs attention his way” could be anything from a puppy smelling shows to a hot chickie checking him out – and what if Adamsk’s definition of threat has to do with intensity of interest. So the following might be situations deemed “threat”: Dog really excited about the pizza he just ate, Gal who thinks Nick is REALLY hot, thief who wonders “OMIGOD did he see me” While psychopath mugger (no emotional reaction) doesn’t register, neither does skilled hitman (calm & competent).
“Adamsk might display a new response to a specific stimuli. For instance, not just "fight, Flight or meh" but "Oooh, gimmie". This could be mating/attraction to a certain being, or it could be coveting a certain object or type of object. It could also be a desire to protect something - a territorial or even "maternal" reaction to something. (Complication: the thing that Adamsk wants to protect is something the other group would prefer not to, like a monster or an NPC who has Questionable Intentions).”
Or “gimme” could appear as a sub-category of “fight”
“Ultimately the spirit has instincts. What are those instincts and drives beyond 'fight, flight or ignore"? How does it Behave in the wild, what does it do? For instance, Bob is a spirit of air, but he's also a spirit of Intellect, he's all about acquiring knowledge. This thing is all about instinct, but what do those instincts drive it to do? What is its purpose, essentially.”
Really good questions – fob them onto the player.
