Usually, I only enjoy Ray Bradbury when I'm drunk. Basically, if I'm sober I keep mentally objecting to and mocking all of his premises, such as how he's fundamentally terrified of technological progress, and so forth. But when I get drunk and I'm being less rational his stories can be kind of fun.
So, recently, while being drunk, I read a Ray Bradbury short story in The October Country about two old ladies who are enslaved by three evil midgets. Yes, you read that right. There are three midgets who disguise themselves as the womens' children but they beat them at night and extort money from them for cigars, whiskey, and poker. Absolutely freaking trippy. There's something outlandishly, feverishly awesome about that. But I really think that, like most of Bradbury's writing, you have to be drunk to fully appreciate how awesome that is.
So, I have this idea for putting something kind of similar to that in a SR game. It involves NPCs whoring Control Thoughts, so I think that it's a good way to smack down the players if the players themselves use Control Thoughts all the time like a few people have been complaining about.
My scenario:
The PCs are sent to a national park of some kind that has crappy rental cabins. They are being asked to spy on a business consultant or two who is staying at the park; they're being asked to watch him, monitor his cellphone transmissions, follow him during the day, and so forth. The PCs have been given a cabin by the Johnson who has paid the rent, and this cabin is also next to a cabin inhabitd by three evil human midgets who all cast a mean Control Thoughts.
So, the business consultants go around during the day seeing various parts of the park and talking shop talk on their cell phones. The party has to split up to follow both of them at once and they leave someone at the cabin to guard the gear, work the radio, whatever.
At this point things become less definite in terms of what exactly might happen but I think you have potential for things to get interesting.
Whoever is staying at the cabin hears crying noises from the midgets' cabin. The midgets have used control thoughts on a single elderly retired man and are forcing him to act like their valet and they beat him violently for entertainment. If the PC isn't noticed and flips out and kills all the midgets I guess that's the end of that. If the PC is noticed the midgets will quickly cast Control Thoughts on that PC and enslave him/her as well. The first thing the midgets will do is use Mind Probe to find out if the PC has anyone who will come looking for him/her and if they get enough successes with Mind Probe they will probably realize that they're in a lot of danger if they keep the PC in the cabin so they'll probably force the PC in question to go and hide out in the woods all evening.
During the daytime the midgets will have the PC go into the cabin, clean the bathroom, do the laundry, and so on. In order to make it unlikely that the PC will break the spell the midgets will administer regular beatings to the PC and generally maintan a M to S level of stun.
Depending on how powerful the GM wants to make the midgets the midgets could be even more evil and sadistic and begin generating Potency for their depraved acts. Perhaps they force the PC to put on grease paint and act like a mime for entertainment. If they do things like that enough it's definitely worth bumping their Potency up by one.
Anyway, for better or for worse, I'm sure this kind of scenario will really shake up how the players view Control Thoughts.