The first thing I think of… is that some of character creation should be out of the players hands. If the idea is for them to come to terms with something then they need something not created by them to have to deal with, otherwise the challenge of… can you come to terms… seems too easy. I’ve got no easy answers to how to do that. I might be trying to figure out just such a thing myself. Heh. Either that or you could force them to take on something difficult through the game, or reward them based on the difficulty of how hard they make coming to terms for themselves.

You might find this interesting. They’re posts from a game that I was really interested in that never got made which is ironic as it was called Neverwake. It dealt in an area that’s similar and you might find good inspiration in these threads: (just don’t post in them as they are too old to post to)

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=18888

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=25824

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=18724

Feel free to hit me up if you feel like chatting about problems or vision by sending email through the strange paths of the internet to a scrunched up theory from the closet via that good old place gmail dot com. I’m pretty sure that was extremely bad grammar….