Once one of your Failed Traumas has maxed out at 5, you don’t have to check your unkept dice when rolling that Trauma any more. You just flee, fight, or freeze as if you’d failed the roll. The only exception is when your Hardened Trauma is enough to void the effects anyway, in which case you suffer no effects at all. Otherwise, you have your short-term freak-out, increase no Traumas, and life goes on. Of course, it’s not really that simple. The first time you hit Failed 5 in a single Trauma, you pick up some kind of mental aberration. You and the GM should work out your insanity together. Note that a permanent madness should play off your personality and your Virtues and their complements. Also keep in mind that insane people can often get along quite well in the world, if with occasional struggles and difficulties. An automatic freak-out in a Trauma you’ve maxed out on doesn’t give you another aberration. One per Trauma is plenty.
Some permanent forms of madness include:
• Phobia. If something drove you mad, it’s quite likely you’ll develop a debilitating and irrational fear of it. If someone only talks about it or shows you a picture of it, you have to make a Will roll in order to avoid freezing or panicking. If you’re exposed to the thing itself, you automatically freak out regardless of what any dice roll.
• Trauma Bond. This is like a phobia, but instead of the actual stimulus, you get scared around something incidental to the trauma. If your father molested you in the mornings before going out to the fields to work, you might repress your memories of that event but dawn itself would set you off.
• Flashbacks. This is also known as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (or PTSD for short). If you’re exposed to any element that was present during the trauma, you’re in danger of reliving the event. In the example given above, dawn might sometimes be a perfectly okay time of day for you—but other times, it might make you relive the event. Or sometimes you might flash back from hearing footsteps on the threshold, or simply from waking up in a bed that reminds you of the bed where the assault took place. There are many examples of combat veterans who flash back at the sound of metal clanging, or when in a setting similar to that where combat occurred.
• Blackouts. You can slip into a semi-conscious state and simply wander away in an attempt to flee your past. When you come to, you have no recollection of your flight. These blackouts (or “fugue states”) can last for days and cover a lot of territory. You’re usually non-violent and seem pretty dazed—you’re just wandering away. Threatening stimuli usually snap you out of a fugue. So can the presence of friends or trusted individuals.
• Addictive Behaviors. You can smother your memories of the past with any one of the countless chemicals available in this magical and medieval world (even without magic, drugs are by no means the sole property of modernity). Alcohol is a perennial favorite—powerful and easily available. Marijuana, milk of the poppy, and other depressants might appeal to you because they deaden the pain and make everything seem okay. On the other hand, uppers like caffeine or coca leaf give you vital illusions of being in control.
• Philia/Obsession. You may develop an unhealthy affection for an individual, object, or action that you perceive (for whatever reason) to have “saved” you from the trauma. The target of your affection didn’t necessarily have to save you directly ~ you see some sort of salvation connection that isn’t necessarily rational. This philia could result in a desire to constantly be around that person/object/area, or it could result in a compulsive repetition of the saving action. If you said a specific prayer when you were “saved,” you might develop an obsession with that prayer, say it constantly, carry prayer beads at all times, etc.
• Delusions. You believe something that simply isn’t true because it covers up the pain. Delusions in response to trauma can range from flat denial to elaborate confabulations that rationalize or justify the experience.
The author of the game, who has been struggling to find the spoons to apply for disability on the basis of mental illness, wants to remind you (continuing to use and modify Greg Stolze’s words) that going mad is not a cliché- ridden Oscar-grabbing thrill ride of hammy acting. Don’t approach it as an opportunity to get wacky. Respect it for what it is: a fundamental and often unexpected shift in the mechanisms of your own mind. Going mad can leave you naked. It changes your choices, often limiting them until you adjust to simply not thinking the same as other people. It means your mind has been stressed so hard for so long that in the moment of panic, only illogic, symbolism, pure refusal, self-doubt, and/or primal animal reactions remain. Fight with tooth and nail. Flee headlong, abandoning everything and everybody. Or freeze, shut down, turtle up in hopes the threat somehow overlooks you. Once the moment passes, the more insidious side of insanity can emerge. A mental illness does not change or replace your essential character. Instead, it often brings that character to the fore in distorted and disproportionate ways. If you were always cautious, you become recklessly violent—but only if the caution was just a mask for a powerfully repressed impetuousness. If you genuinely were cautious, permanent madness is more likely to come to you as an irrational caution, a disproportionate caution, a caution that makes no logical sense—but which has a meaning to you that transcends logic. Insanity is the absence of your rational side. It is the twisting of options. It is when you cannot choose between reasonable paths because you can no longer judge them. Madness is what you see when you’ve got nothing left to fall back on.
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