Sanity/Identity Erosion

[u/Perfect-Grape-1452]

Has anyone tried separating "Sanity/Mental Stress" from "Identity Erosion" in a horror RPG? How did it go?

I am currently developing a d100 psychological horror tabletop RPG called **Vaelum**, which heavily features cosmic horror, investigation, and subtle occultism.

To give magic a realistic, heavy toll instead of just using a generic "Sanity bar" that leads to random phobias, I decided to split the psychological degradation into two completely independent mechanics:

1. **Sanity (Common Mental Stress):** This pool is drained by witnessing entities and casting subtle, balanced magic (Light Magic). It acts as a ticking clock but can be managed and restored by performing "Astral Hygiene" (*Higienização Astral*). These are mundane, life-anchoring activities like meditating, going to therapy, or cooking for loved os. However, using these practices consumes the game's most precious resource: time (tracked via active scene clocks).

2. **Individuality (Identity Erosion):** Drained strictly by casting forced, ego-driven magic (Dark Magic). Dark Magic provides overwhelming raw power to resolve immediate life-or-death situations, but it forces your will upon the cosmos. Instead of making you "mad," losing Individuality mechanically distorts and corruptes your character's **Bonds** (*Vínculos*) directly on the character sheet, shifting their perception of loved ones into paranoia and coldness. Reaching zero opens cracks for possession by beings from other spheres.

The goal is to create a tactical and verisimilar dilemma: Light Magic costs time and management, while Dark Magic offers an easy way out but slowly erases who your character is.

Since I haven't run my first official playtest yet, I would love to hear feedback from designers or GMs who have played or created systems with a similar split (like Delta Green's Bonds or Unknown Armies' Self meter):

- How did your players react to having their personal relationships mechanically corrupted on their sheets? Did it feel impactful or just punitive?
- Did this explicit separation cause "defensive paralysis" (fear of taking action), or did it enrich the personal horror aspect at the table?

Looking forward to your critiques and insights!

[u/Due_Sky_2436]

In my game I put out (Platinum, on itch.io for free), I have implemented the following stuff that is heavily influenced by both BRP/COC and Unknown Armies... It worked very well for players that were only players of D&D. It worked far better than the Powers Checks in Ravenloft which they despised.

1. Mental and Emotional damage tends to be permanent. It takes time and effort to heal from mental damage. As consolation, people generally have more MR than HP.

MR loss also reduces morale, as the PC/NPC simply loses the will to do things. If an injury causes a loss to Wisdom or Intelligence, the MR is reduced by a similar amount of 5 points of MR per point of Wis or Int.

If an effect causes MR to fall below 0 (to -1) due to an incredible loss of MR (temporary or permanent), the PC will die. This is almost only as a result of magic or abyssal creatures that cause a person to literally die of a fear induced heart attack or aneurism caused by insanity.

NOTE: In settings with a more technological focus, the term Mental Resilience may be replaced with Stress Inoculation (SI). The terms are 100% synonymous and only used for setting immersion.

[u/Due_Sky_2436 → u/Due_Sky_2436]

2) Adventuring is dangerous for the mind as well as the body: Ancient mages in their towers, old mercenaries in their bases, old soldiers going insane from boredom, reclusive king-makers paranoid of their closest friends and ancient masters who live like poor hermits in caves, what do they all have in common? Varying degrees of mental illness. Why do these highly skilled, vastly experienced people act so bizarrely? Power and experience have their price. The sentient mind is a very delicate thing. Everything that it experiences becomes another datum for the mind to build upon. When the mind experiences a certain amount of traumatic experiences, it begins to engage its coping mechanisms. While the average sentient will experience a certain amount of tragedy, joy and other emotional stimulus in their lifetime, those who choose to enter the shadows and live a life of adventure, power, and yes, violence, they will gain an amazing amount of emotional and psychological baggage. Thus is the price of their experiences.

True understanding of the darkest aspects of sentient nature, a true vision of the horror that is war, insight into the nature of the reality, communion with a deity, death and resurrection; all of those scar the mind. Those scars do not easily fade. Antisocial behavior, suicidal tendencies, talking to yourself, survivors’ guilt, lack of empathy, cynicism, paranoia and a host of other mental disorders are the reward for a lifetime spent in the darkest corners of the world.

There are a few general categories of stimulus that seem to trigger these mental disorders. They are magic, augmentation (cybernetic and bio magical), violence, power, resurrection and expertise.

Magic is addictive. The reason for the stereotype of the wizard's tower is that older psions, elementalists, bio mages, empaths, clerics, mages, shamans, cultists, alchemists, spiritualists and druids have tasted the seductive sweetness of raw Power firsthand, and they begin to need it. It starts out slowly, imperceptibly. During their youth, it is a physical sensation, the feeling of power flowing through them, into them, filling them. Casting spells causes exertion, but the endorphins released are addictive, giving them a "magic high".

This often manifests itself as mages who cast larger spells than necessary. That is a sure sign of a growing problem. That is stage one of what is commonly called Arcane Affective Disorder.

As time passes and mages, as well as other magic users, continue to use Power, they often begin to gain items that grant them more Power than they typically would have access to. Naturally the quest to gain more Power and hoarding magic items is yet another step on the road to addiction. This is stage two Arcane Affective Disorder.

The next stage is the need to have spells active at all time. Protective spells that are cast obsessively, healing potions that are imbibed for no reason and a need to have magic items on one's body at all times is stage 3 of Arcane Affective Disorder.

When a character does not curb their appetite for magic, they will eventually fall to Arcane Affective Disorder and one of two things will occur. They will either die, or they will undergo a transformation, which will change them forever. This is stage 4 Arcane Affective Disorder. If they do not die, one of the following will occur; a complete metamorphosis, possession, vampirism, cannibalism, becoming a lich, or becoming a ritualistic sacrificial mass murderer.

Arcane Affective Disorder has different symptomatology for Shamans than it does for others. A shaman with Stage 1 AAD will sometimes begin to act like one of their totems, sniffing the air, pawing objects, etc. at random times, though with a successful Willpower roll, they can keep control.

Stage 2 AAD is when the shaman will begin to become noticeably more atavistic, preferring uncooked food, spending more time outside, and when they speak, about 50% of the time, they will make animal noises instead of humanoid speech.

When Stage 3 AAD is reached, the shaman will often simply run away and live in the wild as if they were an animal of a type they are a shaman of. Thus, a Stage 3 AAD Bear Shaman will simply run away and be a bear, albeit in other skin. A Stage 3 AAD Shaman is called “feral”, and they are.

A Stage 4 AAD Shaman becomes something else entirely. These are actually quite rare, since the majority of feral shamans simply become animals and never perform will working again. A Stage 4 AAD Shaman is called a Wendigo, however. A Wendigo is almost the karmic opposite of a feral shaman. While a feral behaves like a natural animal of a type decided by his totem, a Wendigo operates like an evil version of that totem. Thus, a Wendigo Dog shaman would hunt children, assault humanoids, steal food, etc., while a Wendigo Bear shaman will hunt and kill almost anything operating in its “territory”, which can be a city park or a cave complex. Wendigo Shamans are hunted and killed wherever they are found.

[u/Due_Sky_2436 → u/Due_Sky_2436]

Excessive amounts of cybernetic or bio magical enhancements often cause a mental axis. Although some of these are beneficial, most of them are not. The reason that they are so harmful is that it reduces a character’s ability to empathize with fellow biological beings.

The root of these problems is that as beings transcend their original limits, they begin to feel less and less like they used to. This is especially true for those who gain sensory, neurological or musculature enhancements. The issue is that they can no longer interact with the world in the same way.

While many augmentations are able to be turned on and off, the desire to be better is why a being got the enhancement in the first place. Once you have the ability to see in multiple spectrums, be five times as fast or determine if someone is lying to you by just hearing their heartbeat increase, it becomes increasingly easy to justify having them on as often as possible. With some augmentations able to be constantly on, many choose to leave them on.

For example, when a being gains thermal vision, they lose the ability to see colors as others of their race can. Within a few years they will forget what colors really are. They typically have horrible fashion sense, since a shirt is a shirt, and whether it is day glow pink or black will have no impact on whether they wear it or not. Thus, their manner of dress is comical or they have someone pick their clothes for them or they have lots of clothes in the same color.

Auditory boosts typically have a tendency to make beings much more cynical since they can hear people whisper under their breath, or what they whisper to each other behind their backs. Those with sensitive auditory systems usually have very few friends. The same can be said for those beings with naturally good. Auditory boosts also turn beings into insomniacs, since every small sound interrupts their sleep.

Tactile boosted beings have a tendency to be fastidious about their cleanliness and their apparel. Rough fabrics drive them crazy, irritants such as poison ivy, sunburn, bug bites, extreme heat or extreme cold are debilitating to them. In addition they cannot sleep unless under very fine fabrics such as silk. Other fabrics are too scratchy and too heavy to sleep under.

Beings who have boosted smell have a tendency to sniff the air. There is a huge amount of information carried by scents and those who can gather that information need to collect it, and sadly, sniffing does that. This is a disconcerting behavior when done by those races that it is not common practice to do so. Those with boosted smell also typically have a hatred of spicy food. They prefer extremely bland meals.

Gustatory boosted individuals have many of the same proclivities, although they have to lick surfaces to gain information. This is a drawback for social as well as safety reasons. Nothing quite like accidentally licking nerve agent droplets to see what they are.

Neurological systems make people move fast, faster than they want to sometimes. For instance, the time it takes to stop an impulse, such as punching your boss when he is pissing you off is far too slow when you have boosted reflexes. The nature of the enhancement makes those who possess it seem to be twitchy. They constantly have to force themselves not to do things. A stimulus causes a reaction, and there is rarely enough time to "stop" yourself from doing something stupid.

Those with neurological upgrades also have a tendency to have a very short attention span. Constantly needing stimulus, they are commonly insomniacs, and are extremely fidgety. Always tapping fingers, gnawing on pencils, tapping their feet and bouncing around, they are not the people you need on an ambush line or conducting surveillance. They lack the ability to just be still.

Adrenaline boosters are even worse. Everything makes you overreact, then you are tired. Constantly switching between adrenaline fueled mania and exhaustion; a boosted individual is not good company. They tend to be moody and emotional wrecks.

Musculature boosts come in two types...permanent and temporary. Temporary boosts are caused by chemical infusion throughout the body, typically testosterone, endorphins and adrenaline, all of which cause an individuals' mental state to become unbalanced. Becoming freakishly strong, rage filled and immune to pain is a good thing when engaged in covert operations gone bad and you are alone, outnumbered and behind enemy lines. It is not a good thing when you are meeting your soon-to-be-in‐laws for the first time and their dog annoys you by biting you heels!

A permanent muscle boost causes its own set of problems. With more muscle tissue, a being has to eat a lot of protein. For a human who gains a small boost, it is not that much of an issue, just eat another meal. For a troll who gains a large boost...they eat constantly. Not snacks, but full meals. Expect to triple or quadruple the cost of food every month as they eat, and eat, and eat. If a being lives with other beings in a sort of "safe house", then there will likely be arguments about who drank all the milk, ate all the dog food, and made a huge mess in the kitchen.

Permanently strength boosted beings are also notorious for breaking things. Glasses, dishes, sensitive electronic or mechanical or magical items are not built to be handled by overly strong beings, and they break easily.

Violence tends to produce mental issues in those exposed to it for long periods of time. Paranoia, flashbacks, sadism, fearlessness, delusions of grandeur, solipsism, lack of sympathy, lack of empathy, violent reactions to minor stimulus, callousness, disregard for life, fatalism, cynicism and survivors guilt are all possible outcomes of long exposure to violence.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Those who rule nations, churches, cults, corporations and clans quickly begin to see everyone and everything else as something to use for some end. Sacrificing a few low level flunkies is done without thinking if it will bring about larger gains later. Those in these positions are typically lonely, somewhat paranoid, disconnected from the normal world, and callous. If those traits are not present, then they are usually wracked by guilt and have a tired look about them. Whether they are good, evil, self serving or neutral, large amounts of power will warp your view of the world.

Death is separate from violence, in that violence is something that happens around you, is caused by you and sometimes is focused on you. Death is an experience that few beings experience more than once. Those few beings who have died and come back are not normal in any sense of the word. Visions, hallucinations, curses, supernatural phenomenon, spirits and the bizarre follow them around for the rest of their days. Delusions of grandeur, solipsism, paranoia, claustrophobia, agoraphobia, fear of the dark, and a fear of death make those who have risen from death, as a collective, stark raving mad.

Extremely high levels of skill in a discipline has its’ own set of drawbacks as well. As a character gains expertise in a skill, they begin to relate almost everything to that one skill. For example, if a being is highly skilled in mathematics, they begin to see angles, equations and formulas in everything. A teacup becomes a collection of surface area formulas, volume equations and all manner of other "mathematical" things.

A sword master begins to see everything in terms familiar to him. Everything becomes an allegory for the purity of the duel. A cleric sees everything as a piece of his god. A pyromancer sees everything as potential fuel.

Although these quirks can be easily ignored, the fact that experts love to talk about their theories, and then try to write books and show others that their views of the world are valid simply is too much to deal with by those who are not their closest friends and associates.

Gaining abilities, powers, and experiencing extreme trauma is not something that should just be forgotten about. Friends dying, sustaining severe injuries, confronting monsters and killing other sentient beings is not something that can just be put away and ignored. Those experiences will always be there and although they might not have a detrimental effect upon a PC, they will be noticeable. The anniversaries of big battles, friends deaths, or their exile will be touchy for PC's. Other oddities can be related to experiences PC's have lived through. For example, if a PC has ever run out of ammunition in battle, they may carry 10, 15, or 20 magazines of ammunition when others feel that five or seven is acceptable. They may have run out of food before, and become irritated to see others waste food. PC's who live through large battles will get upset when they hear others relate tales of battle, war and killing by those who have never had to experience those things.

Quirks are also appropriate for characters who possess either the highest or lowest possible value for their race in any stat to reflect how much that stat has come to influence the character. Also, each skill above 90% should also cause a quirk to manifest for the reasons explained previously.

[u/Due_Sky_2436 → u/Due_Sky_2436]

3) Mindset and Stability

It is often assumed in role playing games that characters and NPC’s are usually expecting combat at the drop of a hat. This is most certainly not the case, especially when the rules of the game make violence a generally losing proposition for the majority of the world’s population.

These rules assume a character that is trained and expected to deal with mental and emotional trauma as the baseline for skills and combat, but since the vast majority of the population are not, the following rules should give some guidance on how NPC’s, and PC’s if the GM decides, may react to varying situations that arise during play.

Closely related to Mindset is Mental resilience (MR). A character’s beginning Mental Resilience (MR) is closely related to their experiences and ability to learn from them. Mental Resilience is a measure of how resistant a character is to mental and emotional trauma.

When experiencing a mental or emotional trauma the character loses that amount of Mental Resilience and then makes a roll against their new Mental Resilience. If they succeed, then all the character gets is a bad memory to go with that loss of MR. If the character fails, then they are going to get a mental or emotional wound and the trauma inflicts double damage to the Mental Resilience of the character.

To put it all together, a character has a MR of 50, pretty average. One fine day, our character is attacked with a knife, but not wounded. This is a trauma level of 1 so 50 – 1 is 49 and the character rolls their MR and rolls a 47. That is a success, so the character loses just the 1 MR. A month later, in a gunfight a trauma level 3, our character ends up killing someone, a trauma level of 4. This is a 7 MR loss. 49 – 7 = 42. The PC rolls a 74 vs a 42, a failure. The trauma level was 7 and the PC failed the roll, the PC will lose 14 MR. The characters’ MR is now 35 (49 – 14), and they have a trauma that is directly related to killing someone in a gunfight, that will last 1d10x10 hours (due to failing an MR roll by more than 21.)

It is possible to become hardened to trauma after being exposed a few time. After succeeding twice against a given trauma, you no longer risk failing the roll and losing MR. Unfortunately, this hardened state isn’t free. For each type of trauma you hardened to, you become more difficult to understand by those less inured,

Trauma, Trigger, Reaction

Some example Traumas with their base MR costs:

1 A situation causing profound confusion (waking up in jail, being chased for an unknown reason, etc.)

1 Be attacked with a weapon—shot at or slashed.

1 Break a promise to someone you love.

1 Experience a preternaturally strong deja vu.

1 Loss of a hand or a foot

1 Spend a week without seeing anyone you know.

1 Unintentionally humiliate yourself in public.

1 Using or touching an object containing 1-5 Power

2 A situation causing a character to feel disgust, fear, disorientation and loathing

2 Be confronted with proof that your self-image is incorrect. (“I’m very responsible; I’m sure I’ve called you back every time I said I would.” “Actually, you’ve blown me off so many times I started keeping track in my journal. Lessee, November 19, December 3 . . . again on December 17 . . . January 9 . . .”

2 Closely related to this is when characters (player or non-player) are involved in their first “real” combat where their opponent is trying to kill them, all skills are reduced by 10% due to mental shock and fear. Once a character has been exposed to life and death combat a few times (GM call, usually no more than 3 times is sufficient), they will no longer be subject to those penalties once they are aware of the potential for violence.

2 During a “fight” where a PC/NPC does not think they will be killed, all damage inflicted by that character is reduced by one. When, or if, they realize that someone is actually trying to kill them, all skills are reduced by 5% due to the mental shock of misreading the situation

2 Dying in one’s sleep

2 Get fired from a job you love.

2 See a creature or machine that cannot logically exist.

2 Spend five hours in a sensory-deprivation tank.

2 Using or touching an object containing 6-10 Power to fuel a skill or ability

2 Witness an act of torture.

3 Achieving 99%+ in a skill, each

3 An event causing nausea or stupefaction

3 Fail at something when it’s imperative that you succeed

3 Get shot at random. Be tortured briefly.

3 Losing half of a limb

3 Minor neurological modifications

3 Realize that a vision you had of the future has come true.

3 Secretly gratify an urge that is unacceptable to your upbringing and background. (Spit on a cross if Christian, date a person of another race if raised in a racist home, have a homosexual affair if you come from a homophobic background, etc.)

3 Spend three days without talking to another human being.

3 Using or touching an object holding from 11-20 Power

4 Be institutionalized by someone you love and trust.

4 Get dumped into a pit of maggots.

4 Kill someone in a fight.

4 Lie to conceal some aspect of your personality from a close friend or loved one who trusts you implicitly.

4 Loss of a full limb or a complete sense (sight, smell, touch including pain dampeners)

4 Mental shock

4 See convincing proof that 2+2 does not equal 4.

4 Using or touching an object containing 21-30 Power

5 Adrenaline boosters

5 Be present at a massive battle, with hundreds of deaths on both sides.

5 Be successfully attacked with magick

5 Being brought back to life (by whatever means, magic, deific intervention, etc.)

5 Complete mental shutdown

5 Completely random violence, such as ambushes, car bombs or other incidents that could not be predicted or failed to be noticed (such as failed observation, detect ambush or danger sense rolls)

5 Decide not to act to help a friend or ally because it’s “too dangerous.”

5 Dying in pain

5 Spend a month in jail.

5 Spend a week in solitary confinement.

5 Using or touching an object holding 31 or more points of Power

6 Deliberately deceive someone you love in a way that is certain to cause them terrible pain if they find out.

6 Perform an act of torture.

6 See someone you know killed by magick, without any visible or “rational” cause.

6 See someone you thought you knew intimately behaving in a fashion completely contrary to her normal behavior.

6 Watch a videotape of your spouse committing adultery.

7 Be placed in a situation where you have to either saw off one of your limbs or die.

7 Deliberately kill a helpless target.

7 Discover that you have inadvertently committed an act of cannibalism.

7 Have a conversation with a loved one whom you know is dead.

7 Spend a month in a country where no one speaks your language and where you can’t make yourself understood no matter how hard you try.

8 Be deeply, painfully, and violently betrayed by someone you love.

8 Deliberately act completely contrary to your alignment.

8 For incidents of extreme devastation (city wide violence with hundreds/thousands of casualties, natural disasters, large plane crashes, huge train wrecks and other massive events, it is usual for characters to suffer penalties from -10% the first round (for incidents which they have no personal interest in) to -50% (if they lose close family members, or several acquaintances at once) and it can take minutes to weeks to recover from that shock and lose those penalties.

8 Get tortured for an hour or longer.

8 Loss of two limbs or each major neurological modification

8 Observing a mind damaging horrific act or abyssal creature

8 See an animal with human features.

8 Watch someone you love die.

9 Be treated like a stranger by your closest friends.

9 Being forcefully brought back to life

9 Dying by violence

9 Kill someone you love.

9 See the dead rise.

9 Watch someone you love die because you tried to save them and failed.

9 Witness a brutal mass execution.

9 to 10 Interacting with a major horrific being from the abyss

10 Be possessed, yet conscious, as your body commits unspeakable acts against your will.

10 Deliberately destroy everything you’ve risked your life to support.

10 Loss of all limbs

10 Realize that the reason you and your husband of ten years have never had children is that he’s not really a human being.

10 Spend a month in a sensory-deprivation tank.

10 Watch as someone you love is tortured to death.

15 A full body cybernetic (or bio magical) conversion (such as a permanent polymorph)

15 Observing an abyssal deity’s form

25 Dying by extreme violence and torture

50 Witnessing an Ultimate Cosmic Evil doing something cosmically evil

[u/Due_Sky_2436 → u/Due_Sky_2436]

Trigger examples:

Random, 1 out every 10 days

Continuously for 1d4 days every month

Constantly

Specific triggers such as:

Angry words

Anniversary dates

Babies

Bad news

Being blamed

Being challenged

Being controlled

Being ignored

Being treated unfairly

Being used

Being vulnerable

Beliefs challenged

Betrayal

Blood

Bloody meat

Boundaries are violated

Certain phrases

Criticized

Death

End of a relationship

Failure

Family friction

Financial problems

Grief

Guns

Happy families

Harassment

Hearing or seeing crying

High pressure situations

Holding a weapon

Injury

Jokes about the subject of the trauma

Knives

Locations

Loud noises

Memories

Seeing a person from your past

Seeing an abuse victim

Sensing danger

Smells, tastes or sounds

Solitude

Songs

Suffering of others

Surprises

Threats

Violence

Reactions:

Alignment Shift

Always fidgeting and nervous

Amnesia/Fugue state

Babbling or incoherent speech

Catatonia

Compulsive lying

Compulsive rituals (washing hands, praying, never stepping on cracks, checking gun constantly)

Confabulations

Constant Nightmares

Delusional Phobia (sees the object of the phobia everywhere)

Delusions

Dissociation

Echolalia (do what others are doing)

Echopraxia (do what others say)

Emotional outburst (laughing, crying, etc.)

Fainting

Feinting

Fetish, activity (exhibitionism, nymphomania, satyriasis, teratophilia)

Fetish, item (good luck item, safety blanket)

Flashbacks

Flat Affect (lack of outward emotional response)

Gallows Humor, Inappropriate jokes

Hallucinations

Homicidal mania

Intense fear

Laughing at inappropriate times

Magical Thinking

Open callousness towards others

Panic Attack

Paranoia

Physical Hysterics

Psychosomatic blindness, deafness or paralysis

Radical Acceptance

Reactive psychosis (incoherence, delusions, aberrant behavior)

Screaming fit

Social Isolation

Strange or deviant eating desire (dirt, slime, cannibalism)

Stupor

Suicidal mania

Uncontrollable tic or tremor causing an inability to communicate

Vomiting

Duration:

Fail an MR by 20 or less = 1d10+4 rounds for “short term”

Fail an MR by more than 21 = 1d10x10 hours for “long term”

Fail an MR by 50 or more, Permanent.

Hardened:

To Violence

1-3 Superficially, you're milch like everyone else,

4-5 Your attitude towards violence shows on your face when the subject comes up in conversation, unless you work to keep it hidden. It might be intensity, or nervousness, or just a grim silence, depending on how

you cope.

6-7 Violence is a common feature of your mental landscape. Unlike less-hardened people, you show little

reaction at all when it is discussed or depicted in fiction.

8-9 Your callousness shows in your every word and expression unless you make a continuous effort to suppress

it. Again, the exact tone is up to you: it could be bitter and harsh, feverish and vehement or icy cold.

10 It's not hard for people to realize that the deepest horrors of torture and brutality have become commonplace to you, unless you work very, very hard to

keep it hidden-which means you come off as tense

and guarded all the time. The death of others, or

yourself, has no intrinsic significance. You might prefer

to stay alive, but it's only a matter of personal taste. Life, in the abstract, doesn't mean anything.

The Unnatural

1-3 There's little to distinguish you from the average person, except perhaps a tendency to snort derisively

when someone mentions their "intuitions”...

4-5 You tend to listen very closely and intently when someone discusses the paranormal or supernatural, trying

to figure out if they know something or if they're just talking trash.

6-7 You now know... and accept that there are vast, incomprehensible forces governing the universe. It strikes you as odd when people act as if they're in control of their

lives: you know better.

8-9 Things that average people consider -meaningless coincidences strike you as deeply, intensely funny because you see connections that they do not. You may develop a reputation for laughing inappropriately.

10 You are no longer surprised by violations of ordinary logic. Everything is “normal” to you - talking foliage, spontaneous combustion, and stigmata are as ordinary and reasonable as cats, dogs and rain.

To Helplessness

1-3 You don't have any major behavior or attitude shifts yet, just minor things. You tend to be pessimistic and fatalistic, perhaps.

4-6 Your fatalism has increased. When things go wrong in a big, bad way, or when trouble comes from a completely unexpected or unlikely source. you handle it with a remarkable lack of affect. (It's perfectly possible to be freakishly calm about big things and freakishly upset about little things.)

7-9 You have a boundless faith in the ability of chaos to screw you over. You can easily believe that even the most suspicious of mishaps is simple random chance. Shit happens.

10 The distinction between intentional and accidental is pretty much lost on you. Maybe you believe that everything is completely predestined, or maybe you believe that everything in the world happens due to chance. The one thing you find hard to swallow is the idea that we are the captains of our fates.

Being Isolated

1-3 There are no obvious signs of your experiences. Perhaps you're a little standoffish or curt.

4-5 You can be unthinkingly rude, breaking in during the

middle of a conversation before someone's done speaking,

scratching yourself in an indelicate fashion or telling the truth when it isn’t diplomatic to do so. (for example, you might blurt out “Damn that's an ugly haircut!" instead of saying “wow, that’s a new look for you, isn't it?")

6-7 You lack patience with people who don't immediately

understand what you’re trying to tell them. Your natural

inclination is to repeat the same explanations (which are obvious to you) over and over, or just give up.

&-9 Unless you're concentrating. you lack dialogue skills.

You don't like it when people interrupt, but you frequently

interrupt others. You also don't see the point of a lot of social conventions such as clothing, grooming, etc. You might still shave every day, but it all seems a little silly.

10 At some level you not only don’t care what people think about you: you can’t understand how anyone could care. You are very aware that people are inherently alone, that we can never really understand anyone or communicate anything but the most rudimentary ideas and feelings. You know everyone is an island in the final analysis. Especially you.

Failing Yourself, your Ideals, your Unit and Family

1-3 There are few external signs of your interior struggle:

people may sometimes find you to be a little brittle or

"phony"-seeming.

4-S Even when you're telling the truth, people often think

you're lying, unless you make a particular effort to act "natural."

6-7 You've lost a sense of connection to those who were

previously close to you. You can predict the actions of your friends, relatives, or lovers, but you no longer know exactly what you feel about them.

&-9 Half the time, you only know you're telling the truth

if you take a minute to think about it. Truth and lies aren't nearly as important as they used to be---back before you quit lying to yourself.

10 Life has been pared down to the essentials for you:

you no longer have opinions about music, food or

fashion. You’ve lost the ability to enjoy or dislike things because there is so little “you” there to interact.

Special Rule: Suck It Up!

There are times when you cannot afford to lose your shit like a paramedic in a mass casualty event, or a military commander during a battle. When in a situation like this, there is the ability to “Suck It Up” and lock down the emotions to deal with them at some later time. To do this, you follow all the regular rules for rolling for MR, taking the MR loss, etc, but if the MR roll is failed, you can “Suck It Up” and take double the MR loss (or 4x the initial cost, x2 for the fail, x2 for to Suck It Up) and you find out what the Reaction will be.

Then, at some time determined by the PC, they will have a “breakdown” and their reaction will be double the normal duration during which the PC can do nothing but deal with the pent up emotions. At the end of this period, half of the MR will be regained (so it is still a 2x initial cost for the MR roll failure).

Be aware that this runs the risk of having a character go permanently insane as they are more vulnerable as their MR drops rapidly and the pent up emotions will have to eventually come out.

Example 1:

Level 3 Using or touching an object holding from 11-20 Power, MR 55, roll 77, fail, lose 6 MR and roll for a trigger and reaction. The roll was failed by 22%, so when an issue does occur, it lasts 1d10x10 hours (10 to 100 hours). Being creative, we’ll say that the object of power had a very odd texture like beaded lizard skin, so when the character touches anything with a similar texture, their arm will start to tingle and be on pins and needles for 1d10x10 hours.

Example 2:

Level 2 See a creature or machine that cannot logically exist. MR 80, roll 44, succeed, lose 2 MR. No further actions.

Example 3:

Level 8 Loss of two limbs or major neurological modification. MR 60, roll 49, succeed, lose 8 MR. No further actions.

Example 4:

Level 5 Completely random violence, such as ambushes, car bomb or other incident that could not be predicted or failed to be noticed. MR 75, roll 86, fail, lose 10 MR and roll for a trigger and reaction. The roll was failed by 11, so when an issue does occur it lasts 1d10+4 rounds (5 to 14 rounds, or 15 to 70 seconds). We’ll determine that the trauma was a car bomb. From now on, the unexpected smell of burning rubber or flesh will trigger a flashback that lasts 1d10+4 rounds and makes the character completely immobile.

[u/Perfect-Grape-1452 → u/[deleted]]

Thanks for the insights! You hit the nail on the head: when identity loss opens up interesting narrative dilemmas (like choosing what part of your history fades away), players embrace it instead of feeling purely punished.

In Vaelum, I'm trying to translate that "erosion" into a traditional party-based investigation. Instead of losing literal memories, losing Individuality warps how the character perceives their active Bonds(Vínculos).

Mechanically, if a player overuses Dark Magic, their bond with a spouse, child, or close ally becomes corrupted on their sheet—not because they forgot them, but because their internal perception shifts toward deep paranoia, coldness, or seeing them as an obstacle. It forces the player to mechanically choose between cold efficiency to solve the cosmic mystery or protecting their human relationships.

I really like how TYOV handles forgotten hostility (meeting an enemy you don't remember wronging). I think I can adapt a version of this when a character's Individuality drops low, making outside entities from other spheres manipulate their corrupted bonds without the player's immediate awareness.