Unknown Armies:Madness

You’re going to face a lot of threats out there, and not all of them are physical. You’re going to be exposed to stresses that are beyond the normal, experiences that challenge your mind’s ability to fit them into your view of how the world works.

These stresses are measured on the Madness Meters. These are five gauges that measure how resilient or susceptible you are to different mental threats. First, let’s explain how challenges to your sanity are handled.

Stress Checks

There are five categories of mental stress: Violence, the Unnatural, Helplessness, Isolation, and Self. It’s quite possible to be very casual about, say, Violence, while being a basket case when it comes to The Unnatural.

Each stress has two types of notches you can mark off. Hardened notches represent stress checks you’ve beaten, and they are numbered 1–10. Failed notches represent stress checks you’ve blown, and they are numbered 1–5.

Different stresses have different power levels, ranging from 1–10. These are called ranks. The higher the rank, the more extreme the stress and the more you’re likely to suffer if you fail the check.

If you already have a hardened notch at the same rank as the stress, and in the same meter, you don’t have to roll. You automatically beat the check because you’ve faced this down before and prevailed. Failed notches don’t effect stress checks.

If you don’t have a hardened notch at the rank of the stress check, make a Mind roll. If you succeed, mark off the lowest unmarked "hardened" notch on the appropriate madness meter. If you fail, you mark off the lowest unmarked "failed" notch instead and choose one of three reactions: panic, paralysis, or frenzy; these are discussed more under "Getting Crazy". A failure may have other long-term effects as well.

It’s common to have both hardened and failed notches in the same meter. Someone who’s deep in both directions on Isolation probably has a highly ambivalent attitude towards being alone, which is perfectly in character for people who have been repeatedly exposed to that mental stress. Someone with the same situation for Violence feels little or nothing when exposed to most forms of bloodshed, but when something is so shocking that it gets through the hardened barrier, the result is devastating.

Getting Callous

Cops, coroners, and social workers know about getting callous. When you’ve seen enough horror, it loses its power to horrify you. The more hardened notches you have on a single meter, the more it takes for that kind of stress to rip up your head. Once you resist ten incidents on a meter—that is, all ten hardened notches on that gauge are filled in—you’re so jaded and blasé about it that nothing in that category of stress can endanger your mind.

This is not a good thing.

Mental stress makes us vulnerable. But it also makes us human. If you fill in too many hardened marks, you become so completely callous that you are unable to feel fear at all. That’s because you are now cut off from a broad range of emotional experiences that everyone else shares. You’re “hardened” all right: hardened into an emotional fortresses, completely isolated, unable to make a fundamental connection with other human beings.

You’re a sociopath.

You become a sociopath when you have all ten hard marks in two or more gauges, or when your total sum of hardened marks exceeds thirty-five.

If you’ve descended into this state, you can no longer use your passions—the Noble, Rage, and Fear events that represent you at your most intense. You just can’t relate to them anymore, and you don’t get to flip-flop those passion-related rolls.

If you’re an avatar who becomes a sociopath, you cannot use your Avatar skill until you get treatment. Avatars rely on an empathic connection to the global unconsciousness, and sociopaths slam that particular door shut.