As stated in step two, everyone has mental health, but everyone also is at different stages of insanity/sanity. Regardless of how insane your character is, they must maintain their level of mental health to not die from a mental break. Having a mental breakdown results in your character’s mental health reaching zero. This makes your character no longer playable.
When you determined your sub-species, you also determined what your mental health is. This step goes into more detail about how it relates to your character and its importance. Knowing your Insanity rating is essential to protecting your mental health in difficult situations. To do this, we make an insanity check.
Insanity Check
To tell if your character’s mental health is weakening and they are going more insane (if they aren’t completely already) an insanity check is performed. But first, we must determine what the check is opposing or what your Insanity difficulty rating is.
Each character has their insanity difficulty rating (Insanity DR) based on their stats. Refer to the Insanity Difficulty Rating Calculator in the Mentality chapter.
When making an insanity check, you are rolling a psyche check versus your Insanity DR. Equaling or beating the difficulty rating means your sanity is safe and you do not take any mental health damage. However, failing the check results in your insanity stage increasing by one and taking mental health damage based on your insanity stage.
Psyche Check vs. Insanity DR
Insanity Stage
The ten stages of insanity reflect your character’s mental state. The higher the stage, the more insane they are. Regardless of what stage your character is, they cannot die from being insane. However, the insanity stage determines how much mental health damage they take from insanity checks. The higher the insanity stage, the more damage they can take.
During character creation, you pick what stage your character’s insanity starts at. Just remember, while your character cannot die from a higher stage (ten being the max) they take more mental health damage on failed insanity checks. However, before you can pick what insanity stage, your character is starting at, you need to create a psychological profile based on your psychological category.
Psychological Categories
Everyone is born with different mental quarks which are broken down into psychological categories to help determine which ones your character takes on.
When creating your character, you will select one of the twelve psychological categories to represent your mentality. The recommended way to determine which category your character falls under is to roll 1d12 and compare your roll to the list below. However, if you know of a specific type of character you are trying to make pick the category that best fits them. For details on each category, refer to the mentality chapter. You can find more information about each category in the mentality chapter.
Psychological Profile
Once you have determined which category your character falls under, you need to create a psychological profile. Your character’s profile determines what kinds of quirks they have and will gain based on what stage of insanity they are at. The higher the insanity stage, the more quirks they gain besides having two of their statistics altered. Each category has an example profile that you can use if you do not want to make your custom profile. See the mentality chapter for more information.
Step Summary
Refer to Chapter 6: Mentality- Pick a psychological category to base your profile on.
- Create your Profile. Players can combine quirks from multiple categories or create their own.
- Insanity stages 1-3 are what your character considers being sane thoughts. You only need one quirk for these stages, but it’s recommended to fill all three.
- Insanity stages 4-10 are what your character considers being insane. The higher the stage, the more insane they become. Each of these stages needs one quirk.
- Insanity stage affects statistics at stage six (Agility, Mental, Might, Persona, or Vitality). Once you reach (or start at) stage six, one of the chosen statistics increases by one and the other decreases by one. The player must choose two statistics at character creation which they can't alter afterwards.
- Pick which insanity stage your character will start at.
- Determine your mental health damage based on your character’s current stage. Higher stages are easier to pass insanity checks, but failing checks result in higher damage.
- Determine your Insanity DR based on your level and the current stage your character is at. Refer to the table in the mentality chapter.
Character Sheet Reference
