Going Slightly Mad

It started with Call of Cthulhu. The idea of tracking a character's level of sanity -- and giving players a chance to watch their characters' grips on reality falter and fail over the course of play -- was a particular kind of genius. The little extra mechanical weight it added to a largely story-driven element touched the players with a greater sense of risk. Hit points and wound levels and ultimately the loss of life was one thing; the ultimate loss of your mind, and your sense of self, and (let's be honest here) the thought that your PC might tomorrow become the NPC villain of the piece, was quite another. This idea has shown its face in homebrewed Fudge horror over time as well, most prominently as the suggestion of tracking sanity as a separate and parallel wound track.

This all works well enough, but since those early days of SAN points and progressively wounded minds, the idea has had a chance to get kicked around the field a few dozen times. One of the more interesting implementations in recent years comes to us out of the pages of Unknown Armies, from veteran Cthulhu player and author John Tynes and his pals. In the game, sanity is tracked in several parts, including descriptors like "Violence" and "Isolation". While I am not deeply steeped in the lore of Unknown Armies myself, I've had conversations with several of its enthusiasts about the wonderful insanities that have come of it.

Luckily for us -- perhaps unluckily for your players, depending on your perspective -- translating several of its concepts to a Fudge context comes quite easily. A few things need to be established as our conceptual grounding, first.

• Sanity is broken into discrete parts.
  By this, I mean descriptors like "Violence" and "Isolation", which represent the kinds of stresses that can be put on a character's mind -- and thus the places where the stress fractures of insanity can start to manifest. These are the "tracks" along which your characters will ride -- the dark sides of insanity that may draw them in like a black hole's gravity well, if they stray too close. If you're an Unknown Armies owner or fan, then using its types of insanity (Violence, Isolation, Unnatural, Helplessness, Self-Image) will probably be the most familiar and facile. The real goal here, though, is to choose the things that fit with the stories you're looking to tell. If you're tracking Violence, then you've got a strong line on storylines about desensitization to murder. If you're tracking Unnatural -- the realization that reality is not what it seems -- then you're in prime territory for a Clive Barker-esque tale of peeling back the layers of the real like an onion skin.

• Sanity is a continuum.
  For each descriptor you choose, there are its poles. Violence, clearly, has a pacifist on one end and a psychopathic killer on the other. Isolation may have the person who can't stand to be alone on the near end and the one who can't stand to be around anyone on the opposite (and in fact, at its most extreme, they may flee sensation entirely). Furthermore, stress is the motive force that takes characters will up and down this continuum throughout play. The stressor in question is categorized appropriate to the types you've chosen to use. Getting shot at would be a Violence stressor, while discovering that you were responsible for the death of innocents in what you thought was a just cause would strain your Self-Image.

• Sanity and insanity are double-edged.
  This is where some of the meat really comes in. The closer to one end of the continuum you are, the harder it is to take an action that's appropriate to the other end. Violence is the prime example here. The less violent you are, the harder it will be to commit an act of violence -- to fire the gun at the onrushing monster, never mind how necessary it is. The more violent you are, the harder it will be to avoid responding to problems with violence -- when the cashier shortchanges you, you might overreact and injure or kill him. Helplessness is another good example. Maybe you have to get smuggled into the lab inside a cramped box -- if you're "low" enough in Helplessness, you may not be able to bring yourself to climb in in the first place. If you're high enough, on the other hand, you may be paralyzed by even the simplest decisions, no longer able to control your own fate.

• Sanity and insanity compel character action.
  Though it's implicit in the prior point, this is worth underscoring explicitly. When you make the choice to use this kind of insanity in your game, you are asking your players to give up some amount of determinism with their characters. Failing a "check" in a stressful situation means that the player's choices are restricted -- no matter how much they may want to, if they fail their Violence check, they can't shoot that gun (or perhaps even attack). This will not be attractive to some players. As always, make sure that you communicate clearly that these sorts of rules will be in effect, and make sure you get a "read" on what your players think of it.

If you're an inveterate Fudge rules tinkerer, you've already got some ideas about how to put it all together by now. If your ideas work better for you than what I suggest here, by all means, proceed with your own implementation! That said, here's one way to approach the idea.

First off, we'll start with the idea that the standard Fudge attributes center around zero, like so:

Word	Value
Terrible	-3
Poor	-2
Mediocre	-1
Fair	0
Good	+1
Great	+2
Superb	+3

These numbers become particularly interesting when rolling 4dF independent from having anything to add to the roll. The number that results from the dice can be compared to the numeric value, to determine which end of the ladder the roll came closer to.

If we then place Insanity at one end of the ladder and Sanity at the other, then a roll that lands closer to the Insanity end indicates an insane response. Similarly, a roll that lands closer to the Sanity end indicates a sane response.

If we rate each kind of descriptor as one would an attribute, the rating one has in an attribute indicates the dividing line between sane and insane responses to stress of that type.

As a rule of thumb, the negative end of the ladder is where Insanity sits, and the positive end of the ladder is where sanity sits, because that means that a "negative roll" on the dice is insane -- which suits the connotations nicely:

Insanity	Terrible	Poor	Mediocre	Fair	Good	Great	Superb	Sanity

The counter-intuitive part of this, however, is that a lower-rated attribute means the character is less likely to have an insane response to a stressful situation. That said, keeping in mind that the attribute names describe the kind of insanity or instability the character is capable of (consider Unnatural: Poor, or Violent: Mediocre), even this can start to make sense.

Example. Rob has a Mediocre rating in Isolation, and has to spend the night alone in a creepy, old house. A few hours in, his stress level has gotten pretty high, and the GM calls for a stress check on Isolation. Rob rolls four Fudge dice. He gets two minuses and two blanks -- a -2, which is closer to the Insanity end of the ladder than his Mediocre rating. He panics and flees the house. If he rolled zero or higher on the dice, on the other hand, his roll would be closer to Sanity than his Mediocre rating, and he'd be able to keep it together.

If a player rolls a number on the dice exactly equal to his character's attribute, he can choose whether or not to have a sane response. If the player is looking to do a purposefully insane thing, the method inverts easily. Our "can I fire the gun or not" example is a good one, here; if the player can roll closer to Insanity than his Violent attribute, he's able to fire the gun.

Some situations will be more stressful than others, of course. The GM should feel free to assign a bonus to the die roll if the situation is only mildly stressful, or a penalty if it is extremely so. This should not be done casually, however; a bonus or penalty of one is significant -- a bonus or penalty of two is extreme.

When assigning starting values to a set of Insanity attributes, the GM should consider her priorities. If she's looking to have everyone start out a little "cracked", then having the PCs default to the standard attribute rating of Fair makes sense. If they should start a bit more stable, setting each attribute to Poor is better.

Giving players the chance to alter these starting settings can be done as usual, by providing a set of levels they must spend. There are two primary concerns to keep in mind:

• Does spending a level on an attribute make it more or less prone to insanity?

• Can players sell one down in order to buy another up, or can they only buy things in "one direction"?

Example. Lydia is looking to run a game and decides to use the five descriptors from Unknown Armies. She starts all the characters out at Poor, but gives them five levels which can only be spent to increase the attributes (thus increasing the potential for insanity with each level spent). At its mildest, a player will spread these levels out, giving himself a starting rating of Mediocre in all five. At its most extreme, a player will be Poor in four of the insanities, but Superb in the fifth -- a real "hard case".

If you're running a game like Lydia's, you can always choose to make Flaw levels the currency for increasing starting insanity levels. Regardless, in most cases your insanity attributes should be kept in a separate "box" from your regular attributes.

The final consideration to apply here is how insanity changes over time. This is another element of this approach that should be fine-tuned according to your own sensibilities. If insanity should only change occasionally, then this may be the rule you want:

• Changes only result from extreme responses.
  If a player rolls a natural -4 on a significant stress check, his character gains one level of Insanity. If a player rolls a natural +4 on a significant stress check, his player loses one level of Insanity. If modifiers are in play, the threshhold for change may be higher or lower at the GM's discretion.

In other cases, a GM may have a policy of only calling for a stress test (die roll) whenever there's a chance for change. This could result in a more liberal ruling:

• Success or failure changes your sanity level.
  After the results of a sanity check have played out, the character's insanity level is adjusted upwards one level if he had an insane response, or downwards one level if he had a sane response.

This approach yields a very fluid sense of sanity and insanity that gets harder to pull away from the further your character sits from the center. Someone with a Fair can get nudged either way fairly easily. Someone either Terrible or Superb is unlikely to budge except in the rarest of circumstances.

Even if insanity isn't something you want in your own game, consider that the ideas covered in this article don't need to be used to model insanity alone. Anything that runs along a continuum could be used here -- what changes, is what the "stress trigger" is, and what the consquences of moving up or down the ladder are. Consider a Dark Side/Light Side division for a Fudge space opera game, where the "stress" comes in the form of moral quandaries. The classic game Pendragon also offers its own gaggle of Virtue/Vice pairings (Chaste/Lustful, Forgiving/Vengeful, and Modest/Proud just to name a few). These, too, could be tossed on the ends of an "insanity" ladder.

Before you get too carried away here, it is important to remember to go easy on the number of attributes you use. Choose each sin, vice, or insanity carefully -- in a vacuum, these attributes, once on your players' sheets, will start forming the basis for how they play their characters. If you aren't interested in telling stories where Lustfulness is a key issue -- don't put it there. If your players can use it, they will use it.

Also, Since these are attributes, it's easy to add a number of additional mechanics that make use of those attributes in ways that go beyond what has been discussed above. Consider these options:

• Use them as reaction modifiers.
  The nice thing about knowing that your character has Violent: Poor (-2) is that you can make much out of the numeric portion when gauging the reactions of NPCs. Trying to stare someone else down? Someone with a high Violent score is probably radiating a kind of edgy dangerousness that will make the other guy back off, while a low score is likely to be the one doing the backing. Trying to convince someone you won't hurt them? Inverting the sign and applying your Violent rating to a reaction roll (Poor would get +2) could make sense there, too.

• Treat them like Aspects.
  (Aspects are from an earlier article.) In essence they give you a number of boxes that you can check off in order to get rerolls when the circumstances are right, or which a GM can use the levels in as a Fudge Point payout in order to compel you to take an appropriate action. Here, drop the sign on the number and take that many boxes (so both Poor and Great would get two boxes). If the boxes come from a negatively numbered adjective, then they give you rerolls when acting "sanely"; otherwise, they give you rerolls for acting "insanely".

• Put spin on the paranormal.
  In fiction, the insane often have some special kind of line on higher truth, visions, power, and so on. Use an insanity attribute to fuel these sorts of things. Someone with a high Unnatural score may be able to use that as a bonus to their Lore skill rolls. Someone with a low score in Helplessness might be able to apply it as a penalty to the roll made by a villain trying to mind-control them. The possibilities go on.

Regardless of how you put it all together, bringing insanity to your Fudge game is a great way to crank up the tension in your horror or occult campaign. In short order you may find your players developing subplots about their characters' grips on what's real, and when one of them truly slides off the deep end, the story you find yourself telling may well be Legendary.