Sanity

A character with a high Sanity is level-headed even in the face of bizarre or terrible circumstances, while a character with low Sanity is unsteady, breaking easily when confronted by horrors that are beyond normal reason.

Sanity Checks

You might be asked to make a Sanity check in place of an Intelligence check to recall lore about bizarre or Dark creatures featured in the campaign, to decipher the incomprehensible scrawlings of witnesses, or to learn spells from tomes of forbidden lore. You might also need a Sanity check when a character tries one of the following activities:

• Deciphering a piece of text written in a language so alien that it threatens to break a character’s mind
• Overcoming the lingering effects of madness
• Comprehending a piece of magic foreign to the character's current understanding of magic

Sanity Saving Throws

You might be asked to roll a Sanity saving throw when a character runs the risk of succumbing to madness, such as in the following situations:

• Seeing a mutated creature for the first time
• Making direct contact with the mind of a mutated creature or a zombie
• Being subjected to or use spells that affect mental stability (Hallucination, Premonition or Memory Writer)
• Resisting an effect conferred by an attack or spell that deals psychic damage
• Seeing an ally die or be seriously injured
• Seeing a person become an Other or Zombie
• Seeing the effect of or using necromacy, Resurrection, Regenerate or horrific damage spells like Decomposition, Disintegrate or Hand of Death.

A failed Sanity save might result in short-term, long-term, or indefinite madness. Any time a character suffers from long-term or indefinite madness, the character’s Sanity is reduced by 1. A character can increase his or her Sanity through level advancement.

Madness

In this campaign, we will be paying attention to the mental and emotional impact of the dangers characters face day after day. Sometimes the stress of being an adventurer can be too much to bear. We will be using sanity and madness as a way to reinforce the horror theme within the campaign, emphasizing the extraordinarily horrific nature of the threats the adventurers face.

Madness can be short-term, long-term, or indefinite. Most relatively mundane effects impose short-term madness, which lasts for just a few minutes. More horrific effects or cumulative effects can result in long-term or indefinite madness. A character afflicted with madness rolls on one of the following tables depending on the duration of the madness inflicted.

Recovering from Madness and Restoring Sanity

Immediate Care

When someone suffers an episode of short term insanity, another character can try to can bring them out of it—calming their terror, snapping them out of their stupor, or doing whatever else is needed to restore the person to the state they were in before the short term insanity—by making a DC 15 medicine check as an action.

Long-Term Care

Providing long-term care means treating a mentally disturbed person during downtime for a day or more in a place away from stress and distractions. A therapist must spend 1d4 hours per day doing nothing but talking to the patient. If the therapist makes a DC 15 Medicine check at the end of this time, the patient recovers 1 Sanity point. A therapist can tend up to six patients at a time; each patient beyond the first adds 1 hour to the total time per day that must be devoted to therapy. The check must be made each day for each patient. A roll of 1 on any of these Medicine checks indicates that the patient loses 1 point of Sanity that day, as they regresses mentally due to horrors suddenly remembered. This treatment cannot raise a patient's sainty above their baseline score. When a patient reaches their baseline sanity, the therapist can spend an additional 1d4 hours with that patient to attempt to cure long term or indefinite madness. If the therapist makes a DC 20 Medicine check at the end of this time, the patient recovers 1 from one long term or indefinite madness effect.

Sanity Zero

If a character's sanity falls to zero, they loose hold of themselves completely and become a zombie. This represents the powerful effect that the Dark has on this world and its ability to manipulate and change people over time.