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Insanity and Raider Disease

Characters can lose their minds over the course of play, especially if your campaign is anything like the storyline of Project Horizons. When a character is sufficiently traumatized or terrified of something, they may gain a psychosis or a phobia, as per the hindrances of the same name. GMs should not be afraid to give either of these role-playing hindrances to players; this is just another form of character development, and psychoses reflect the changing mental state of a character in reaction to the events they’ve experienced and participated in.

As characters gain psychoses, however, their demeanor should slowly change. What may once have been a peaceful stable-dwelling repair pony may turn surly, introverted, or even outwardly deranged.

GMs interested in playing with insanity as a mechanic should roll INT secretly for a character every time that character receives a mental hindrance via role playing. Each existing Psychosis hindrance is a 1 MFD step bonus on the roll. If they ever get a critical success, then that character should become totally insane. This system reflects that genius leads more readily to insanity, meaning that a higher INT character is more at risk, but those without psychoses are unlikely to go insane regardless of their INT score.

A character that goes insane will not act rationally (though this does not necessarily mean that they will act violently), and will perceive the world differently than it really is. Some GMs may wish to take the character sheet of such characters and play them as an NPC to properly express this; others may wish to merely have the player reflect this radical alteration of behavior on the part of their character. In the latter case, the GM should take the player of the insane character aside and discuss privately what that character sees, or more generally how that character’s view of reality has become warped. This can lead to some interesting party dynamics if handled carefully, though it should be mentioned that insane characters tend to have a short life-span in situations where death could potentially be on the line.

 

 

Raider disease – also known as the blood hunger plague – is a debilitating prion-based disease (look it up) that rapidly turns a character infected with it into a gibbering, violent mad-pony, directly affecting both their sense of loyalty and their normal behavior in a specific fashion. This is not a conventional form of insanity, and it is under no circumstances a good idea to knowingly contract it. That being said, if a character does contract this disease, GMs should treat it as they would conventional insanity (whatever that means), and either take their sheet or explain how their view of reality is altered. Any character is looking to be a cannibal is at risk. Check out the Blood Hunger Plague entry in the diseases section for more information on this particular type of insanity’s psychological symptoms. Celestia help you.

Going Feral

Ghouls risk a specific kind of insanity that is referred to in the Fallout and Fallout: Equestria universes as going feral. A ghoul goes feral when they seem to lose higher brain function. They may still be intelligent (as far as any predatory animal could be considered intelligent), but they are no longer able or willing to communicate. Evidence suggests a sort of unending animal hunger develops as an instinct to fill the void, leading them to hunt down less-irradiated creatures. Feral ghouls do not distinguish between friends or foes, only between ghouls, heavily tainted creatures, and everything else. If you’re not in one of the first two categories, they will attack you.



Ghouls can go feral for any number of reasons; most go feral upon achieving their state of undeath as a result of mental degeneration from the radiation that caused it to occur. Those that are sentient, however, are unique – their minds and souls remained intact enough that the necromantic radiation did not destroy their ability to act as they did before their near-fatal exposure. These are the types of ghouls that can be played as characters – sentient ghouls. This is the type of ghoul at risk of going feral.

Most ghoul characters had at least one major reason or another to cling to life, their Purpose. It may have been a loved one that they needed to see, a goal (such as a Fixation, though it doesn’t need to be that specific), an ambition, or some sort of deep seated animal desire to go on living, but they had a reason. This reason is what keeps them sane, and prevents them from going feral.

That having been established, any ghoul whose main Purpose is completely removed or otherwise rendered totally untenable will begin to go feral. This process can takes minutes or it can take days, but unless they find something new to focus on as a new Purpose, they’re doomed to become little more than a flesh eating zombie-pony.

Going feral as a psychological process can be averted by the presence of friends and loved ones in a ghoul’s life. If surrounded by friends or family members, ghouls are less likely to go feral. This is doubly true if any of those friends or family members is dependent on the ghoul in any way. If a ghoul has lost their Purpose and remains in the presence of one of more friends or family members, they will not begin to go feral until that social support is removed. This can keep a ghoul who lives and works as part of a settlement sane indefinitely, but significantly negative changes in interpersonal relationships – see Sanguine, of Project Horizons – can cause a ghoul to go feral even with social support present.

If they’re not kept socialized, a ghoul who has lost their Purpose will go feral in a span of 1d20 minutes. After this process is complete, treat their behavior as you would any other feral.
Restoration of purpose (i.e. they thought their goal was lost, but in reality it wasn’t) within a week of their becoming feral can sometimes snap a feral ghoul back to sanity, but documented cases of such are quite rare.

Ghouls that go insane in a conventional fashion are still able to descend into a different type of insanity by going feral. More ‘conventional’ madness doesn’t prevent the loss of higher brain function.


Date: 2015-12-11; view: 1032


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