Sanity Rules:
Sanity Score: This is sort of like mental hit points. It’s the sum of all your mental stats (Wisdom, Intelligence, Charisma) less any damage to those scores.
Sanity Damage: this is like hit point damage done in physical combat (like a sword blow, etc), only, it affects your sanity score, not your hit points. So, if you encounter an attack on your sanity and suffer damage, you deduct that damage from your sanity score.
Losing Sanity and Gaining Madness:
When you’re faced with a monster that can do sanity damage, you have to make an immediate will save. If you save, most of the time, you will be able to ignore all Sanity damage (i.e. your mental faculties hold up) though some creatures may do damage regardless of your save (like Great Old Ones).
If you lose ALL of your Sanity (i.e. Sanity pool moves to zero), you gain a lesser madness (this is generally a temporary condition), I will not have PCs suffer more than 1 lesser madness at a time. This mechanic is for flavor not to annihilate PCs effectiveness.
If you lose ALL of your Sanity facing a Great Old One, that will trigger a greater madness. This is permanent though each PC will only ever gain a single one of these.
Losing Madness and Gaining Sanity:
Madness can be lost (and sanity restored in several ways).
1. Rest: Every 7 full days of uninterrupted rest heals sanity damage equal to your Charisma modifier (minimum 1). You’re letting your own sense of self and force of personality reassert itself and mend together the tattered fragments of your tortured psyche.
2. Therapy: Tell someone else your problems (mentor, counselor, confidante, friend, family, priest, advisor, etc). At the end,, the ally attempts a Wisdom or Intelligence check (whichever is higher) DC equal to the amount of Sanity you have lost. Success means you add their ability modifier (wis or int, whichever is higher) to the amount of sanity damage you heal.
3. Magic:
a. lesser restoration: 1d2 points once per day
b. Restoration: 2d4 points per day
c. Heal: 3d4 points/day
d. Greater restoration, psychic surgery, limited wish: all of it, if your sanity was below your edge (in other words, you still had more than half your sanity points left). Or, to 1 point below your sanity edge if you had more than half of your sanity lost.
e. Miracle and wish fix everything
Effects of Restoring Sanity:
Lesser Madness - If all of your sanity damage is healed, your lesser madness is removed entirely.
Greater Madness - If all of your sanity damage is healed, your greater madness is dormant. It will become reactivated if you again suffer a full loss to your Sanity score. A greater madness can only be fully healed with a long term psychiatric stay (1 month, which could well be played out over a downtime depending on how the chronicle proceeds) r the use of a Wish or Miracle spell (hard to come by in Ravenloft!).
In my next post I will cover the more traditional fear/horror checks of Ravenloft and how I will use those alongside Sanity Rules.
