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Madness Checks
· Madness checks are Will saves made by characters to avoid slipping into madness.
· Madness represent a character’s attempt to retain his or her sanity in the face of extreme mental shock or stress.
· The extent by which a character fails his save determines how severe his mental illness may be.
· Madness takes two forms – temporary and indefinite.
Provoking a Madness Check
· Madness checks are made whenever a character experiences some sort of mental trauma.
· Madness checks are always made when a character makes mental contact with an aberration, elemental, ooze, outsider, plant, or undead (DC 10 + ½ creature’s HD + its Charisma modifier).
· Madness checks are always made when a character comes to a realization that his world is fundamentally different than he had previously believed (minimum DC 20 – 30).
· Madness checks are always made when a character comes upon a grizzly scene such that it would provoke a sense of horror (DC 10 – 15).
· A successful save signifies that the character was able to maintain his or her sanity.

Failure
· A character that fails a Madness save by less than 5 suffers from temporary madness. Roll on the tables given below to determine the extent, duration, and nature of this madness.
· A character that fails a Madness save by 5 or more rolls 1d% for every 5

Temporary Madness

Indefinite Madness
· For every 5 points by which a character fails a Madness save, he rolls 1d% on the following table to determine the nature of his madness.

Roll Madness
1 – 10 Personality
11 – 25 Anxiety
26 – 30 Psychospecies
31 – 35 Mood
36 – 40 Impulse Control
41 – 45 Eating
46 – 50 Psychosexual
51 – 55 Other
56 – 65 Sleep
66 – 75 Substance abuse
76 – 80 Somatoform
81 – 85 Dissociative
86+ Schizophrenia/psychotic

Madnesses

Recovering from Madness
While it is quite easy to recover from Temporary Madness (this being natural), Indefinite Madness is nigh impossible to put behind a person. Such mental ailments are so severe that even were a character to receive modern professional help, only with years upon years of strong and steady progress would a person ever begin to remove the diseased state of mind and replace it with something only slightly disturbed. As a result, the only sure way for a person to shed himself of the burden of insanity is through restorative magic.

Should a person ever under years of therapeutic counsel, he may be able to learn to live with his madness or even begin to fight it off, but it is always there lurking just beneath the frail surface of his reality.