Mental Healing & Psychosurgery

Stress is trickier to heal than physical damage. There are no nano-treatments or quick fix options (other than killing yourself and reverting to a non-stressed backup). The options for recuperating are simply natural healing over time or psychosurgery.

Psychosurgery Care

The skill Medicine: Psychosurgery is used to treat characters suffering mental stress or trauma. This is a long-term process using virtual reality, involving methods such as psychoanalysis, counseling, roleplaying, relationship-building, hypnotherapy, behavioral modification, drugs, medical treatments, and neurological alterations. Muses possess this skill, though they are not as talented as professionals.

Psychosurgery is handled as a task action. Any stress must be eased before traumas can be addressed, and traumas must be healed before disorders can be treated. Because psychosurgery is an intensive and emotionally exhaustive process, it is performed in periods of no more than 1 hour per day — any more than that tends to create its own stress, which defeats the purpose. Accelerated-time simulspaces are used, but each hour of psychotherapy past the first requires a full subjective day in the VR.

Successful psychosurgery heals 1d6 [4] stress with a timeframe of 1 hour. The timeframe for healing traumas is 8 hours, 40 for disorders; both split across 1-hour periods. Each trauma and disorder applies a −10 modifier to the test. At the GM’s discretion, a critical failure inflicts a Mental Disorder or other negative ego trait (Using Psychosurgery).

Even when treated, the scars from mental suffering remain. According to some opinions, disorders are never truly eradicated, they are just eased into submission … where they linger beneath the surface, waiting for new traumas to come along.

Natural Healing

You can eschew psychosurgery to work out the problems in your head on your own over time. For every month that passes without accruing new stress, make an INT Check. If successful, you heal 1d6 points of stress or 1 trauma (all stress must be healed first). Disorders are more difficult to heal, requiring 3 months without stress or trauma and a successful INT Check. As a result, disorders can linger for years until resolved with actual psychosurgery.

Motivational Recovery

Successfully reaching personal goals is rewarding to your confidence, well-being, and overall mental stability. At the GM’s discretion, each time you achieve a goal defined by your motivations, heal 1d6 stress. If you have no stress, remove a trauma instead. Motivational goals cannot heal disorders, but they will provide a +20 modifier to the next INT Check or Medicine: Psychosurgery Test to remove a disorder.