Disorders

Disorders are long-lasting psychological afflictions that typically require weeks or even months of psychotherapy and/or psychosurgery to remedy. They represent the best attempts of a damaged psyche to adapt to and deal with mental and emotional distress. Disorders are not always “active” — they remain dormant until triggered by certain conditions. While it is certainly possible to function “normally” with a disorder, it represents a severe impairment to a person’s ability to maintain healthy relationships and succeed in their work/pursuits.

Gaining a Disorder: You acquire a disorder during character creation, by infection with the exsurgent virus, or by accumulating stress equal to or exceeding your Lucidity. You should work with the GM to choose a disorder appropriate to your character and circumstances.

Removing a Disorder: You can get rid of a disorder through in-game or down-time treatment or by buying it off as a negative trait (Lose a Negative Ego Trait).

Triggering a Disorder: Each disorder is triggered by certain circumstances, as determined by your GM. Example triggers are given with each listing; disorders are also triggered by traumas. When a trigger condition occurs, make a WIL check; if you fail, the disorder is triggered. When activated, the disorder directly affects your actions and what you can and cannot do, as fitting the affliction. The GM may direct your character’s behavior or apply modifiers as they see fit. The episode lasts for as long as your character is affected by the triggering condition. Others can assess your state or bring you out of it with successful Know: Psychology or Medicine: Psychosurgery Tests.

Alien Behavior Disorder

Triggers: Alienation, exsurgents, the unknown

This disorder primarily affects asyncs. You experience strange urges to behave in an alien fashion or to use phantom appendages or other body parts that don’t map to your transhuman form.

Effect: You must make a WIL Check or be compelled to exhibit alien behavior. The compulsion examples listed on the Influence Effect tables provide a number of possibilities.

Anxiety

Triggers: Bad news, boredom, helplessness, the unknown, violence

With general anxiety disorder, you are overcome with worry about nearly everything. Even simple tasks represent the potential for failure on a catastrophic scale and should be avoided or minimized. Negative outcomes are always assumed to be the only possibility.

Effect: You must be convinced with a Persuade or Provoke Test to do almost anything, and even then will self-sabotage or give up after a short time.

Atavism

Triggers: Alienation, mobs, violence

Atavism mainly affects uplifts. When triggered, they regress to behaviors more in line with their animalistic precursors.

Effect: You might lose the ability to speak and reason or engage in primitive animalistic behavior such as threat or dominance displays.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

Triggers: Overstimulation, sleep deprivation, the unknown, violence

ADHD is the inability to notice details and focus on any one task for an extended period. You may find yourself starting multiple tasks, beginning a new one after only a cursory attempt at the prior task. You may also have a manic edge that manifests as confidence in your ability to get a job done, even though you will quickly lose all interest in it.

Effect: −30 modifier to Perceive Tests and task actions. Task action timeframes increased 50%.

Autophagy

Triggers: Alienation, injury, violence

This anxiety disorder, characterized by self-cannibalism of the limbs, usually only occurs among neo-octopi.

Effect: You must make a successful WIL Check or begin to consume one of your limbs.

Bipolar Disorder

Triggers: Grief, helplessness, sleep deprivation, violence

With manic depression, your periods of depression are interrupted by brief (a matter of days at most) periods of mania with heightened energy and a general disregard for consequences. The depressive stages are similar in all ways to depression. When manic, you will take risks, spend wildly, and engage in behavior without forethought or consideration of long-term consequences.

Effect: Similar to depression, but when manic you must make a WIL Check to stop yourself from undertaking a risky endeavor. You will also try to convince others to go along with the idea.

Body Dysmorphia

Triggers: Alienation, helplessness, resleeving

You believe that you are irrevocably ugly or defective, making you unable to interact with others or function normally for fear of ridicule and humiliation. You are secretive and reluctant to seek help because you are afraid others will think you vain. A similar disorder, gender dysphoria, occurs when your sexual biology conflicts with your internal gender identity. Due to resleeving, both disorders are fairly common. Some asyncs have a similar species dysmorphia disorder, where they become convinced they are aliens trapped in transhuman forms; they often seek out exotic morphs and modifications.

Effect: −30 to Resleeving Stress Tests.

Cosmic Anxiety Disorder

Triggers: Alien/TITAN technology, the unknown, x-risks

This disorder arises from facing x-risks, aliens, and incomprehensibly advanced technology. It functions much like anxiety; you are helpless in the face of an uncaring and dangerous universe.

Effect: Like anxiety, but when faced with an alien or TITAN threat, make a WIL Check or either flee or collapse in panic.

Conversion Disorder

Triggers: Alienation, the unknown, violence

You suffer a neurological condition such as blindness, deafness, inability to speak, loss of balance, seizures, or paralysis in high-stress situations. Some asyncs suffer from a similar condition, alien sensory disorder, where attempts to use phantom alien sensory organs disrupt one or more of their actual physical senses.

Effect: WIL Check or suffer from one of the chosen conditions.

Depression

Triggers: Alienation, grief, helplessness, life transitions, violence

Clinical depression is characterized by intense feelings of hopelessness and worthlessness. You feel as though nothing you do matters and no one cares anyway. You find it difficult to be motivated; even simple acts such as eating and bathing seem monumental.

Effect: Make a WIL Check to take any sort of action; apply a −30 modifier to the test in the case of task actions or other sustained activity.

Disassociative Personality Disorder

Triggers: Helplessness, specific memories, the unknown, violence

A separate, distinct personality develops apart from your original personality. The personalities may or may not be aware of each other and “conscious” during the actions of the other personality, though there is some basic information sharing (such as language and core skill sets). Most subjects have only a single extra personality, but it is not unheard of to have several personalities. Each personality sees itself as a distinct person with their own wants, needs, and motivations.

Effect: The other personality must be roleplayed (perhaps by the GM or another player).

Fugue

Triggers: Helplessness, the unknown, violence

You enter a fugue state where you display little attention to external stimuli. You still function physiologically but refrain from speaking and stare off into the distance, unable to focus on events around you.

Effect: You are totally non-responsive to most stimuli. You will walk only if led by a helper. You will not even defend yourself if attacked, simply curling into a fetal position if physically assaulted.

Impulse Control Disorder

Triggers: Helplessness, impulse focus, the unknown, violence

You must engage in one specific activity that dominates your thoughts: compulsive shopping, explosive aggressiveness, kleptomania, mesh addiction, pyromania, sexual exhibitionism, etc. You feel a sense of building anxiety when prevented from engaging in this behavior for an extended period (usually several times a day to weekly, depending on the impulse) and will often engage in this behavior at inconvenient or inappropriate times.

Effect: You must make a WIL Check not to engage in the impulsive activity. If denied the activity for too long, you suffer modifiers between −10 and −30.

Insomnia

Triggers: Alienation, responsibility overload, the unknown, violence

You are unable to sleep, or unable to sleep for an extended period of time. This is most often due to anxiety or depression and the accompanying negative thought patterns. Insomniacs may find themselves nodding off at inopportune times, but never for long. As a result, they are frequently lethargic, inattentive, and irritable.

Effect: You have a near total inability to find rest in sleep when it is desired. Treat long recharges as short recharges, or do not receive any recharge benefits at all. Apply a −30 modifier to Perceive Tests and a −10 to all other actions.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder

Triggers: Criticism, insults, praise, the unknown

You believe yourself to be the single most important person in the universe. Nothing else takes precedence and everything must be done according to your whim. Failure to comply with your dictates will incite rage and physical assault.

Effect: You demand attention and suffer a −30 modifier to Persuade Tests. You may be provoked to violence if insulted or if others fail to comply with your demands (WIL Check). Narcissistic NPCs are immune to Persuade Tests.

Paramnesia

Triggers: Alienation, immersion in water/vacuum, sex, the unknown

You have trouble distinguishing between real memories and fake ones — or ones that do not belong to you. This disorder has grown more common thanks to resleeving and the potential integration of memory artifacts in a morph’s brain from a previous user to a later one. Some asyncs recall memories that are not transhuman.

Effect: You recall memories that are not real or not your own, or you may be confused about who, what, or where you are. Any superior failure on a skill test will result in you confusing important details.

Paranoia

Triggers: Betrayal, conspiratorial behavior, the unknown, violence

You mistrust others. You are hypervigilant but also hypersensitive to perceived hostility and insults. You bear grudges for longer periods.

Effect: −10 to Kinesics Tests. Paranoid NPCs have a +20 bonus to SAV Checks against Persuade, but a −20 against hostile Provoke Tests while the disorder is active.

Phobia

Triggers: Helplessness, phobia focus

You have an irrational fear of a particular place, situation, or thing. Common phobias include AIs, microgravity, pandora gates, muses, robots, enclosed spaces, open spaces, and death.

Effect: Make a WIL Check to enter the proximity of the phobia’s focus. If exposed to the focus, make a WIL Check or flee. Suffer −10 to −30 in the focus’s presence.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Triggers: Frustration, helplessness, pain, specific memories, the unknown, violence

PTSD results from life-threatening incidents. You develop an acute fixation on what happened, obsessively reliving the past, losing sleep, suffering anxiety and depression, and becoming easily angered or irritated. PTSD survivors will avoid painful memories and suffer extreme anxiety if forced into similar circumstances.

Effect: WIL Check to avoid responding to imagined threats based on the traumatic experience with violence. Otherwise treat as anxiety, depression, or phobia as appropriate.

Reiterative Schizophrenia

Triggers: Alienation, drug use, forking, the unknown

Not to be confused with the genetic disorder, reiterative schizophrenia has similar symptoms but develops in egos that undergo frequent resleeving, possibly due to some sort of repetitive error in the download process. Schizophrenics lose their ability to discern reality from unreality. You experience delusions, hallucinations (often in support of the delusions), and fragmented or disorganized speech. You experience your behavior as perfectly normal, to the point of becoming paranoid that others are involved in a grand deception.

Effect: You experience delusions and hallucinations as determined by the GM and are prone to conspiratorial thinking. You suffer a −20 modifier to tests that require coherent communication.