What Sanity Is

Sanity Points (SAN) are the resilience of your character's mind against the world as it actually is. With high SAN, your character still trusts their understanding of things despite the hardships. With low SAN, the brutal arithmetic of a world in decline has started to win. At zero, the character is gone — not dead, which would be kinder, but gone.

Starting Sanity

A character with Intelligence 12, Wisdom 14, and Charisma 10 begins with 36 Sanity Points. Most characters land between 25 and 35. The Character Creator works this out for you the moment your ability scores are assigned.

From that total, subtract points for what your character carried into play. This is a conversation with your DM, not a shopping list:

Maximum Sanity

The ceiling is 99 — for those who know nothing. Characters with proficiency in Arcana checks concerning harmonic theory, the Wyrd, or the forces behind the decline reduce their maximum by twice their proficiency bonus. Those with expertise in such checks, or formal training from the Smritipal, reduce it by three times their proficiency bonus.

This is the system's quietest rule and its cruelest: the more you learn about why the world is ending, the less room your mind has left to live in it.

Sanity Tests

When the world demands one, roll a d20 and add your Wisdom modifier against DC 15 plus the severity of the trauma (typically 0 to 5). Losses are written as two numbers: 0/1d4 means you lose nothing on a success and 1d4 on a failure; 1d6/1d10 means even success costs you.

Rules of thumb: if failure costs 1d6 or less, success usually costs nothing. If failure costs 1d8 or 1d10, success usually costs 1. A natural 20 means you lose the least possible; a natural 1 means you lose the most. Some encounters are worse than the rules of thumb allow for.

The Three Threats

Sanity is lost to violence, to helplessness, and to the Unnatural. The categories overlap (being made to fight in Nexipol's arena while your family starves is both of the first two at once), and each makes the others worse.

Violence

Taking a life is not instinctive, whatever the veterans tell you. In combat, a given trauma forces a test the first time it happens in that fight; outside combat, every incident counts.

*On a failed roll, add 1 per victim beyond the first, up to the maximum possible roll.

Helplessness

The essential impulse of a sentient being is to act. Watching your community, your Bonds, your way of life come apart while you can do nothing is its own category of wound — and in the Fading, it is the commonest one.

The Unnatural

Last, the things that exist wholly outside mortal experience: Wyrd phenomena, tears in the world, the shapes that harmonic instability leaves behind. The Unnatural wounds by opening gaps in understanding that nothing can close. This is why Wyrdtouched knowledge lowers your maximum SAN — and why there is no adapting to it. Every encounter is the first one.

Thresholds and Breaking

As Sanity falls, the mind starts making trades it cannot take back:

The DM calls the threshold; the player should have the loudest voice in what the flaw actually is. A disorder should grow out of the trauma that caused it — the scholar who watched a friend burn develops a fear of fire, not a butterfly collection.

Temporary Insanity

Lose 5 or more SAN in a single roll and your character breaks — briefly. Control passes to the panic, in one of three shapes, chosen with your DM:

Flee. Away from the stimulus at top speed for CON modifier + 1 rounds (minimum 1), then collapse with a level of exhaustion — or until they feel "safe," whichever comes first.

Struggle. Lash out at the nearest threat, however insurmountable, until killed, unconscious, or restrained.

Submit. Shut down. Catatonic and paralyzed until the DM decides otherwise; on waking, the trauma is likely suppressed, and dredging up details takes a DC 15 Intelligence check and costs peace of mind.

If circumstances are calm, someone can attempt a DC 15 Wisdom (Medicine) check to talk your character down.

Disorders

A disorder is the mind's release valve — an irrational adaptation to intolerable stress. It lurks under the surface as a chronic condition and erupts in acute episodes when triggered. During an episode, the character obeys the disorder's internal logic; a DC 15 Wisdom (Medicine) check can diagnose it, and a second such check can talk them down over a few minutes.

The lists below are suggestions, grouped by the wound that typically produces them. Work with your DM.

From violence: Addiction, Depression, Intermittent Explosive Disorder, Sonophobia, Paranoia, Traumatic Stress Disorder, Sleep Disorder, Totemic Compulsion.

From helplessness: Anxiety Disorder, Conversion Disorder (blindness, deafness, or paralysis under stress), Dissociative Identity Disorder, Agoraphobia or Claustrophobia, Obsession, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

From the Unnatural: Amnesia, Depersonalization, Fugues, Megalomania, Sleep Disorder.

Most acute episodes impose disadvantage on ability checks, attack rolls, saving throws, or Sanity tests while they last; several are triggered by losing 2+ SAN in a single roll. Calming preparations (shantirasayana, manashanti, or plain drink and dreamleaf) can grant advantage or a bonus to repress an episode, at the price of disadvantage on everything for 1d4 hours and a straight road to Addiction.

At 0 SAN the character is lost for good — catatonic, delusional, or worse. The Sant-Rakshak have a word for the worst kind, and they do not use it above a whisper. Those who return from zero are not empty. Nobody who has met one says what fills them.

Resisting

Adaptation

Survive a category of trauma often enough and it stops cutting. Lose SAN to violence or helplessness three times in a row without going temporarily insane or hitting a threshold, and your character adapts to it: they automatically succeed on Sanity tests of that kind, forever.

The price is written in the character, not the character sheet — but the sheet keeps score too. Adapting to violence permanently costs 1d6 Charisma and the same from every Bond: empathy is what got worn away. Adapting to helplessness permanently costs 1d6 Wisdom: the drive went with it.

There is no adaptation to the Unnatural. The only minds it makes sense to are the ones at zero.

Bonds

Bonds are the people, places, and ideals that hold your character together, rated 1–10; most characters start with two to four. They can absorb what your character cannot: when losing SAN, spend a Hit Die and roll it (no modifiers) — if you still have at least 1 HP, reduce the loss by the roll, and reduce a Bond's score by the same amount. You can spend a Hit Die the same way to repress temporary insanity or an acute episode, followed by a DC 15 Sanity test. Either way, the strain lands on someone who loves you. Decide what that looks like the next time you see them.

Recovery

There are few roads back, and none of them are fast:

Bards deserve a line of their own: a successful Performance check after a short rest restores 1 SAN to listeners. In a world with one bloodline of Bards left, that is not a small thing.

Class Notes

Sant-Rakshak gain proficiency in Sanity tests — and owe regular harmonic rituals for the privilege, at risk of SAN loss if neglected. Bards restore it in others, as above. Characters of strong faith have advantage on Sanity tests against helplessness, though the Unnatural tests that faith hardest of all. Certain spells interact with the system: calm emotions can suppress an acute episode, lesser and greater restoration can remove a level of temporary insanity but never restore permanent SAN loss, and protection from evil and good gives advantage on tests triggered by otherworldly entities.

Optional Rules

Keep SAN secret. Knowing Jaladhara has exactly 12 SAN feels very different from knowing that Jaladhara hasn't been the same since the chambers beneath Nexipol's arena. Some tables hide current SAN from other players; some DMs hide it from everyone.

Insight at the cost of sanity. A character below half their starting SAN may roll with advantage on certain Investigation or Insight checks concerning Wyrd phenomena — the unstable mind sees what the stable one refuses to. Each use demands a DC 15 Sanity test or costs 1d4 more SAN. The DM may also feed such characters visions and whispered truths that saner minds would reject. Whether they are truths is another question.