MTH:Asylum

Introduction

Asylum replaces Integrity when applying the superhuman template.

Being more than human innately distances you from humanity. When a person's life takes a sharp turn and they take-on capacities and flaws unlike that of their normal existence, many fight this separation and seek to return to a normal life. Some succeed. These are not your player characters.

Maybe they embrace their unusual state, or simply carry on without coming to terms with it, returning to the struggle periodically. Either way, if their estrangement continues unabated, they will find themselves without a context for their lives, unable to relate to anyone, alienated and alone.

Everyone needs someone. Without humanity to connect with Superhumans turn to each other, despite their great range in variety. By connecting to each other a Superhuman staves off alienation and finds a kind of peace. This peace isn't necessarily calm, but it does allow a kind of balance to be reached.

Asylum originally meant sanctuary, a place of refuge and safety. To some extent, it still means that. As the word 'asylum' began to be applied to facilities for the insane however, the word took on the connotation of madness. Both these meanings are applicable here. On the one hand, Superhumans must take refuge with their own for safety and kinship, and on the other their lives are filled with melodrama and danger.

As a Superhuman is confronted with the world outside of their Asylum, or as danger threatens their Sanctuary, a More Than Human character may suffer Estrangement.

In game terms, in addition to their normal Breaking Points, every MTH character has a Sanctuary. Things that reinforce their unusual identity are part of their Sanctuary. Affiliations and Origins are thus part of their Sanctuary. If the character keeps a secret identity, this is something that helps facilitate their hidden life, so a secret identity is also part of the Sanctuary. Any significant damage, or threats of damage, to these building blocks of abnormal identity prompt an Estrangement roll to see if the character will loose Asylum.

Benefits of Asylum

Asylum has a strange way of making the character 'in the world but not of it'. Mechanically this grants several benefits.

First, Asylum grants the character a measure of immunity to permanent harm. When the character would logically suffer permanent harm, the player may roll their unmodified Asylum. On a success, the player may rationalize away or alter the permanent effects of the injury by any means that feel appropriate to the genre. The effect takes place in between sessions. They must still heal any damage in the normal mechanical way, but any Persistent Conditions are dismissed or modified before the next game. For example, if the character had their arm cut off, on a successful roll they could claim that they met up with a super-scientist NPC again after encountering the NPC in an earlier session, and that the super-scientist was able to regrow/reattach/replace the severed limb.

Second, as Superhero and Supervillians tend to be able to dismiss the incidental fallout of a lot of their activities, so too can characters in MTH. By rolling Asylum at the end of a scene and getting a success, the player may immunize their character from discovery by NPCs not bearing the Superhuman Template (thus the character's nemesis or other important NPC might still piece it together, but not the average person). Essentially no one called the cops, or they missed critical evidence, people rationalized things away, just decided not to follow up on what they saw, etc. The ST may penalize this roll if particularly obvious evidence exists to link the character to their activities, such as videotape with them on it.

Third, and most powerful of all, is the power to dismiss being Unmade. Being Unmade is a catch all term for anything that would make the character unplayable. Most typically, this is death, but the term Unmade is intentionally broad, covering even things like annihilation of the soul or erasure from the timeline. Using this ability costs a dot of Asylum and prompts an Estrangement roll. In addition, the player and ST must come to an agreement on how the character either circumvented death, or literally came back to (un)life. In doing so the character can be changed, gaining or loosing merits, skills attributes, virtues, vices and/or powers, as well as gaining or loosing permanent conditions and Breaking Points. It is not unusual for this sort of event change the arch of a story, or prompt one.

Assume that the Sanctity of Merits rule, in this case, extends to other aspects of the character. Thus many traits may be converted to exp or traded for something equivalent...eventually. The ST is required to make thing easy for the character, they're just supposed to make things fair for the player.

Asylum 0

Unlike other alternate Integrity traits, having the character reach 0 Asylum doesn't make the character unplayable, only nearly so. Characters loose the ability to avoid being unmade at this point, but the other two benefits of Asylum can still be attempted at a chance die. Since the character has become so far removed from plausibility that it may become hard to take them seriously however (“Oh my god how many ret-cons can they put this guy through?”), the player is advised to at least consider retiring the character.

Estrangement

Estrangement Rolls

A character rolls an Estrangement roll, equal to their current Asylum, anytime one of the following occurs;

• The character's secret identity is threatened with exposure (assuming they have one).
• A Superhuman the character is intimately involved with is threatened by someone other than the PC (“Nobody kills The Bat but me.”- The Joker). A non-Superhuman may prompt a Breaking Point, but not an Estrangement roll.
• The character is threatened with the loss of their Affiliation.
• The character looses or their Affiliation, even by choice, unless they are replacing it with another.
• The character's sense of their Origin is threatened, such as by learning significant negative facts about their Origin, or that significant facts where untrue. Alternatively, loosing a power related to their Origin might prompt a roll, if the power in question was particularly vital to their sense of identity.
• Any other emotional situation which starkly demonstrates that the character's life is vastly different from most peoples' lives, which takes up the greater portion of the scene. That is takes some time is important, because the character may well be able to avoid the role by changing the situation or making it less emotional. For example, if a character can breath underwater and finds themselves trapped in a sinking school bus full of children, they can avoid the Estrangement roll by either working to save the children or swimming away so as not to watch them drown. Such choices mark the difference between heroes and villains.

On a success the character regains a point of Willpower or Verve (player's choice). On a failure, the character should gain an appropriate Condition and loose a dot of Asylum. A Dramatic Failure should levee a Persistent Condition in addition to the lost dot.

Roll Modifiers

It is assumed that players can't detail or bring into play all of the vast number or details that go into the character's sense of identity, but those that are substantiated in play grant bonuses to Estrangement rolls. Assume each of the examples that follow would modify the Estrangement roll by +1, and that the modifiers stack.

The Character …

• ...lives or works with 2+ individuals involved in the heroic or villainous lifestyle.
• ...lives or works with 1+ individuals of the same or a similar Affiliation.
• ...lives or works with 1+ individuals of the same or a similar Origin.
• ...is intimately involved with someone involved in the heroic or villainous lifestyle.

'Lives or works with' means any prolonged regular contact. The exact relationship can vary. Similarly, 'intimately involved' does not have to mean a romantic or sexual relationship. An archenemy is assumed to be intimately involved with their enemy. As a rule of thumb, an Affiliation is considered similar if their methods, hierarchy, purpose or scope is fairly similar. The same goes for Origin, with species counting as an Origin even if there is no mechanical benefit to the species. Note that the stacking modifiers can involve the same person more than once with particular situations. Green Lantern Hal Jordan was both the lover of and nemesis of Star Sapphire Carol Ferris, they were both human and effectively members of their respective Lantern Corps. That's two intimate connections, equivalent Affiliations and identical Origins, for a total modifier of +4, for that complicated relationship. If Sinistro and Atracitus moved in with them, it would be a +5 (and one hell of a sitcom).

The New Normal

When all is said and done, Asylum is relative. It's relative because it's based upon the character's distance and safety from normality, and 'normal' is relative. When playing Chronicles not set on Earth the Storyteller should keep in mind that they may need to adjust what events risk Estrangement.