Power causing insanity in tabletop games.
- The Mad Scientist archetype in the Weird West setting and Junkers from the Hell on Earth setting of Deadlands both make use of a strange substance known as ghost rock in order to power their bizarre contraptions. It has numerous adverse side effects, up to but not exclusively, pants shitting, dribbling insanity. Hardly surprising considering what ghost rock is made of or who actually made it.
- It's never made quite clear whether the powers of the Awake from Don't Rest Your Head are the outcome or the cause of their madness and insomnia, but one thing is for sure: the madder you become, the greater is your power. The more you use your power, the madder you become. It's a slippery slope, and it ends with you turning into a Nightmare.
- Exalted.
- Justified: after their defeat, the Primordials leveled the Great Curse against the Exalts, making them progressively insane. The madness of the Solars was the canonical reason for the Usurpation and the Sidereals decided to kill the Solars thanks to the Great Prophecy and their own Great Curse. The Solars, as the leaders of the Divine Rebellion against the Primordials, were cursed the most. The Dragon-blooded shock-troopers were cursed the least with the Lunars and Sidereals coming in between.
- There's an even more direct example in Elementals. When an Elemental reaches Essence 10, it becomes a Greater Elemental Dragon, an entity of immense destructive power (possibly greater even than the most powerful Demons). All Greater Elemental Dragons to date have been utterly insane, to the point where they've needed to be imprisoned behind some of the most powerful safeguards in Creation (the Gardullis, Greater Dragon of Fire, is imprisoned within the Sun itself). It's speculated that this is because Elementals were simply never designed to be capable of coping with that level of power.
- Also justified by Word of God for the Primordials themselves, most of whom are a) kind of crazy and b) have Crippling Overspecialization written into their very beings. They have these traits because for most of their existences, they had been simply too powerful to face consequences to their actions, with even their weak points way outside the power level of anything not prohibited from fighting them. And then the Exalted came into play.
- This phrase goes some way to defining Warhammer 40,000. They've even got a Tagline for the game that goes: "Only the insane have the strength to prosper. Only those who prosper can judge what is truly sane." At least some of the Chaos forces admit it - "Sanity is for the weak."
- Even Chaos is very, very thankful that The Outsider is still self-trapped in his box on the outskirts of the galaxy. We only know he's there because the Tyranids give it a hundred light-years of space to itself.
- In the fluff backstory of Mage Knight, it was stated that mastering the opposing magics of Necromancy and Elementalism would drive a mage insane. The one guy who did went on to found the Atlantean Empire, which practiced slavery and subjugation.
- Cyberpunk 2020 has humanity loss as a side-effect of cybernetic enhancement; as characters become more powerful, they start to feel disconnected from the meatbags around them. Eventually they go crazy, at which point C-SWAT has the job of taking them down.
- Aberrant has a "taint" system, which is explained in that "No human being was meant to contain that much power." Taint works in a number of ways. You can purchase a new level in any ability at half price if you take a point of taint with it, and you also take a point of taint when your power reaches a certain level, etc. But no matter how good, or "taint-free" your character is, just remember that this is a prequel to Trinity, where it has already been set in stone that all the Novas went insane.
- Not quite. While large numbers of superhumans did go insane, the idea that they all do so is actually Aeon Trinity propaganda and history rewriting.
- Call of Cthulhu introduced the Sanity (or SAN) stat. As your characters learn more about the Cthulhu Mythos, their Sanity slowly decreases until they go completely insane. Learning and casting magic also lowers your Sanity, as magic in the Cthulhu setting is a perversion of the natural laws that humans are accustomed to, but then again anything, even mundane stuff like seeing a shadow, can do that in Call of Cthulhu.
- CthulhuTech, in the grand Lovecraftian traditions, is into this in a big way. Having a chip implanted in your brain so you can pilot the awesome Eldritch Abomination Humongous Mechas drives you mad slowly, being linked to an extradimesional symbiont that makes you essentially into a were-Lovecraftian Beast drives you nuts over time, learning both sorcery and enhancing your paraphysic abilities makes you crazy, and the Zoner parapsysics are normal people who a) got powers by going near a tear in reality that used to be Las Vegas and may be an intrusion into the body of Azathoth, and b) as you guessed, go very, very crazy.
- Thankfully, this is also a setting where there are, in fact, therapists, and they're Genre Savvy enough to make their sessions a perk of military duty.
- Rifts gives us the Mind Over Matter (M.O.M.) Works, a process that grants incredible strength, reflexes, and Psychic Powers to its users via a set of tiny chips implanted in key spots in their brains. Trouble is, the chips slowly cause mental instability that gets worse and worse with time.note The character type that has M.O.M. conversion is called, fittingly, the Crazy.
- Sentinels of the Multiverse: Infinitor, who, in addition to the powers his brother Captain Cosmic got, was also driven insane by the screams of voices from across the cosmos now in his head.
- Vampire: The Requiem subverts the trope at a conceptual level with the new Ventrue, where a Ventrue vampire is more likely to gain derangements and go insane when called to make tests of humanity. And when would they need to make tests of humanity? When expanding their political power. And as the Ventrue are "Lords of The Damned", they would have a tendency to do this a lot....
- And in the Revised version of Vampire: The Masquerade, the Malkavians, who have both MalkNet (a sort of hive mind of insanity) but also the super power to make OTHERS share a little insanity.
- All of WoD had some kind of character that was completely out of its mind. Marauders, Black Spiral Dancers, Specters, every playable character in Hunter.
- When the voices are real, are you still insane? But really, the Imbued of Hunter acquired more power the more they threw themselves into the Hunt, thus moving further away from humanity and its trappings (ethics, morals, emotions, etc), eventually turning into super-powered anti-supe fanatics who are human only in biological makeup.
- And two of the creeds - the Hermits and Waywards - are broken right from the imbuing, since both get a direct pipeline to the Powers That Be.
- True in Changeling: The Lost for really great Power — sometime after reaching Wyrd 10, they can lose all of their sanity in a matter of weeks. And it usually goes downhill from there.
- The Geniuses of the fan-game Genius: The Transgression. They're all mad, and have the potential to get even madder.
- And in the Revised version of Vampire: The Masquerade, the Malkavians, who have both MalkNet (a sort of hive mind of insanity) but also the super power to make OTHERS share a little insanity.
- The Forgotten Realms setting has Sammaster, one of the mages "promoted" by Mystra to semidivine being status. This impaired his sanity, triggering a delusion (provoked by a ritual) that the goddess was infatuated with him, and the "friendly" advice of an evil priest made it even worse. He ended up stripped of power and convinced that dead dragons shall rule the world due to his bad translation of old prophecy. To fulfill this prophecy, he created dracoliches and the infamous Cult of the Dragon.
- BattleTech features several types of neural interface technology that can boost battlefield performance beyond what's possible with just the usual manual/voice controls and neurohelmet, but are correspondingly more invasive and dangerous. Clan ProtoMech pilots, who depend on this kind of interface to control their smaller-than-regular-'Mech war machines in the first place, consequently tend to become increasingly unstable over time and usually die young.
- This trope is one of the problems for magick-users in Unknown Armies. Adepts and avatars get their power by virtue of being so utterly obsessed with something (like drinking, or being the ultimate warrior) that it lets them alter reality. This means that most mages are a little nuts by necessity, and need to be pretty committed to their ideals if they want to become more powerful. It's no surprise that one of the big movers-and-shakers in the occult underground doesn't use magic at all.
- This is also popular in Warhammer. All magic is made from the powers of Chaos, and chaos likes to reshape things into Eldritch Abominations. If a wizard uses too much juice, the side effects could range from his mind starts coming unhinged, to an explosion with a five mile radius. Being a worshiper of the Gods of Chaos also tends to do this, as their warriors are trying to earn enough glory to become daemon princes, but most end up getting killed or turned into Chaos Spawn long after they go completely insane. Skaven can be described as this, as their leaders tend to have a skewed view on things. Most Dark Elves could also count, especially with Malekeith.
- Asyncs in Eclipse Phase are required to take one mental disorder for each level of the Psi trait they acquire because their powers come from a virus written by an alien entity that borders on Eldritch Abomination. And unlike other disorders taken during character creation, they don't get extra character points for them.
- Pictured on the main page, Zur the Enchanter
from Magic: The Gathering. He was a powerful wizard who went mad trying to achieve immortality and attacked his former homeland Kjeldor. After his invasion was thwarted, he went into hiding and spent the rest of his days aloof from the world basking in his own power.- This used to be the norm for planeswalkers, who once were basically gods. As pointed out by Jodah, their power and lack of need to see anyone else as being anything more than insects in comparison was strongly linked to their insanity. After the Mending, when planeswalkers just became people who can travel between dimensions, all the planeswalkers who saw themselves tripped from their power have either become power-hungry monsters or extremely morally dubious at best.
- This is a major function of Arkham Horror. A number of powerful spells all require a sanity cost regardless of whether the spell successfully casts, and some spells, like "Dread Curse of Azazoth" give you an incredible +9 to combat checks. The downside is, with the wrong character, 2 sanity can be very hefty. Heck, even with a character that has a high sanity max like Harvey Walters, you could cast a spell like that and defeat an opponent, only for something like a Flying Polyp to reduce your sanity down to 1 just by showing up and you failing a horror check. As such, it's a risky attempt to use them, but sometimes you have little other option.
- The Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition supplement Hero Builder's Guide has the Raver, a character build for Dwarven Sorcerers where they were driven insane by their magical powers manifesting. The Raver is described as being only kind of arcane spellcaster considered "acceptable" to Dwarves because they're obviously mentally ill and in need of help, but says that their families feel a guilty sense of relief if they decide to leave the delve.
- The Eye and Hand of Vecna. Each of them is an Artifact of Doom and using them will eventually result in Vecna's soul ripping out your own before possessing your body.
