Dementation

Dementation

Dementation
Clans	Malkavians, Malkavian Antitribu
Bloodlines	Ananke
Sects	Anarchs, Camarilla, Independents, Sabbat
Rituals	None
Combination Disciplines	Dementation Combination Disciplines
Rarity	Uncommon

Dementation is the specialty Discipline of the Malkavian clan, and it has only one function: to share the mental illnesses and strange hallucinations that the Malkavians suffer from with everyone else around them. Depending on the Malkavian you ask, some will tell you that Dementation is a gift, a way to share the inexplicable insights and warnings that only they can see with other Kindred less fortunate; others will shrug and simply say that everyone deserves to experience what they do once in a while, or that they enjoy watching less mentally prepared people suddenly manage the bewildering effects they live with daily. Whatever the reason, Dementation has the effect of sharing a little bit of the Malkavians with everyone else - whether they want it or not.

Basic Powers

Passion

You may increase the emotions of one person in your vicinity three times over, fanning a small spark of discontent into seething resentment, annoyance into unreasonable rage or gentle fondness into passionate love. The person thus affected does not know why they suddenly feel so strongly, but they respond to it anyway, and do not know that any power was used to cause this shift in their emotions. You cannot choose what emotions to increase - whatever the person you target is currently feeling is immediately blown out of proportion, and more than one Malkavian has accidentally increased the intensity of an emotion that was definitely not beneficial to them. The newly heightened feelings last only for the remainder of the scene, after which the person affected returns to normal (although they still remember the feelings).

The Haunting

By subtly breaking down the image of normal, safe reality around them, you may afflict someone with the delusion that they are being haunted. They begin to hear strange voices and whispers that they cannot identify or find the source of, sometimes see what seems to be a shadow or a face out of the corner of their eye, become sure that something terrible lurks just behind them or out of sight, and suffer from the constant nervous breakdown of believing themself to be in continual supernatural danger. Mortals or Kindred who don't know anything about the occult are likely to believe that they are being haunted just like the protagonist in a horror movie; those who know a little bit about Wraiths or other frightening inhabitants of the astral realms might imagine that such beings have come after them. The haunting lasts for the entire evening and extends into terrible nightmares during the daylight hours; prolonged and repeated uses of this power on the same person may cause permanent traumatic damage.

Intermediate Powers

Eyes of Chaos

Things that seem like random coincidence or that "normal" Kindred would completely ignore have hidden meaning for you with this power, which allows you to see past the cracks and crevices of reality to recognize the underlying pattern that controls all things. You may gain insight into what is likely to happen for the rest of the current scene; you cannot be surprised, can accurately claim to have known things were going to happen, and may have a second to pre-empt various actions that you know are coming. Of course, it's not entirely accurate and you can't know all the details of events to come, and many Malkavians use this power simply to know, rather than trying to interfere with what they see as destiny unfolding.

Vision of Death

You may cause your victim to suddenly and vividly hallucinate their own death. You decide what form this death takes (drowning, being decapitated, and so on), but your victim's mind does the rest, suddenly terrified by its own mortality and the experience of dying. Mortals are likely to simply instantly drop dead unless they are exceptionally hardy, and supernatural creatures are unable to do anything but flail at the terrifying vision until it ends when they finish dying. Those who survive this power are completely unharmed physically (although the mental scars may remain, depending on the person).

Berserk

By touching someone, you stimulate their unreasoning fight-or-flight instinct, washing them in adrenaline and instantly turning them into a maniac on a wildly violent rampage. Your victim attacks others near them at random, screams and cries, and destroys objects if there are no people nearby, blindly infuriated with no knowledge of their actions for the rest of the scene. This power creates such a mental overload that mortals often fall unconscious or even die when it expires if they are fragile, while supernatural creatures survive but are exhausted and frightened. Vampires and ghouls may enter a rage Frenzy in this state if they are able, while shapeshifters are likely to immediately shift into their bestial forms to rampage.

Confusion

You may lay a shroud of confusion and muted unreality over everything that one person perceives, causing them to wander in a semi-daze, unable to recognize anyone they don't know very well or care about anything in the general wasteland of blank fog. They can still recognize normal landmarks and won't intentionally place themself in mortal harm, but they aren't capable of doing anything particularly important or difficult until the fog clears at the end of the night.

Fire Voice

You may immediately inflict Rötschreck on everyone in your immediate vicinity; vampires respond as if confronted by overwhelming flame, while mortals and other supernatural creatures are afflicted by the same unreasoning fear regardless of whether or not they could normally experience it. The fear lasts for the rest of the scene, which is usually more than long enough to clear the area.

Silence the Sane Mind

By touching your victim or making eye contact with them, you may block off the part of their mind that regulates one emotion, skill, or set of memories. This generally causes immediate instability, with your victim becoming unable to handle their emotions, becoming so confused they have difficulty functioning, or becoming distraught over the sudden inexplicable loss of their own thoughts. This power lasts until the sun rises, although those affected are likely to be frightened and confused for a while afterward as they try to figure out what happened to htem.

Voice of Madness

By whispering terrible things in someone's ear, you whip their emotions to unbearable heights, triggering a Frenzy immediately no matter where they are or what they're doing. You must be able to directly communicate with someone in order to use this power, and they will remember that you were present and acting to incite them later, although whether or not they know that you actually caused the Frenzy depends on how much they know about Dementation. You may choose which kind of Frenzy they enter.

Advanced Powers

Total Insanity

By gaining your target's full attention for a moment, you may pull all their deepest traumas, fears, and mental anguishes to the forefront, inflicting immediate, debilitating stress and resulting mental conditions upon them. They immediately suffer from five random Derangements for the rest of the evening; the player must do their best to play the same character while dealing with the effects of these new and unexpected conditions, and will remember the experience on later evenings fully (although untangling it and understanding what happened may not be possible).

Elder Powers

Babble

If you are connected to the Malkavian Madness Network, this power allows you to send messages across long distances that are heard by other members of your choice (and, usually, a few extra ones you didn't choose). The resulting message is loudly babbled in the air near your recipients' ears (or in opportunistic text on whatever is nearest to them if they are unable to hear), making it difficult to understand but technically audible to others who are near them at the time.

The Call

You may call to anyone else who is connected by the Malkavian Madness Network to come and meet you at a prearranged place; you telepathically grant them basic knowledge of the place, enough for them to find and recognize it but not enough to add any additional detail. Those you contact are not necessarily forced to arrive, but they feel a strong compulsion to do so, and many will automatically answer regardless of what else they are doing. You must be connected to the Network yourself to use this power.

Devil in the Mind

With this power, you may cause a person to lose all impulse control and inhibitions, acting immediately on their impulses without being constrained by social morals or the judgment of others. Most people affected by this power are prone to violent outbursts, theft, and even assault, depending on what they want at the moment and how much others try to interfere with them. Some victims may have firmly held internal philosophies or values that this power does not shake, but a surprising number turn out to only follow the rules because they fear being judged by others.

Enigmatic Text

You may hide secret messages in patterns and clutter - writing, artwork, music, the arrangement of items in a room, a pile of trash, and anything else that you could conceivably arrange in such a way as to mean something. No matter how weird and esoteric your communication of choice, those who perceive it for more than a few seconds are suddenly struck by the knowledge of what it is trying to communicate (although what they do about this information, if anything, is up to them).

Kiss of the Moon

Like the cycles of the moon, you can cause your victims to cycle through different states themselves. You inflict two permanent derangements on them, but these derangements must be related in some way; each month they oscillate between one becoming ascendant as the other recedes at the full moon, and the other becoming ascendant at the new moon.

Shattered Mirror

By touching someone, you may inflict your entire personality on them for the rest of the evening, creating a composite personality from yours and theirs. They gain any derangements or other mental features (for example, addictions) that you have, as well as becoming inclined to behave similarly to you, although they retain free will and a similar amount of their own personality as well. You cannot control their actions while in this state, and many vampires have found to their disgruntlement that seeing their own flaws played out in someone else isn't nearly as much fun as they thought it might be.

Stain the Soul

By looking into a person's eyes or touching them, you may inflict one derangement on them permanently. This derangement is random, and you do not necessarily know what it is once you have inflicted it, although studying your victim's behavior may give you some clues.

Childmind

By touching someone or looking into their eyes, you may interfere with their mental processes, making them unable to access knowledge or skills except with great difficulty. They permanently lose several of their mental traits; you may cause a skilled surgeon to become clumsy and ignorant of human medicine, a scholar to suddenly find that they can't remember anything around the blank fog in their minds, or make someone once considered a genius regress into only being able to perform rote actions. Because this power cannot be reversed, it has been known to cause distressing side effects for those who use it, who may realize too late that they have obliterated the very knowledge or help they now need from someone.

Cobble the Road

By touching someone, you may affect the emotional building blocks of their personality, changing their Virtues to others of your choice. You may choose any Virtues you wish, transforming compassionate healers into violently zealous hunters and vice versa. In some cases, this causes your victim's entire morality path to change, as they may no longer hold the values required to pursue it.

Mind of a Killer

You may inflict a specific compulsion to commit cold-blooded murder on your victim, who is consumed with the idea and can focus on nothing else until they kill someone. You have no control over who they kill or how, but they are unable to resist for too long once opportunity presents itself. This power dissipates once your victim successfully intentionally kills someone; very rarely, if they make it to sunrise without having committed murder, they are freed from the compulsion.

Restructure

You may look into another person's eyes and change their most core self: their Nature, which you can reassign to any other you wish. This change is permanent, and while it is often initially unrecognizable (even to your victim themself), inevitably their behavior and morality will begin to change to match their new personality.

Sleep of Reason

While the idea of mental illnesses and fears as goblins in the mind is as old as the hills, you can make it a literal reality by touching someone, manifesting all their worst fears and mental conditions as literal, hideous creatures. These goblins count as chimerae for purposes of anyone else trying to affect them with supernatural powers. The goblins have no individual personalities or goals other than tormenting your victim, the person from whom they originall came, although if they are released for too long they may begin to inflict similar problems on others in the area as well. While few people manage to face their goblins instead of panicking, anyone who successfully manages to kill one will find that the fear or distress it represented no longer affects them for the rest of the night. The goblins cease to exist at sunrise, returning to being purely mental features of your victim's mind.

The Sword of Malkav

This power allows you to inflict an earth-shattering epiphany on someone; you may choose one fundamental truth that they believe in whole-heartedly and replace it with a new idea of your own, one that they not only believe in just as powerfully but are incapable of even questioning. They cannot fathom the idea of this new idea being untrue and cannot be talked out of it in any way. This power is a dangerous weapon in the hands of any zealous vampire, since it can change religions, redefine morality, or turn trusted scholars into raving conspiracy theorists.

Wave of Insanity

Your Total Insanity power can now be extended to everyone in the scene with you if you wish. You can exempt people if you want to (although most users of Dementation don't bother).

Coma

You may trap someone in their own mind by touching them, causing them to become incapable of communicating in any way; they lapse into unresponsive catatonia and are incapable of taking care of themself or recognizing others around them, consumed instead by their own thoughts and feelings. You may keep them in this state for weeks, months, or even years, as long as you visit them to use this power again intermittently.

Deny

This power allows you to weaponize denial, simply refusing to believe in things until they stop bothering you. You may choose a single object or person and refuse to believe in its existence; it becomes literally unreal to you and you can no longer perceive or interact with it in any way, while it is completely incapable of affecting you in return. A denied sword would simply go right through you with no injury, while a denied person could be screaming at the top of their lungs and go completely unnoticed by you. Since you cannot recognize whatever you have denied later, this power's effects are permanent, making it possible to lose access to important people or items if you fail to plan ahead.

Minds of the Children

You may now inflict mental confusion and ignorance on multiple people at once, the same as if you had used Childmind on each individual person. You can only do this to those in the same scene with you, but you need only touch or make eye contact with a single one of them.

Personal Scourge

Those with this power understand that the most foolish people are those who believe that they have the strongest and most inflexible minds; by touching someone, you may turn their Willpower against them, causing them to take unavoidable lethal damage from it each hour. They can mitigate this by using up their Willpower, of course, but it resumes as soon as they regain any, permanently making them pay for strength of mind with frailty of body.

Blessing of Chaos

You may intentionally sabotage your own mind so that no one else can interfere with it. You immediately gain five additional derangements, chosen at random, but the resulting mental chaos is so powerful that you can no longer be affected by anyone using Chimerstry, Dementation, Dominate, or Presence; these powers simply cannot affect a mind that is so violently different from the ones they are used to. In addition, while those with Auspex may still attempt to read your aura or even mind, they suffer a random temporary derangement for the rest of the night if they do so as their own mind is affected by coming too close to yours.

Lunatic Eruption

You may create an absolute bedlam of mass derangement, hysteria, terror, and riot for ten miles in every direction; every living or undead being within that area enters a mad rampage of uncontrolled emotions and violent lashing-out. Vampires and ghouls are likely to Frenzy, while everyone else acts as if enraged and maddened by phantoms. This power constitutes a major breach of the Masquerade and is very seldom used, since the ensuing seemingly-sourceless melees are difficult for anyone to explain.

Mass Coma

You may inflict the catatonic state you can cause with Coma on everyone in the scene with you, exempting people at your whim. While this power makes it much simpler to remove people from the equation en masse, it is much more difficult to maintain over a long period of time, as you must visit each individual person if you want to keep them catatonic for long.

Touch of the Saints

Just as you understand the minute details of mental illness, you know exactly how a mind is meant to function without causing its owner distress or confusion, and you can alleviate those symptoms with a touch. You may cure your victim of all derangements they currently possess, as well as any other external mental features (for example, embedded commands from Dominate). The person thus relieved is permanently cured of those problems, but can be affected again (or develop new illnesses) as they would normally be able to afterward.

Important Things to Keep in Mind

Derangements (and the real-life mental illnesses they model) are not convenient, funny, or easy to ignore; they cause very real and very difficult-to-manage effects, and any player affected by them should make the best-faith effort possible to portray them realistically. Users of Dementation may want to be sparing when it comes to affecting others; even a well-established court Malkavian might find themself bloodhunted if they meddle in the wrong person's emotions or show themself to be a loose cannon one time too many.