| Challenges | Hardening | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | Get attacked with a weapon. | 1–3 | Pretty normal. |
| 2. | Witness torture or a vampire drinking blood. Knock someone out in a fight. | 4–5 | Your attitude shows when it comes up in conversation— you may turn grim, or intense, or nervous. |
| 3. | Get shot at random; be tortured briefly. Knock someone out from stealth. | 6–7 | You’re used to it, and show little reaction to the prospect. |
| 4. | Kill someone in a fight. Witness brutal murder, such as a Garou eviscerating someone. | 8–9 | Your callousness is obvious in casual conversation. |
| 5. | Be present at a battle involving massive carnage. Kill someone whom you are sure is corrupt. Witness grisly murder. Be involved in a pitched battle where only one side is left standing at the end. | 10 | Your matter-of-fact attitude toward torture and brutality is obvious, or you work so hard to hide it you come off as guarded all the time. Life and death are not important; you may want to stay alive, but that’s just a matter of aesthetics. |
| 6. | Torture someone, or kill them in a grisly manner. Transform an unwilling person into a vampire. | Failure | |
| 7. | Kill a helpless target. | 1 | You’re a little edgy around the prospect of violence. |
| 8. | Be tortured for an hour or more. | 2 | You’re very aware of violence in the world, and consider people who think Hollywood depictions are accurate childish or fools. You are alert to the dangers. |
| 9. | Witness mass execution. | 3 | You become alert or uneasy at the sight or blood or a reasonable facsimile thereof. You get nightmares. |
| 10. | Watch as someone you love is tortured to death. Travel through combat as a lord of destruction, killing all who stand in your path and shrugging off all attacks because they cause negligible damage. | 4 | You instinctively prepare for trouble whenever you hear a loud noise or raised voice. Your nightmares are frequent, and you constantly perform threat estimates on everyone around you. |
| The Unnatural | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Challenges | Hardening | ||
| 1. | Feelings of strong deja vu, confrontation with the supernatural behind a veil (“That’t can’t be a vampire, that’s just another Goth...”), witness a person under the effects of a blessing or hex, or perform coincidental magick. | 1–3 | Pretty normal, though you may treat many New Age topics with derision either as skepticism or elitism. |
| 2. | See a vampire, werewolf, wraith, or demon. You might explain it as special effects or tricks of the light later, but it sure seemed real at the time. Experience scrying, aura reading, or shamanic travel. | 4–5 | You pay close attention to matters paranormal and supernatural, seeking to sort out the truth from the hype. |
| 3. | Realize that a vision you had of the future has come true. | 6–7 | You know beyond the shadow of a doubt that the world is a larger and stranger place than you were raised to believe, and you find it odd that people are unaware of the vast forces that manipulate them. |
| 4. | Witness obvious shapeshifting or teleportation. Realize that you have produced a blatant nonphysical effect (lit a candle by focussing your will). | 8–9 | You can see the fundamental interconnectedness of many things, and may acquire a reputation for amused or thoughtful reactions to what others consider meaningless coincidences. |
| 5. | Be successfully attacked with magic. | 10 | You now expect the unexpected, and have to make a concerted effort to react as if anything unusual surprises you. |
| 6. | See someone you know killed by magic, with no sane way to rationalize it. | Failure | |
| 7. | Have a conversation with a loved one you know is dead. | 1 | You’ve turned a bit superstitious. |
| 8. | See an animal with human features. | 2 | You have a few nightmares, and have developed a suspicion of or fascination with the occult. |
| 9. | See the dead rise. | 3 | You frequently feel like you’re being watched, and have begun to perceive patterns in what was formerly noise— the noise of water splashing in a fountain becoming voices, or faces in the clouds. |
| 10. | Realize that someone who has been close to you for years is an inhuman supernatural being, so totally other that your relationship cannot have been anything but a sham.. | 4 | You often feel as if there are presences around you, but they aren’t there when you swing around at a hint of perceived motion in your peripheral vision. You get frequent nightmares, and often cannot tell them as such until you awaken. |
| Challenges | Hardening | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | Spend a day without seeing a familiar face. | 1–3 | Pretty normal. You may be a bit standoffish or curt. |
| 2. | Spend five hours in a sensory deprivation tank. Conceal your nature as an Innerwalker or supernatural being from a loved one. | 4–5 | You can be unthinkingly rude at times. |
| 3. | Spend three days without talking to another human being. Spend one day lost in the Netherworld (if you don’t know what the place is). | 6–7 | You lack patience with people who don’t understand what you’re trying to tell them, which you find obvious. (You need to think about it to remember to explain things.) |
| 4. | Be institutionalized by someone you love and trust. Return from the Netherworld to find that your personal history— as far as your loved ones understand it— has changed. | 8–9 | Unless you’re concentrating, you’re completely lacking in conversational skills, and social conventions such as shaving, dressing, and bathing begin to seem meaningless to you. |
| 5. | Spend a week in solitary confinement. Discover your home era has changed to a different juncture. (First time only.) Realize that knowledge of your nature would horrify most normal people. | 10 | You don’t care what people think about you, and you can’t imagine why anybody would care. |
| 6. | See someone you thought you knew extremely well acting completely out of character. Experience lateral reincarnation. | Failure | |
| 7. | Spend a month in a country where no one speaks your language and you can’t make yourself understood, no matter what. | 1 | You can get along in normal society, though you may be a bit shy, and feel a kind of gratitude whenever a new acquaintance doesn’t reject you. |
| 8. | Be deeply, painfully, and violently betrayed by someone you love. | 2 | You’re a bit nervous around new people, and may become a chatterbox or very shy as you try to make a good impression or at least not make a bad one. |
| 9. | Be treated like a stranger by your closest friends. | 3 | You are uncomfortable with silence, and can have insomnia when sleeping alone. Sometimes you talk to yourself or think out loud when you’re not paying attention. |
| 10. | Spend a month in a sensory deprivation tank. | 4 | Sometimes you have panic attacks when you’re all alone or surrounded by strangers. |
| Challenges | Hardening | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | Unintentionally humiliate yourself in public. | 1–3 | You’re a tad pessimistic or fatalistic; “Shit happens” or the equivalent is prominent in your vocabulary. |
| 2. | Get fired from a job you love. Be swallowed whole by a horrific creature, or encased in its secretions. | 4–6 | When things are going wrong in a big way or trouble just came out of left field, you handle it remarkably well. (This is not incompatible with two failed notches: you can be upset over small things and placid about big ones.) |
| 3. | Fail at something when it’s imperative that you succeed. | ||
| 4. | Get dumped into a pit of maggots. Be forcibly transformed into a bloodsucking fiend. | 7–9 | You have a boundless faith in the perversity of the universe, and may easily mistake conspiracy for the usual effects of Murphy’s Law. |
| 5. | Spend a month in jail. | 10 | You’ve lost sight of the distinction between incident and accident. You may believe that everything is predestined or random; free will is a bad joke. |
| 6. | Watch a videotape of your spouse committing adultery. Experience blackmail on the order of “do this or I’ll kill/torture your friends, and it will be your fault.” | Failure | |
| 7. | Be placed in a situation where you have to cut off one of your own limbs or die. | 1 | Pretty normal. You may be a bit finicky or meticulous in your attempts to head off Murphy at the pass. |
| 8. | Watch someone you love die. | 2 | You get nervous, upset, or pessimistic when small things go wrong. |
| 9. | Watch someone you love die because you tried to save them and failed. | 3 | You have an intense dislike for surprises, even good ones. |
| 10. | Be possessed, yet aware, as your body commits unspeakable acts against your will. | 4 | You find it very difficult to trust anything; you perceive your tools, your friends, even yourself as intrinsically unreliable. You have a tendency toward compulsive behaviors such as regularly rechecking to make sure your door is locked when you leave the house. |
| Self | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Challenges | Hardening | ||
| 1. | Break a minor promise. | 1–3 | People may find you to be a bit brittle or phony. |
| 2. | Be confronted with proof that your self-image is inaccurate. | 4–5 | Even when you’re telling the truth, people often think you’re lying, unless you make a particular effort to act “natural”. |
| 3. | Secretly gratify an urge that is unacceptable to your upbringing and background. | 6–7 | You’ve lost a sense of connection to those who were previously close to you. You may be able to predict their actions, but you no longer know exactly what you feel about them. |
| 4. | Lie to conceal some aspect of your personality from a person close to you who trusts you implicitly. Kill someone who is just doing their job without understanding that they’re supporting something morally wrong. | 8–9 | Half the time, you only know that you’re telling the truth if you take a minute to think about it. Truth and lies aren’t nearly as important as they used to be, back before you quit lying to yourself... |
| 5. | Decide not to act on one of your better impulses because “it’s too dangerous.” | 10 | Life has been pared down to the essentials for you; you have no aesthetic opinions, and you have lost the ability to enjoy or dislike things, because there’s so little “you” there to interact. |
| 6. | Deliberately deceive someone you love in a way that is certain to cause them anguish if they find out. | Failure | |
| 7. | Discover that you have inadvertantly committed an act of cannibalism, murdered innocents under the impression they were corrupt, or killed an innocent you thought you had only rendered unconscious. | 1 | Occasionally, you have a sense of dissociation, where you feel dissociated from your own self. |
| 8. | Deliberately act completely contrary to your own moral system. | 2 | You question yourself regularly, and tend to become introspective when someone mentions matters such as “truth,” “lies,” and “promises.” |
| 9. | Kill someone you love. | 3 | Half the time, you feel like you’re an actor playing a role, your actions rehearsed, forced, or fake. |
| 10. | Deliberately destroy everything you’ve risked your life to support. | 4 | You frequently feel as if you’re just along for the ride in your own life. |