Violence

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

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.

Isolation

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.

Helplessness

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

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.