Players are maimed, poisoned, plagued and disintegrated. Those that survive see a lot of crazy things that , even in a fantasy world of elves and dwarves, would make for some truly disturbing dreams.

LJPDesigns Two Dozen Dangers: Insanity, provides 24 mental diseases to trouble the most strong-willed PCs. Insanity takes a different attempt on “mental anguish” than other PDFs have. The pathway is refreshing and makes insanity far easier to implement into a game. Most systems use some sort of extra hit point system to represent mentality. Two Dozen Dangers: Insanity slightly revises the disease rules already implemented in Pathfinder. The result is an easy integration that makes the entire game a bit more meaty, particularly any power that heals or prevents diseases.

The short 7-page PDF is made up of 24 of the insanities. Each insanity requires a will save to temporarily prevent the ill effects, and, borrowing from 4th edition, requires multiple occurrences and checks to completely cure.

For the DM Each insanity is broken down into types: traumas, horrors and spell sickness. In my current horror campaign, I find myself using creature exposure insanities such as Aberrant Sensorium, (which provides a serious mental illnesses for encountering those Cthullian inspired creatures), and Dust Nihilism, which drives those who encounter powerful undead a bit over the edge.

The Iron Word I love when people use what is already there and make it better. More than just a simple grouping of new things to inflict in PCs, adding mental diseases to physical diseases beefs up the entire disease system. The creativity of the 24 diseases range from nagging to borderline mean.

Two Dozen Dangers: Insanity by LPJ Design This b/w-pdf is 7 pages long, 1 page SRD and features some nice b/w-artwork.

Insanities in this book are treated as a kind of mental disease that works exactly like the mental equivalent of the physical ailments. The insanities portrayed herein all fit in one of three categories: Horror, Trauma or Spell-Sickness.

The insanities presented in this book are mostly interesting and fairly non-standard and all have a rather “magical”, distinctive fantasy-ish flair, i.e. you won’t find CoC-related or IRL-insanities in this little book, which I consider to be a plus.

The fluff-descriptions of the insanities range from fair to good.

The insanities are: Aberrant Sensorium, Black Futility, Death Friend, Draconic Obsession, Dust Nihilism, Dying Nostalgia, Elder Bane, Ergot Sickness, Fey Worry, Gigantaphobia, Labyrinthical Hysteria, Miser’s Curse, Mute Witness, Night Haunt, Pyroclastica, Refusal of Mortality, Regret of the Righteous, Shatter-Ear, Shapechanger’s Confusion, Sickening greed, Symbolic Compulsion, Temporal Isolation, The Trembling, Wretched Wilting.

Conclusion: While I liked most of the insanities, some of them felt not like insanities, but rather magical afflictions (Shatter-ear does sonic damage to the afflicted if someone is talked loudly to) and e.g. Elder Bane is a kind of senility, which I didn’t particularly care for. It is a nice plot-device, but old and venerable PCs are not that common and for NPCs you wouldn’t need this insanity, which renders it (mostly) obsolete.

Formatting is ok, but the file could have used another pass at editing: The ToC reads “Poisons” instead of “Insanity” and among others, one of the names of an insanity is misspell: “Labrynitical Hysteria”[sic!] should probably read “Labyrintical Hysteria”. As mentioned above, some insanities look more like magical afflictions to me. Due to the editing glitches and the fact that none of the insanities really made me yell “brilliant”, I’m going to rate this 2.5 stars, rounded down to 2.