Gestalt: A Roleplaying game of the loss of self. - Foolz!

It is used for one of the five following effects:- To rise up the Dice track, one die per expenditure- To donate or take a test without Limitation- To remove a point from any of the Vicissitude tracks- To change a single die to a d20 for a single check.- To force the DM to lower their magnitude (one per point) for a single check.Discord is the DM’s fate point pool, and he begins each session with just one. Whenever the DMspends a point of discord, all players gain a point of Unity, however they cannot spend thispoint the turn its generated to try and counter the DM, or visa versa (though they can spendpreviously earned points).Whenever a point of Unity is spent, the DM gets one Discord point.Unity can be spent retroactively, Discord can’t.Vicissitudes:This represents the gestalt double edged sword, you’re capable of awesome things, but it canreally suck.All vicissitude tracks can be substituted at a rate of 2:1 (e.g. a character takes 3 Soma damagebut can’t afford to, he can instead cop 6 damage in the soul) and can be substituted in part orin full.Soma:Soma is the representation of the body as separate from mind and spirit, but due to the natureof the gestalt, that doesn’t mean much. Considering that it’s existential metaphysics keepingyour fucked-up-ed-ness in one contiguous pile, things that fuck with your head can leavephysical scars. Remember, Soma represents how you view the physical self just as much as it isyour little fleshy cage keeping you alive.In short: any failure deals damage. Regardless of the source (In some ways this makes youreally soft as sharp words can leave sledgehammer wounds, while in others it means you canshrug off bullet wounds like they’re noting. DMs however should be reasonable, using a pool ofeighteen d12s for a your mom joke deserves the following table flip). Damage is inflicted indifferences, that is for every three points the DM trumps your failing roll by, add a single markto the Soma track. Failure always results in at least one Soma mark however.Maxing the Soma track basically leaves you a physical trainwreck. You can’t dominate the body,participate in actions and in essence, your turn is passed over as you can’t do anything otherthan be a little cheerleader on the sidelines. Other characters can dominate without having tocompete with you for dominance.What can’t you do with max Soma: ActWhat you can do with max Soma: Donate, accrue and spend Unity.

Soul:Soul is the sense of self. You. Seeing as how you’re sharing room with a bunch of other poorsaps however, and this wreaks some pretty horrendous damage to your ability to keep youridentity coherent.Soul is expended as per the guidelines in the ‘Donation and Sacrifice’ section.Maxing the soul track leaves you listless and catatonic, we’re talking full depersonalisationand derealisation in one nasty package.What can’t you do with max Soul: DonateWhat can you do with max Soul: Act, accrue and spend unity.Psyche:The mind. Thoughts, memories, etc. The Soul might be ‘you’, but the mind is how you define‘you’, how you experience the world, how you comprehend all the sense data bombarding youevery day. Gogito Ergo Sum - I think therefore I am. The mind suffers whenever things don’twork with your fellows. Failing a bid for forced dominance or donating to a failed check all addPsyche damage (same way as Soma: one mark per three degrees of failure)Maxing Psyche turns you into a gibbering wreck and a creature of impulse and instinct. Higherfunctions shut down, all that’s left is a scared monkey running for cover.What can’t you do with max Psyche: Accrue and Spend UnityWhat can you do with max Psyche: Act, DonateIf a track goes over for any reason (e.g. Soma: a maxed character taking more damage, Soul:donating to a failure more dice than you had boxes left, Psyche: a maxed character failing adomination bid), the damage exceeding the track is split evenly among all players (rounded up)with a minimum of one damage.Donation and Sacrifice:The core of the game is your relationship with the other players, for better or worse.Donation is when you hand your dice to another player to help with a check. They add the diceyou’re willing to commit to the pool and roll, hoping for a high number. But there’s a catch…well, three catches.First: Failure duplicates all ill effects on the main actor on all donating players (though thedonating characters suffer damage in the mind track rather than the soma track)Second: each player can only donate up to three dice to a pool without sacrifice.Third: if the pile being donated results in the main actor’s pool being three or more dice largerthan the DM’s, sacrifice is also called for.To donate, you simply put your dice in the main actor’s pool.How does Sacrifice work? In game terms, characters are lending little fragments of themselves

in order for the other players to succeed, so they’re gambling their own sense of self for thebenefit of another.When a player adds more dice than the GM, or more than three dice (this doesn’t stack, so morethan three dice and more than the GM don’t cause double badness) and the check passes, theytake a single point of soul damage. On a failure, they take soul damage for every diecontributed to the test, even the ones in the ‘three dice safety threshold’.When a character is under one of their inspirations, they suffer none of the ill effects ofdonating, though a GM could reasonably end the inspired state quickly after a couple offailures or when the moment’s passed.When a character is under one of their adversities, they suffer all ill effects. A success inflictsthe same soul damage as a regular failure, regardless of how many dice are used, while afailure immediately results in the donating character suffering the total number of dice, notjust the ones he added to the pool, in soul damage.Actors and Domination:With all these rules, a point of clarification and an apology is owed…Main Actor: this is the character currently dominating. All characters can ‘act’ and urge the mainbody to do things at any time, which usually works out well because the gestalt has thecapacity for super-human speed, but the main actor is in control.- The main actor’s body is the one currently being inhabited and calls the shots, though asubordinate actor can try and ‘veto’ them by successfully dominating the body.- The main actor rolls six dice on every check without penaltySubordinate Actors: All characters not dominating fall in this category. They might as well bevoices in the main actor’s head, but they’re not useless… just impaired because the main actoris drowning them out.- Subordinate Actors can only roll three dice on a check without penalty, though a main actorcan veto them.- Subordinate actors must expend Soma to add up to three more dice to their pool (one Somaper die).- Subordinate actors have no physical presence, the main actor is the one with the body andthus the current looks, however a subordinate actor can speak through the gestalt and thevoice is theirs, regardless of what the main actor’s voice is like.Domination:A gestalt working together with singular purpose won’t ever see this happen as they’ll simplyrelinquish control to one another, but a divided gestalt will. Whenever a character wants totake over the main actor role, or a main actor wants to suppress a subordinate actor, they rolldomination.Simply: They roll off against each other with their full dice pools. Both sides can acceptdonations without penalty from sympathetic parties but neither side can use Unity points

against each other. The loser in a domination bid suffers Psyche damage, (and of course, soulfor the donations).Recovery:All damage recovers at a rate of one mark per ten minute’s rest game time. Gestalts havebenefits, as a full Soma track is roughly the equivalent of having 3rd degree burns on 90% ofthe body.Initiative:1d20 roll off. Highest number goes first. 20s raise the die magnitude one track, 1s lower it.Weaving:Weaving is the act of constantly shifting between characters to utilise related skillsets. Twocoders with different language backgrounds (lets assume python and emacs) couldtheoretically work together and constantly shift between each other for what would otherwisebe a horrendous task. Both parties and DM (using up to 12 dice) make a Domination roll, neitherparty can donate or accept donations. If the players win, the weaving allows both players toact as the main actor for the task they weaved for, but if the task finishes or is interrupted,they either have to roll dominance or at least one has to relinquish control. Combat is one ofthe tasks this can be used for. As they both act as the main actors, if one character suffersdamage, they both do equally.Note that as more than two characters can weave and the DM increases their dice pool by 6 peractor looking to join the process.When to hand in the character sheet:If you max all three tracks ‘you’ are functionally dead, but the damage is done and thefragments spawn a ‘Fictional’. The remaining characters, and the fictional that will be your newcharacter, colour in a proportion of the vicissitude tracks equal to your ‘fraction’ of the gestalt,rounded down. (say there’s three in the gestalt, you represented 1/3rd, you all colour in fiveboxes. Say you represented one sixth, 3 boxes are coloured). Nothing can remove thosecoloured in boxes, they stay as permanent damage to the gestalt. The fictional is a newcharacter, an abstract ‘dream’ of a person that the gestalt instinctively creates in place of theego that used to exist before. But with a whole host of uncanny valley thrown in the mix, and alife that never really happened, it creates a lot of discord with the other minds. Whenever aplayer dies and becomes a(nother) fictional, they remove one die from their dice pool (I.e. aplayer who does twice has a dice pool of 4 and so on. They cannot fall below one this way). Aone die fictional has the depth of a plate as a person, and can cause untold damage to thegestalt.

Note on test difficulty:1-3 is a simple task4-6 is a moderate task6-9 is a hard task (If no one's willing to donate, you'd best hope for decent dice)10-12 is an excruciating task (this is the point where people are taking Soul damage indonations)12-15 is an heroic task (danger zone of some serious shit, tiny but possible chance of healthycharacters dying outright)15-18 is an impossible task (danger zone of handing out new character sheets)18+ DM's a dick.