Also known as:
- Ontological Flux Disorder (O.F.U.X.D. for short)
- Matrix Glitching
- Aetheric Drift
- Being Fucking Haunted
Otherspace Sickness is characterized primarily by the repeated intrusion of Otherspaces into the personal experience of the sufferer.
Whenever you open a door, seawater or desert sands might rush out. Snakes may slither from under a dim bed. Who knows who might stand on the stage when the curtains go up? Or who will be in the rows around you when the lights go up? Any time the sufferer passes through or opens some threshold a misplaced piece of unreality might be on the other side.
Eventually you go missing or you’ve given up any hope of understanding which of the realities is “baseline”. If you’re smart and sharp enough you figure out how to get off the train before it reaches that destination.
The Cause, The Cure
Otherspace Sickness never comes on alone. It is always precipitated by some contact with the strange and unnatural which sets off the sickness: Passing through a Hall of Mirrors with impossible geometry, deeply insulting an Archetype with domain over liminality, handling an artifact from an otherspace that wants to return home. Graffiting over a sigil of stability that was keeping our world from becoming undone and becoming the center of the destabilization.
Whatever caused the Sickness is the cure. Pass back through the Hall, make peace with the Godwalker of the Shaman, find where the artifact came from and help it find its way back. Figure out what that sigil was, sneak into the abandoned subway station in the dead of night through the labyrinth of tunnels and ghost trains, and tag it before the universe self-stabilizes by removing you from it.
The mental damage remains.
Progression
Progression ultimately depends on the nature of the Sickness. Or, in playable terms – GM fiat.
Initial infection: Cases of Otherspace Sickness originating from the same vector begin with the same sudden and total substitution of reality in the blink of an eye. Examples:
- A vast, dead moon looking up at an alien sky.
- Looking out at a grey cloudy sky and a grey angry ocean up on a cliff.
- A field of sunflowers that is painfully bright and beautiful.
This perception ends abruptly (after at most a minute) and causes a Rank 4-7 Unnatural check.
Growing anxiety: Following this, small visual and auditory manifestations may occur – strange noises of birds singing flutelike music, shifting shadows in lit rooms, shifting lights in dim rooms, the distant sound of machines. These are, at most, Rank 1-2 Unnatural checks and are not perceivable by those not similarity afflicted. It’s just in your head.
It’s around you: The physical manifestations become undeniable. Objects appear where they shouldn’t – the aforementioned snakes under your bed. They’re actually there, for everyone, including innocent bystanders. Expect Rank 3-6 Unnatural checks here.
If you go looking for otherspaces you can find them. On a successful Secrecy or Casts Gutter Magick roll you can find a passage to a (currently) adjacent otherspace. On a matched success you can actually have some say in what it is. On a failure nothing happens, and worse than that is subject to whatever the Handler finds entertaining.
You’re in it now: You start slipping into otherspaces; passing through thresholds carries with it a chance of being briefly spirited away to an otherspace. Or not so briefly.
Things start coming through. Sometimes the rules of physics change on you for a few minutes. Rank 5-10 Unnatural checks become fair game as your sense of reality is directly undermined.
At this point victims become intuitively aware of adjacent otherspaces. This might manifest in some irrational behavior as you plead with your loved one not to open a closet that leads to the deadly void of space. But you shouldn’t be around anyone you care about at this point.
It’s too late: Once you hit 5 failed notches under the influence of Otherspace Sickness, you gain the disorder Untethered from Reality – until you receive some kind of treatment you no longer have any idea whether or not you’ve returned to baseline reality. Even with treatment you’ll never really be sure.
While untethered, you may find it hard or even impossible to find your way back home next time you enter an otherspace. Hopefully your friends keep you in sight.
Palliative Measures
Gutter magick is sometimes capable of slowing or halting the progression of the sickness – you just iterate the victim’s connection to the current Otherspace. And as noted above, in more advanced cases of Otherspace Sickness you are able to influence which adjacent otherspaces you visit. Failure in these cases has especially undocumented behavior.
Specific rituals may or may not exist with more targeted effects. Ask your local Rook1.
Avatars of the Shaman and narco-alchemists will find that Otherspace Sickness falls under their random magic domain.
Example: The Flower Fields
There’s a graveyard at the edge of a town. In that graveyard, there is a crypt. Spend a full moon in that crypt with its broad obsidian doors shut tight. During the brief few minutes that the sun is cresting over the horizon those doors will open to a beautiful field of tall grey tulip flowers and an intoxicating aroma of sugar and pollen, suspended in perpetual dawn. Returning to the crypt, closing the doors, and waiting until the dawn breaks brings you back.
But the scent follows you. Within the next 24 hours the initial infection kicks off – victims will see the flower field through a window or other opening and be overwhelmed with the scent of sweet pollen (Rank 4 Unnatural). This perception resolves itself within a few seconds.
From that point on you’ll occasionally smell that pollen. You’ll spot individual grey tulips in nature for fleeting moments before they resolve back into their appropriate shapes. Scurrying noises of insects around corners and when you turn on lights in pitch-dark rooms. It becomes harder to breathe as the air is substituted for thick pollen (Rank 3 Helplessness, may apply penalties to Fitness rolls). Things are coming through.
A few weeks later you may find that the floors of elevators are covered with dry grass that only you can see (Rank 2 Unnatural, Rank 2 Isolation). You might be chased down by swarms of monochromatic insects with too many fragile eyes, even for insects (Rank 2 Unnatural). And you might find the ground falling out under you leave you in pools of deep, dark water and you paddle blindly until you find your way to a shore of black sand under a moonless starry eternal night until you find that any new source of light cuts through this flimsy reality and brings you back to where you were, drenched in sugar water (Rank 6 Unnatural, Rank 5 Helplessness). You’re in it now, at the mercy of that which is under the skin of the world.
The cure is a tea made from those grey flowers. Return to the crypt and collect at least 3 grey tulip bulbs. Steep them for at least 3 minutes at boiling temperature. Immediately decant the bitter fluid and drink it in one gulp (Rank 5 Helplessness to do it in one gulp, 2d10 damage from drinking near-boiling water). The longer you wait, the less effective the cure is – instead, it sets back the progression of the illness.
The Sickness of the Flower Fields cannot be slowed by gutter magick. You are able to use gutter magick to tilt towards adjoining otherspaces; however, these will never be populated by anything but grey tulips.
GM Notes
Due to the extremely broad nature of otherspaces, almost any other supernatural effect can be reproduced simply by virtue of being part of the natural order of an unnatural otherspace. Otherspaces are blank checks to do whatever you want and Otherspace Sickness is a machine that lets you print blank checks.
Otherspace Sickness is extremely disempowering. Be aware of the amount of control that you’re taking away from your players over their ability to affect the world. Or lean into it.
The example Sickness directly contradicts the claim that all initial infections present with total substitutions of phenomenological reality and several guidelines about progression and stress checks. That’s fine.
Per Book 5, virtual otherspaces exist, otherspaces that exist as experiences of individual minds. A virtual otherspace sickness in full bloom would be a series of endless awakenings.
Cultural Touchpoints
Impossible Landscapes, Disney’s Haunted Mansion (when a ghost follows them home). Anything where the line between dreams and reality is blurred.
mellonbread brought to my attention Gate Bleed, which is a similar thing but for Eclipse Phase. Convergent evolution I guess.
- Or duke/duchess, or charger. ↩︎