Modern: Madness is a very short pdf from Ronin Arts -- it clocks in at simply 11 pages, and costs a mere $1.75 from rpgnow's online shop. As it turns out, I didn't even have to pay that, as the book was a gift to me from a very generous online pal who was ordering some other pdfs and threw mine in there, since I couldn't order it by itself (it was under the minimum transaction amount limit.) The author is Bruce Baugh, famous mostly for his work with White Wolf, including on the Aberrant line and the d20 Gamma World line. Even a cursory glance at the product indicates that it's written essentially to replace the (now Open Content) Sanity rules from d20 Call of Cthulhu and Unearthed Arcana with a mechanism that does the same thing but is a) simpler to use, and b) more tightly integrated with the d20 system instead of a bolted on mechanic from an incompatible system (in this case, Basic Roleplaying.) In a few cases, the text behind them is nearly the same word for word, although the mechanics are different.
I should probably point out quickly that I'm a huge fan of Sanity in my games; the aforementioned d20 Cthulhu game is quite possibly my favorite gamebook ever published and I'm using the Sanity system, complete with inimical spells, dusty and dangerous tomes of forbidden knowledge, and the "messed up lore" skill in my fantasy homebrew. However, I've never really been very happy with the resolution mechanic, which bears no resemblance to any other resolution mechanic in the d20 system, and I've also never been very fond of the detailed clinical descriptions of the various forms of temporary insanity from that book, finding many of them not really very useful in play. So I was predisposed to like this product; one could almost say that it was written with me in mind (of course it wasn't, but it could have been) as I've been tinkering around with something like this myself and never really satisfied myself with my own creations.
As the title suggest, Modern: Madness is meant to be a bolt-on product to the d20 Modern game, and does occasionally make reference to skills that are not present in other d20 games (such as Dungeons & Dragons, naturally) or to the d20 Modern classes. However, it would be a quite simple matter to modify these by allowing another applicable skill to work in place of the d20 Modern skills, and the class references are very minimal and should have no significant impact. It's interesting that what is essentially a cleanup of the Cthulhu Sanity system is intended to be bolted on to d20 Modern however; it would allow for a slightly more action-oriented horror game, entirely appropriate for settings like Dark Matter, for instance.
The crux of the entire document is really the Sanity saving throw, which is essentially a Will save with a few extra modifiers added on. Rules are included on how to develop on the fly the Difficulty Class of this Saving Throw. Rules are also included for Sanity costs for creatures not from the Cthulhu book, or for converting the Sanity damage for those that are. As in the previous OGC Sanity rules, Sanity damage is "/" damage; that is, a successful save deals the damage on the left hand side of a slash (this number is often 0) and a failed save deals the damage on the right hand side of the slash. A big departure, however, is that instead of the damage being dealt to a Sanity score, it is converted into ability damage, half of which must be Wisdom damage, and the other half can be dealt to whatever score you (and the GM, of course) feel appropriate given the situation. This ability score damage heals like regular ability score damage. I really like this effect; chipping away at your Sanity in Cthulhu lacks any immediate effect, other than to make the player gradually more and more nervous as they see their character's score start to drop; in Bruce's system, you are sufficiently bothered by the experience that it impacts your effectiveness. Good call!
Because the damage is ability score damage, the numbers obviously had to be scaled differently. In Cthulhu, for instance, a character with an average or better Wisdom score has a starting Sanity probably somewhere between 50 and 75 or so. A relatively modest shock can therefore deal 1d6 Sanity damage on a failed roll, while something utterly Sanity blasting like seeing Cthulhu itself rise from the ocean is a 1d10/1d100 Sanity roll. The same checks in Bruce's Modern: Madness would be more along the lines of 1d2 or 1d3 for a modest shock, and 1d3/1d20 for equivalent damage to seeing Cthulhu.
Besides the actual Sanity checks themselves, Bruce tackles the question of using unnatural and twisted, corrupting magic, as the Cthulhu game does, by implementing a Sanity check that matches up to spell level. The table included here only goes to "5th+" level spells, showing again the focus on d20 Modern rather than D&D, although technically you can use 5th+ for spells all the way up to 9th anyway. The other neat thing about these rules are a number of modifiers that stack into the DC for the Sanity check depending on the nature of the spell. He gives an example, for instance, of a modern mystic of some kind that wants to cast a high-level spell enabling him to step into an extremely foreign and unnatural dimension to hunt some evil entity. The combined modifiers to the Saving Throw turned into a DC of 47 with damage of 3/1d6+5. Many high level spells will have similar modifiers which kind of ameliorates the fact that the table only goes up to 5th level if you're hoping to use these rules in a game that includes higher level spells. Of course, using the rules as written would mean that there's no occasion for this to come up anyway.
After that, we get to the Forbidden Lore skill, which is very similar to the skill of the same name from Unearthed Arcana. The major difference is that the skill is expanded somewhat to include such Cthulhu-like conventions are reading the Necronomicon as a way to gain ranks in this skill. There's also a better explanation of when this skill should be used, and when you'd use your standard Knowledge skills instead than the Cthulhu game gives.
The little pdf finishes up spending three pages describing what happens if you lose too much Sanity too fast; i.e.; beyond the ability damage, you can suffer the effects of Madness, which as in the Cthulhu rules come in three varieties, temporary Madness (which usually last from a number of rounds to a number of hours or days, and may, under extreme circumstances (i.e., rolling badly) result in a lasting quirk or personality tick that makes for great roleplaying potential), indefinite Madness which has a much more lasting effect on your character, to permanent Madness, which essentially turns him into an NPC incapable of continuing the campaign. This is also, as near as I can remember, taken almost directly from the Cthulhu and Unearthed Arcana rules, although the detailed clinical descriptions are omitted in favor of a more simplistic and pragmatic approach that describes what it does to your character. This is both good and bad; I would have liked to see some of the more unusual results that seem very strange in play (such as developing the sudden desire to stop and eat dirt when you see some kind of shocking alien horror coming towards you) removed and replaced with something that is more appropriate. The behavior is what happens to you when you are horrified and freaked out, and some of the results, while yes, clinically are psychological problems, seem thrown in without respect to how they make sense (or don't) in given circumstances. But that's a weakness (in my opinion) of the original rules on which this pdf is based, and there are suggestions for dealing with it by removing some of the random nature of the Madness result.
The pdf ends with a few quick rules on recovering from Madness, using psychologically knowledgeable characters, for instance, to engage in "field therapy." There are a few other little gems, such as rules for "delayed trauma" for Sanity checks; a section that I initially scoffed at as "for wimps" until I read it and was favorably impressed with how it works.
All in all, I'm quite pleased with this product, the entirely of which is Open Content, as a better alternative for Sanity than that printed in Unearthed Arcana yet covering all the same bases point for point. It's short, and the font isn't exactly dense either, but it is really cheap, the presentation and layout is good, and the rules themselves are really nice.
