234. Trauma Fatigue

Transhumanity has been through a lot, and continues to go through a great deal. Even before the Fall, Earth was slowly collapsing, climate shifts causing droughts, floods and famines, leading to political instability, and political instability to wars. Ruinous chaos in one sphere destabilizes others, and the dominoes never stopped falling.The rich and powerful did their best to isolate themselves, either in enclaves on Earth or, better yet, off Earth entirely. They bankrolled most of the technology and infrastructure that allows for any life off-Earth, but the majority of the population the refugees that followed them.

Rates of PTSD are higher than they have ever been among the general population. The combination of unique stressors, mental augmentations, psychosurgeries, designer drugs, nanodrugs, and simulspaces sometimes seem designed to break minds in strange and new ways. One of the most common of these new disorders has been tentatively dubbed "trauma fatigue".

Trauma fatigue is as yet poorly defined. Although psychosurgery and brain scanning allows potentially complete information on a patient's mind, but trauma fatigue itself is inconsistent. The constants are a history of traumas and an unpredictable response to stress; sometimes responses will be exaggerated, at other times muted. Brain prints sometimes show unusual structures in the hypothalamus or pituitary, but the meaning of these structures remains elusive and the structures exist in a minority of patients in any case.

Mechanics

Trauma fatigue is a negative ego trait giving a 10 CP bonus, or could, at the GM's discretion, be taken as a derangement for a regularly traumatized character.

Every time an ego with trauma fatigue takes stress, flip a coin. On heads, they take half the stress. On tails, they take double the stress.