Merits & Flaws

You’ve got a truly infernal temper: one so violent it feels like a volcano in your soul. As with a werewolf or vampire, you’re subject to the dreaded frenzy that turns you into an engine of hot rage. Under intense stress, you risk losing every shred of enlightenment you possess. Driven to such extremity, you let loose with the most immediately destructive powers at your command, and “vulgarity” be damned! Everyone in your vicinity becomes a target, and the consequences matter to you only when this inner storm has passed.

System

-wise, this Flaw sends you into deadly rages as per the

Berserker /Stress Atavism Trait featured in Mage 20, p. 644.

Instead of rolling your Willpower to avoid the frenzy, however, you roll your Avatar rating plus one die, with your Willpower as the difficulty of that roll. If, as an example, young Vyper Trabia suffers from the Beast Within Flaw, with an Avatar of 4 and a Willpower of 5, Vyper’s player rolls five dice against a difficulty of 5 when that Akashic hothead is under ferocious stress. A failure on that roll sends Vyper into a berserk rage. Yeah, this probably happens pretty often. Vyper’s friends don’t stick around for long when things go poorly.

(If you employ the optional Resonance Trait described in Chapter Two, you could substitute your highest Resonance, plus one die, as the dice pool for your rage. The roll’s difficulty is still your Willpower Trait, and your Resonance plus that extra die should at least equal, if not exceed, your Avatar Trait. In this case, the Resonance in question must be something capri­ ciously unstable – Wild, Primal, Ferocious, and so forth – instead of calm and centered energy. For details, see Four Flavors of

Resonance

, pp. 136-138.)

Considering that the Avatar could be seen as your inner Beast, a character with the Pattern Essence cannot take this Flaw. It’s best suited for Dynamic Essences, although a Quest­ ing or Primordial Avatar could attain frightening rages too. A berserk mage cannot employ rituals or employ complicated tools; only the most direct methods of attack – magickal or otherwise – will do. Although mages rarely suffer from such grotesque lapses of self-control, an Awakened Ghoul (as in that Merit), a cyborg, a Victor, a Shapechanger Kin (again, as per the Merit), or an animalistic shape-changer could possess such inhuman monstrousness.

For similarly bestial character traits, see the Mental Flaw:

Feral Mind (p. 52) and the Expanded Practice of Animalism in Chapter Three, pp. 197-199.