Review: Asylum

This week I review another World of Darkness book: Asylum. Part a discourse on mental health treatment, part rules supplement on Medicine, and part location book, Asylum covers a lot of ground and covers it well. It's a tome I expect to keep mining for quite some time.

Asylum

Asylum begins with the usual fiction segment. It’s a nice of an overworked psychiatrist and sets up the horror feel of the game. After that Asylum jumps into the Introduction, outlining the theme of the asylum as a gulag for those society wants to hide away and a mood of isolation within an internal vastness. One part I really liked in the Introduction was a handy section on medical jargon.

Chapter 1: Total Bedlam focuses on the history of mental illness and its treatment from the earliest asylums to modern-day. The section includes a nice discussion of different viewpoints on mental illness, its cause, and possible treatment. While lacking in game material this section is definitely worth a read just to get grounded in the subject material. It reads a lot less dry than most ‘factual’ material that I have encountered in World of Darkness books (history sections for Mage: the Awakening I’m looking at you).

Chapter 2: Putting the Pieces Together is more practical, discussing how to create medical characters: nurses, doctors, psychologists, surgeons and so forth. It gives us guidelines on what their Attributes and Skills levels should be, what Merit dots they should have and how you might play them. It also features an expansion of the rules for the Medicine Skill, treatments for mental illnesses, new Derangements and a nice selection of useful merits. This chapter is full of good stuff, equal parts crunch and fluff, both of which are exceedingly very helpful. It is a good chapter to reference when building medical PCs and NPCs,

Chapter 3: Bishopgate - Built on Secrets brings us Bishopsgate Asylum from the dark history of the hill it is built upon to modern day, including all the horrid abuses of the Victorian era, 20th century eugenics experimentation and so on. Each age adds more secrets to its storied past, new layers to build your stories upon. Throughout we are provided in-game letters and records about the site. In my game, I printed out some of them and used them as handouts when a player character decided to research the site.

We start with the hill and the mysterious tunnels that predate the asylum's construction. This section comes across as quite Lovecraftian. Also in that vein we have the Teesdales family, beginning with the witch whose house once stood on the grounds and whose descendants keep popping up in its history.

We are also given a wonderful second pass through the history of mental health in the specific example of Bishopsgate. This chapter is full of story seeds related to each age of secrets: unresolved mysteries, possible connections to other supernatural creatures, and several story frames. After the history we have a description of the buildings themselves and the major ghosts that may haunt it .

In terms of story frames, we get outlines that could be used for entire Chronicles. They range from feuding supernatural factions, the idea that the asylum is a trap for a fallen angel, that the asylum is controlled by a paralyzed psychic, that it is haunted by the twisted creations of a well-intentioned psychiatrist who extracted the darkness from his patients, and a purely vile mundane conspiracy. I used several of those ideas already in my own games and will probably use the others in the future.

Chapter 4: Case Reports provides us 10 case files for people committed to Bishopsgate. Each is given a report, a history and several different interpretations about what is really going on. Are they just crazy or are the stories they tell at least partially true? We get stats for several possible monsters and how the PCs might investigate the truth of the patients’ claims. I haven’t mined this chapter as much as I could but each case file could be an entire sotry on its own.

Chapter 5: Staff records gives us a bunch of premade NPCs from staff to patients. Nothing amazing here but really helpful in a pinch.

Finally we have Appendix Reaping Madness which details ways supernaturals can interact with the asylum, how they might bend or break minds with their powers. Mostly it’s self evident. I haven’t used this chapter much myself.

Personal Experience

In my own games I’ve used the material extensively. I stole the name Bishopsgate for a district of my Changeling: the Lost setting Rosebriar. In the end I omitted almost all of the details from the mental health facility on the edge of the neighborhood (other than the tunnels below it and the Teesdales). I did use that material extensively in my Hunter: the Vigil chronicle, Corrupted Transmission, though I renamed the asylum the Hillcrest Center (and added material from another excellent book Mysterious Places). I expect I will eventually mine the case files as well when I need them.

Conclusion

Overall Asylum is an excellent book chock full of game ideas for any setting featuring mental health, insanity, or creepy locations. It is well worth buying even if you only use the Bishopsgate Asylum itself only once.