Mind Rape/Tabletop Games: Difference between revisions

 

* In ''[[Magic: The Gathering|Magic the Gathering]]'', most cards that force a player to discard cards from their hand or their deck are flavored like this. It doesn't help matters that these cards tend to be blue (the color of the mind, mind control and trickery, among other things), black (the color of corruption, insanity and power at all costs, among other things) or both.

** As well as creating entire races just so they would fear it and then proceed to feed on that fear.

** Eldar Farseers can have a psychic ability called 'Mind War,' essentially a Mind Rape as a weapon to burn out an enemy's brain and kill them.

** The process of creating an astropath involves a normal human psyker making psychic contact with the Emperor for a brief instant. The process is so traumatic that it burns out the subject's eyes.

*** And since [[Psychic Powers]] are drawn from a [[Hyperspace Is a Scary Place|hell-dimension]] Psykers in general face a lifetime with the threat of suddenly being Mind Raped at any moment. For the lucky ones, [[Mind Rape]] is the worst thing that happens. For the unlucky ones [[The Corruption|there]] [[Body Horror|is]] [[The Dark Side|worse]]. [[Demonic Possession|Much worse]]. For the very lucky, it's a [[Burn the Witch|short]] [[Better to Die Than Be Killed|lifetime]].

** Inquisitors frequently use this one. Inquisitor [[Ravenor]] is particularly adept at this. Partially subverted in the Ravenor series of novels where the titular character performs the closest thing to a benign [[Mind Rape]], taking physical and mental control of the wearer but still being them at the same time. This is almost always traumatic and allows Ravenor total access to any and all of the persons memories. He only does it as a last resort.

** What the Emperor uses on Horus destroying, destroying his soul, which was some really nasty business -- ending the [[Horus Heresy]].

** The implication is that with the Mind Rape spell is something that a) hurts a lot and b) is actually forcibly removing the memories and character traits. Selective Amnesia is a subtle blocking of certain parts. Both are a violation, but the implication is that the Amnesia is supposed to be used for blocking traumatic experiences and such.

** Another spell exists in the divination category called Terrible Secret, which causes the caster to reveal a mind-shattering secret to his opponent. The secret is so horrifying it causes the creatures brain to simply malfunction and potentially. It can also be applied to a group with the upgraded Terrible Revelation.

** Normally the good guys don't get to do this, but in the book "Exalted Deeds", the good counterpart to the "Book of Vile Darkness", there's an Exalted Spell that does this.

*** Specifically, "Sanctify the Wicked" traps an evil person's soul in a crystal and aggressively [[Care Bear Stare]]'s them until they are ready to be let out. When they emerge, their alignment has radically shifted to be the Good alignment you prescribed. You basically break their mind and permanently change their entire personality. And this is supposed to be a ''Good'' act.

** Surprised no one has mentioned the Mindflayers (Illithids). They have tentacles that they use, at close range, to actually penetrate the head of the victim, suck the brain out and eat it. At a distance, they have psionic powers that can mind rape a character as well; possible effects include permanent insanity, rage, confusion, coma, and death. I'd say that pretty well qualifies.

** In 4th Edition, there is a "psychic" damage type, implied to be exactly this. ''[[Fridge Horror|It can kill people.]]''

* ''[[Mage: The Awakening]]'' has a spell called "Psychic Violation" which essentially does this to people. The effects include sapping their will, potentially driving them insane, and giving them a pathological need to avoid confronting the caster. There is another spell, "Nightmare Journey", which takes the concept of [[Mind Rape]] a step further by detaching the subject's consciousness, and ''projecting it into the mind of a [[Cosmic Horror]]''. Both spells are mostly practiced by a group of mages whose ''whole creed'' essentially revolves around [[Mind Rape]], and can only be performed by a person with a criminal mentality without potentially putting a ding in the [[Karma Meter]].

** There is also "Dislodge the Soul" a spell that allows one to mess around with a person's soul so that they lose all feeling of connection or empathy for other humans (this is represented in game terms by automatically failing any roll to prevent a ding to the [[Karma Meter]]), an experience that can be intensely disturbing for those who experience it. The only way to recover (without magic) is to engage in activities that reaffirm one's connection to humanity (such as a parent playing with their children); this naturally becomes more difficult as [[Karma Meter|Morality]] decreases. It is also possible for the casting mage to take a glimpse at what lies behind the damaged soul. Most find it ''incredibly'' disturbing; the Echo Walkers (who invented the spell) find it ''inspirational'', as they believe it lets them see the [[Our Angels Are Different|angels]] they want to emulate.

** [[Mind Rape]] tends to be what [[Changeling: The Lost|changelings]] go through during their stay in Arcadia. Notably, the driving ethos of many of the changeling Courts seem akin to the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

** The Earthbound of ''[[Demon: The Fallen]]'' have access to the Lore of Violations. Its second rank is called "Mind Rape," which allows an Earthbound to rummage through a mortal's thoughts and memories, causing physical damage in the process.

** The ''flavor'' explanation is that a discard spell functions by reaching into the enemy mage's mind and destroying their knowledge of particular spells before they can be cast. There's an example in the Ice Age block novelisations where the protagonist, Archmage Jodah, engages in a battle with an evil wizard. He gains an advantage by using mass-discard spells to tear apart his opponent's mental library of spells.

** And there's an in-story example in ''Agents of Artifice'', where {{spoiler|Jace Beleren does this to Tezzeret after winning a duel against him, in a rare hero-to-villain example.}}

** On a different line of logic, if a player cannot draw a card because his/her library (Magic-speak for a player's deck while in a game) is empty, he/she immediately loses, described in-universe as that planeswalker going insane and being unable to continue fighting. There are some spells like [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=190177 Traumatize] and [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=83597 Glimpse the Unthinkable] that put cards directly from your opponent's library into their graveyard, which tend to have this type of theme.

* ''[[Exalted]]'' has quite a lot of mindrape powers, most spectacular being the Border of Kaleidoscopic Logic Kung Fu style, which cannot only fundamentally and permanently rewrite one's mind, but also do things like permanently locking the target in an illusion of being a perfect, flawless being, or denying the target the capability to comprehend any spoken or written language, ever.

** Oh, there is one that beats this by several orders of magnitude: the process of [[Deal with the Devil|becoming an akuma]]. The ''mind''rape part, which goes on for hours, is bad enough. The next part, the ''soul'' rape, goes on for ''days''. At the end of it, your personality and memories have been hacked up with a rusty cleaver and put together in a variety of horrible fashions (such as your happy childhood being converted into fifteen years of hellish abuse), and your former Motivation has been violently ripped out and replaced with an Urge, essentially a command that you can't gainsay (such as to end the worship of Ahlat or corrupt the Dragon-Blooded with demonic taint). And [[It Got Worse|it gets worse]]. If you complete your Urge, you have to ''go through the whole thing again in order to get a new one''. (And if your Urge becomes impossible, such as if you're programmed to kill someone and he gets hit by a stray Death of Obsidian Butterflies, you almost invariably go mad.) Unsurprisingly, the Yozis take care not to advertise that this is what happens when you sign up to their "get more power by serving the Yozis" deal.

 

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