sanity

The single most important trait in the role-playing game Call of Cthulhu. It measures your character's mental stability, the higher the better and is a product of your character's POW. Every time you experience something traumatic, terrifying, or learn about the true nature of the universe your sanity score goes down. Read those Pnakotic Manuscripts you found during you last adventure and it goes down. Have your brain removed and stored in a jar by the foul Funghi from Yuggoth and it goes down. See Cthulhu in all his naked, tentacled glory it it goes way down. And when the score reaches zero, your character goes stark raving mad.

There are some ways to recover lost sanity points (although spending time in a mental institution tends to do more harm than good), but you tend to lose them faster than you recover them. Call of Cthulhu is probably the only game where you're more likely to end your career in a padded cell than actually die. This tends to encourage extreme caution among players and discourage hoarding of ancient, mystical, manuscripts and artifacts.

An excellent Amiga scene group writing some of the most surreal demos. Sanity were known for being almost anti-design. Chaos would say in the disk mags that only code mattered. Ironic, considering their most famous production was Arte, a very well-designed demo.

An incomplete memberlist:

• Jester (music)
• Moby (music)
  No, not that Moby, this is another guy. He is now called El Mobo and writes game music for a living. Formerly a member of Alliance Design/Quartex, went on to Noon after Sanity.
• Virgill (music)
  Joined TRSI later.
• Cougar (graphics)
• Havok (graphics)
• Ra (graphics)
  Left for Noon after Sanity.
• Chaos (coding)
• Cosmos (coding)
• Microforce (coding)
• Mr. Pet (coding)

Among their demos are:

• Arte from 1992 was one of their biggest successes, made as a collaboration between their French and German members (like the tv station of the same name). It was a tour de force in compact code, showing several diferent algorithms, such as shader bobs, scaled vector graphics, and mapped textures.
• Jesterday, a music disc with 8 .mods by Jester, and graphics by Cougar.
• World of Commodore, a demo famous for lacking design. It also featured music by Moby, as most Sanity demos did. Had morphing M.C. Escher pictures.

Audited March 11, 2002

San"i*ty (?), n. [L. saniras, from sanus sound, healthy. See Sane.]

The condition or quality of being sane; soundness of health of body or mind, especially of the mind; saneness.

 

© Webster 1913.