All your pretty treasures are just a fetter, a trap set to hold you down. Your wealth, your status, even your loved ones: at best they’ll come to naught but a line on your headstone.
Dice Pool: Manipulation + Satiety – Resolve
Normal: The victim loses access to a number of Social Merit dots equal to the Beast’s activation successes. The Beast’s player may allocate these lost dots as she sees fit, but she cannot partially shut down a Merit with a flat cost. For example, if the victim has the three dot Merit “Inspiring,” it cannot be reduced to a single dot. A scaled Merit like Resources, however, can be partially reduced. The “lost” Merits don’t actually go away, rather, the victim can’t seem to muster the energy to use them. It all just seems pointless.
High Satiety: Even as he recognizes the fleeting futility of all his possessions, the victim becomes obsessed with one single object or relationship in his life (chosen by the Beast) as emblematic of his legacy. He won’t willingly leave the object or the subject of the relationship without a successful Resolve + Composure action. If he is separated from it, he gains the Deprived Condition (see p.323). However, as long as he’s in the presence of his legacy, he gains the Inspired Condition.
Satiety Expenditure: The victim realizes with absolute clarity that his Social Merits are chains that he will never be free of — not unless he gets rid of them. The Beast may spend multiple Satiety on this effect, up to the number of successes on the activation roll. For each Satiety spent, the victim permanently loses one Social Merit dot the Beast blocked. He might give away his money and possessions, burn his bridges with friends and contacts, or forswear the vanity of physical beauty, for example. As with the temporary suppression of Merits described above, Merits with a flat cost cannot be partially destroyed. Finally, if this Nightmare is used on another player’s character, the Sanctity of Merits rule (p.112) applies.
Exceptional Success: No effect beyond blocking a very large number of Merit dots