Examples of The Corruption in Tabletop Games.
- Aberrant, White Wolf's superhero RPG, had Taint. The explanation was that the human body, even with the extra lobe and all, just wasn't suited to channeling the raw energies of the universe; channeling too much could affect your body in strange ways. It might start with glowy eyes and a strange timbre to your voice, but it would eventually grow into permanent stone skin, a short-range radiation effect... oh, and insanity. Thing is, to get to the true "break the universe" levels of power, you had to take Taint... The second edition subverts this by replacing Taint with Transcendence; you're still becoming increasingly inhuman, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. That said, there's still a measure of this trope with Flux, the side effect of messing with Quantum - and sure enough, enough Flux forces a new dot of Transcendence on you.
- Blue Rose has an actual mechanic named Corruption. How does it work? If you get corrupted, the more corruption you have and the more debilitating effects your character suffers. Get too much and it will kill you. But you can embrace corruption, in which cause you instead get buffed. The more corrupted you are, the more POWER you have!
- Call of Cthulhu may have been the original game to use this concept, with the Sanity score. The more you learn about the Cthulhu Mythos, the more effective a monster-hunter and magician you become... and the lower your Sanity drops until you eventually Go Mad from the Revelation and join the forces of the old ones. In game terms, your Maximum Sanity is 99 minus your ranks in the skill "Cthulhu Mythos". Getting enough ranks in the skill to make it usable (skill rolls in Call of Cthulhu are d100, roll under your skill number) means your sanity is fragile enough one good shock can leave you babbling.
- In Changeling: The Lost, one possible fate for changelings (given the toolbox nature of the game) is to turn into True Fae as they reach the zenith of their power (which is inevitably followed by the nadir of their Clarity).
- Eden Studio's Conspiracy X has the "Seepage" phenomenon, which occurs from dealing with the supernatural. When it corrupts a character, they start going insane. Continued exposure to seepage will at best turn your character into a babbling wreck, at worst it turns them into one of the things they were hunting.
- Dark Heresy has this as a game mechanic called Corruption Points. If you accumulate too many, you start to mutate...
- In The Dresden Files RPG players have to spend precious refresh points to gain new abilities, and when the refresh rate hits zero the character becomes so corrupted by power that they become unplayable. Interestingly, these abilities need not be supernatural and are sometimes forced upon characters who act in certain ways. A wizard breaking one of the laws of magic, for instance, must buy the Lawbreaker ability.
- The Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition sourcebook Oriental Adventures featured "Taint" as an effect of spending time in the Shadowlands or interacting with its natives. It came back as a setting-generic version in the 3.5 supplements Unearthed Arcana and Heroes of Horror: Taint slowly corrupts anyone who stays in a tainted area, performs evil actions, or is unlucky enough to fight a monster with the bestow taint ability. As your Taint score climbs, you go mad, endure horrific transformations, shift alignment to evil, and eventually turn into either a psychotic killer or a psychotic killer monster, at which point you roll up a new character.
- Heroes of Horror even includes Prestige Classes with a Taint Score requirement. They are all either about embracing corruption or accepting that its destructive power is inevitable — but not going down without a fight.
- Ravenloft has Powers checks: every time a character does something sufficiently wicked to call the attention of the Dark Powers of the demiplane, they may reward him with a special ability, which only serves to accelerate his damnation. Fail enough Powers checks to commit an Act of Ultimate Darkness and you end up a mockery of your former self, trapped forever in a domain of your own making.
- Dungeons Of Drakkenheim has Contamination, a mechanic that represents the ongoing physical and mental degeneration of those exposed to Delerium. Player characters gain a mutation every time they gain a Contamination level, and if their Contamination level rises to 6, they devolve completely into an insane mutant monster and become a hostile non-playercharacter.
- The Exsurgent virus family in Eclipse Phase is both this and The Virus. Different strains can infect computers...or flesh...and the result is never, ever pretty, usually featuring Body Horror and always featuring Mind Rape. Oh, and they're very, very adaptive. Like, normal-viruses-on-crack adaptive. A digital strain can infect a nanofabricator, reprogramming it to produce biological and nanotechnological variants, which then go on to infect other beings and devices. Oh, and it can also be transmitted as pure sensory information, so you can get infected just by watching the wrong video, known as a basilisk hack. It comes in many variants, but as a rule, infection with any strain of Exsurgent is a death sentence. The Haunting and Mindstealer strains mentally convert their victims into pawns of the virus over the course of months and minutes, respectively, imbuing them with mind-breaking mental abilities and alien motivations. The Xenomorph strain acts much the same as the Haunting strain, but it transforms the victim's body as well. The only (relatively) benign strain is Watts-MacLeod, which confers Psychic Powers without any overt downside. Nevertheless, these infectees often begin having dreams of alien landscapes, strange urges and feelings, and even a sensation that something else is looking out from behind their eyes...
- Fittingly, this is a major part of Eldritch Skies: Hyperspatial Exposure allows one to tap into Psychic Powers and Functional Magic at initial infection. Higher levels cause hallucinations, increased attention from the Eldritch Abominations that live in hyperspace, and Blue-and-Orange Morality. Maximum levels cause horrific mutation, and at that point, you can't reverse it.
- Exalted has three examples, which, in true Exalted style, has only one that is played straight.
- The Wyld, the unformed elemental Chaos that is the foundation of all things, has a tendency to mutate unprotected individuals, resulting in bizarre hybrids of man, animal, and Raksha. While it does have an effect on people's minds-it's addictive, and it tends to simplify people's personalities so that they're more literary character than man-the first is (usually) curable and the second is mostly an Informed Attribute.
- Desecration, the Yozis' power to modify humans and animals into forms more to their liking. This does not have an effect on minds unless the Charm causing it is supposed to be doing that, and for the most part, it's willing (although in the case of Cecelyne doing it, "willing" is a matter of semantics).
- The straight one is Gremlin Syndrome, a sort of pseudo-cancer derived from the Primordial Autochthon's sickness. See Nightmare Fuel for an explanation..
- This is the nasty downside of using arcanowave technology from Feng Shui, which is made of demons and Black Magic. Every time you use it, it sends bent magic into your system like a virus. If you use it too much, you start mutating into something horrific and run the risk of becoming an Abomination, one of the altered demons that the Buro, the government of the 2056 juncture where this technology hails, uses to fight its wars.
- In Geist: The Sin-Eaters, Sin Eaters turn into Meat Puppets if they come Back from the Dead one time too many,.
- GURPS provides ways of modelling the trope:
- Some character disadvantages are worth some number of character points in proportion to the evilness of whatever's corrupting you this week.
- GURPS Magic has rules for corrupting Black Magic. GURPS Thaumatology, a big book of variant magic systems, generalises these for all kinds of “spirit-assisted” magic. GURPS Thaumatology: Age of Gold, a setting which features multiple types of magic, includes instances of that type. In fact, one of the sample villains detailed, The Jungle Madness, is an example of where this leads; once a Central American sorceress, she is now a totally inhuman and dangerous supernatural creature.
- The Possessed (from Inferno) turns into the embodiment of their Demon's Vice, and so on.
- In Legend of the Five Rings, the Shadowlands is a vast wasteland infected with the evil of the hellish realm of Jigoku. Prolonged exposure to this evil realm infects living things with the Shadowlands Taint. Even the slightest scratch by anything in or from the Shadowlands can infect someone. The Taint causes increased strength, speed and reflexes along with psychological changes such as violent outbursts and paranoia. Even when killed, a Tainted body often becomes re-animated as a zombie. What few 'cures' exist are usually fatal and are more concerned with the well-being of one's soul than one's mortal body.
- To a lesser extent, many of the spirit realms have their own versions of the Taint, referred to as "Control," on those who visit them for an overly long time. Taint is merely the most famous, but you can also end up with animal traits, or afflicted with a strange sense of mental chaos and prankster-ness.
- The touch of the Lying Darkness also qualifies. Its effects can be incredibly powerful, allowing you to hide more effectively in the shadows and perform increasingly powerful darkness-related feats. However, in exchange, you lose your identity bit by bit, until you're faceless and have forgotten who you truly are.
- Recently, madness has become another example, at least in the card game. The influence of the Mad Dragon P'an Ku has manifested itself in a few different ways in the card game - most prominently, the Fallen Keyword indicates a figure under the influence of madness (though in some cases these were hallucinatory versions from the dreams of P'an Ku IF he wasn't stopped) and Madness tokens, which could have various effects and lead to other such effects.
- This is generally how Magic: The Gathering treats Phyrexia, especially while its remnants invade and warp Mirrodin.
- The Eldrazi have their own take on this.
- The Eldrazi have their own take on this.
- In Mythender, Corruption is technically how much you appear like a god, while Fate is how close you are to actually becoming a god (and yes, that's a bad thing; gods in Mythender ain't the cuddliest). The more Corruption you have, the easier it is to acquire more Fate, though, and you usually acquire both at the same time anyway.
- Nearly every single gameline in the New World of Darkness has Corruption in one form or another. Losing Morality is also a bit like this. You're less and less constrained by Morality as it falls, but if you hit zero, your character becomes unplayable. In fact, the Corruption is the gimmick of Cheiron Corporation's Hunters: they graft monster parts into their body. Squick.
- The protagonists of the Old World of Darkness game Demon: The Fallen have Torment, the spiritual residue of millennia in Hell. It afflicts all Fallen to some degree and can be used to supercharge a demon's powers, but doing so involves letting more Torment into your soul. It also acts as the game's Karma Meter: too much Torment turns you into a monster like the Earthbound.
- Wyrm taint in Werewolf: The Apocalypse corrupts a character's body and mind if left untreated. Gaia factions have rites for cleansing mild Wyrm taint, but severe Wyrm taint may necessitate an ordeal in Erebus.
- Wraith: The Oblivion has Angst, the fuel that feeds the soldiers of Oblivion. As each wraith has a Shadow in the back of their head beckoning them to give in, any act that feeds said Shadow (calling on its powers, following its advice, allowing it to take over temporarily and wreak havoc) allows it to accrue Angst. Once it hits permanent Angst 10, the wraith falls and becomes a Spectre.
- Flux works a little like this in Promethean: The Created. It is the antithesis of the creative power Azoth, waiting for a Promethean who has become disenchanted with the Pilgrimage to stumble upon it. Its trademark "gift" is mutation, slowly turning the user into an inhuman form, though it also grants control over Pandorans, its "children". Prometheans refer to the slow dive into irretrievable Centimani as being "seduced by Flux".
- Princess: The Hopeful has Dark Warping. Once a character becomes Darkened by suffering a Breaking Point inside a Tainted Area (or just spending too long in one), then every time he loses Integrity he has a chance to gain a new Umbra. Each Umbra grants a power, but it also comes with a hefty downside, often hideous deformation or something else that makes human interaction more difficult. On top of that, being Darkened blights the conscience, making Vice more emotionally rewarding and Virtue less, and making it easier to lose Integrity at Breaking Points. And if your Integrity hits zero while you've got at least one Umbra, you die and a bestial Darkspawn is born from your corpse.
- In both D6 and D20 versions of Star Wars the RPG, PCs could acquire Dark Side points by using the Force for aggression or by committing evil acts. In the D6 version, acquiring too many made you lose your character. In the D20 version, it eventually reduced your stats.
- In both d20 versions you can also lose a character with too many Dark Side points if the GM wants to run a light sided campaign, it's mentioned briefly in both rulebooks.
- The Dawn of Defiance campaign has this as a rule. You cannot be dark side, period.
- Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 bring us Chaos, possibly the most developed and frightening example to date. It's ruled by the four gods of mutation, plague, debauchery, and bloodshed.
- And when we say most developed, we mean most developed. The Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay has a whole book on chaos taint, Tome of Corruption, including a D1000 table for rolling up mutations, many of which have D10 to D100 tables of their own — of which 80% are a direct death sentence for your character either because they make him unable to live or because of the reactions of society. But it's certainly nice to have those tables... It says something about how nasty Tome of Corruption is that Black Crusade is actually Lighter and Softer, lacking pretty much all of the "Gotcha!" mutations, like Mindless, Chaos Spawn, Walking Head...
- Background material establishes that mutation will occur faster or slower based on which god a mortal worships primarily. The followers of Tzeench (the Lord of Change) are most prone to bizarre mutations (the Thousand Sons Legion became haunted suits of Powered Armor trying to avoid Tzeench's mutation). Followers of Nurgle (God of Plague) are guaranteed to be wracked with numerous diseases constantly (The Plague Champion in Dawn of War II even mentions that his body is liquifying!), while followers of Slaanesh (Prince of Excess) and Khorne (the Blood God) mutate more slowly.
- Warpstone is Chaos energy solidified into crystalline form, so while it's still as corruptive as true Chaos, it can also be used as Green Rocks by those blessed with either ignorance, a good sense of denial, or a willing embrace of Corruption.
- Yu-Gi-Oh!:
- "The Fool" grabbed a random magical terminal seeking power, but ended up accessing "Spellbook of the Master", a high-level "Spellbook" that brings out anything in a Magician, ranging from their best to their worst. However, he unleashed and was consumed by extremely wicked magic inside "Spellbook of the Master", corrupting and transforming him into "Reaper of Prophecy". As a result, he went on a rampage.
- From the Hidden Arsenal storyline, Cairngorgon, Antiluminescent Knight may be intended to represent the state of Gem-Knight Crystal after the final battle against Gishki Zielgigas and Evilswarm Ouroboros. With Sophia, God of Rebirth defeated, the united Gem-Knights' transformation into Gem-Knight Master Diamond beginning to fall apart. In the midst of this, Crystal appears to have been corrupted by the remnants of the Evilswarm virus and has either taken control of Diamond's crumbling body or reassembled his damaged body using the remains of his fallen comrades.
- This in turn gives birth to the force behind the Shadolls, who are themselves a form of The Corruption.
- Gishki Psychelone is an Verz/Evilswarm-infected Gishki Noelia.
