Overview
Sanity is one of the two principal player-character resources in Lord of Mysteries alongside Acting. Every Beyonder ability has a sanity cost, every supernatural encounter risks a sanity loss, and dropping sanity below a threshold puts the character on the path to permanent madness.
The system is borrowed directly from the source material's framing: the closer a Beyonder leans into mysticism, the more their mind frays, and the harder it becomes to stay 'human' on the way up the Sequence ladder.
Sanity Level vs Pathway Level
The game has two separate progression meters that should not be confused:
Sanity Level: governs the maximum sanity pool, the safe daily-use sanity budget, and certain gear-tier eligibilities. Sanity Level is reported by beta testers to be used to gate the player's progression speed independently of Sequence advancement.
Pathway Level / Sequence: the Sequence number on the player's chosen Pathway, from Sequence 9 (entry) to Sequence 0 (god-tier). Advancement is gated by potions, the Acting Method, and Sequence-specific ritual ceremonies.
The two meters are deliberately decoupled. A player with a high Sanity Level still drinks the same Sequence-specific potion to advance, and a Sequence 9 character can have a substantial Sanity Level if they have invested in non-Sequence-related play.
Sources of Sanity Loss
Drinking a Beyonder potion is by far the largest single sanity drain. Sequence 9 potions cost moderate sanity even with high Acting; later Sequences scale up sharply.
Witnessing a high-Sequence ritual, fighting an Outer-Worldly entity, entering the Gray Fog, or staring directly at a divine artefact all impose flat sanity hits.
Using Beyonder abilities in combat costs ability-specific sanity per cast. High-tier and area-of-effect abilities cost more.
Failing an Acting check during a story scene takes a flat sanity penalty.
Repeated exposure stacks. Spending hours in a high-density mysticism zone (a contaminated dungeon, an anomalous mansion) racks up small ticks that total to a meaningful drain over a session.
Sanity Bands
The sanity bar is partitioned into named bands. Each band changes UI tone, dialogue colour, and how easily the character resists corruption rolls. The exact thresholds and band names below reflect the source-material framing the game adapts; specific in-game band names may differ in localisation.
Calm (high sanity): no penalties.
Strained: minor effects. NPCs note that the character 'looks tired'. Beyonder ability sanity cost rises slightly.
Frayed: significant penalties. Periodic visual hallucinations rendered as in-world overlays, dialogue choices show fewer options, and certain rituals can fail outright.
Brink: the character is at risk of madness on every supernatural exposure. Combat camera distorts; ambient sound mutates.
Madness (zero): the character collapses into a temporary madness state. Madness can be temporary (recovered after a long-rest activity), uncertain (requires a quest-line cure or an aligned Beyonder ritual), or permanent (the character is permanently corrupted; this state is gated behind multiple low-sanity exposures and is recoverable only via a high-cost story-locked ritual).
Recovering Sanity
Sanity recovers naturally during in-game rest at the character's residence: sleeping, eating, journalling, brewing tea, drawing tarot cards. Rest activities scale with the character's Pathway in the source-material framing the game adapts: divination practice for Seer-aligned characters, journalling and crowd-watching for Spectator-aligned characters, and so on.
Several NPCs in Tingen sell sanity consumables, including brewed teas, calming tinctures, and small mundane sentimental objects. These restore a small amount of sanity per use and are limited per day to prevent stockpiling.
Specific Tarot Club-style rituals, performed in the player's Divination Club guild ritual chamber, also offer sanity recovery for guild-mates.
Madness States
Temporary Madness: triggered when sanity drops to zero in a single session. The character loses control briefly, gains a 'corruption taint' debuff, and revives at the nearest safe-house. Easy to clear with a long rest.
Uncertain Madness: triggered when sanity drops to zero multiple times in a short window or after a critical-failed advancement ritual. The character carries a persistent debuff line; clearing it requires a Pathway-specific quest in the player's current zone.
Permanent Madness: triggered by repeated Uncertain Madness without intervention, or by certain story-critical failures. The character is corrupted into a Beyonder Monster transformation. Permanent Madness is recoverable only through a story-locked sequence at significantly higher cost than Uncertain Madness, and the affected character carries a visible scar of the event for the rest of the playthrough.
Tips
Treat sanity as your real budget. Calm-band combat is the safe daily play; venturing past the Strained line should be a deliberate choice, not an accident.
Pace your potion drinking. The biggest Sanity hits in the game are the Sequence advancement potions; do them when your sanity is full and your Acting is high.
Stock sanity consumables before raids. Dungeon and raid bosses inflict flat sanity hits during their cosmic-horror set-pieces; carrying tea and tinctures lets you keep abilities firing through the encounter.
Watch for the Strained-band visuals. The first sign your character is sliding into Frayed is a subtle desaturation of the world and a colour-shift of HUD elements. If you see it, retreat.
Permadeath Confirmation
In statements around the second closed beta's recruitment in May 2026, the studio confirmed that the Sanity bar is a true permadeath mechanic, not merely a roleplay-flavoured madness gauge. The studio framed the design as a pure MMO in which a character can be lost to madness for good: if a character's Sanity value drops to zero, the character ceases to exist and is deleted from the account.
This sits alongside the recoverable madness states documented under the Madness States section above. Repeated descent into the Brink band, failed advancement rituals, and back-to-back zero-Sanity events compound the risk. The fully recoverable Temporary and Uncertain Madness states remain on the table, but the final tier is now framed by the studio as a one-way exit: at the depths of Permanent Madness the character is removed from the live account, not merely scarred. Treat zero-Sanity as a genuine end-state, not a setback.
The corruption framing is preserved from the source material the game adapts: the closer a Beyonder leans into mysticism, the more their mind frays, and the further their character drifts from the human world. The dev quote 'just like in the original novel, you must always beware of corruption in the game' anchors the system to that worldbuilding while making the consequence concrete in MMO terms.
Player Practice
Because the loss is potentially permanent, combat guides and raid handbooks for the closed beta recommend treating the Calm band as the only safe long-term residence, with brief and deliberate excursions into Strained for advancement work. Stockpile sanity teas and calming tinctures before any Gray Fog projection, any high-Sequence ritual, and any boss with a cosmic-horror set-piece. Players who already lost a character report that the slide accelerates once the bar dips below Strained, because every supernatural exposure during low-Sanity play stacks more weight on the next exposure.