nightmares

Nightmares in EB are the hot potato. Everything else you can get rid of, but nightmares you have to pass back and forth until someone goes mad again.

When I see that someone "desperately needs to talk to me" it's like back in high school when some girl I liked wanted to talk to me about her boy troubles. "You're such a good friend that I will never have sex with!" Their nightmares go down, mine go up. Yeah.

Don't forget that you have the option to deal with nightmares with drugs!  Laudanum gives you restful sleep at the expense of being wounded.  That of course can be fixed by drinking Tincture of Vigor.  F.F. Gerbrandt is clearly a rich, rich woman.

And then you drink too much tincture of vigor and it's back to nightmares! Whee!

There are cards that allow you quiet walks by the river which make your nightmares go down. You can deal with nightmares if you have lots and lots of secrets. You can buy a goldfish. Having a high Persuasive works, too.

It's not *that* bad, it just looks that way in the beginning. Yeah, you have to accept that you're going to go a little crazy all the time, but it's possible to bring it back down with relatively little trouble.

That's true, after going mad that first time (and I didn't even try to avoid it, cos I wondered what the 'something bad' was :) ) I haven't been too troubled by nightmares, but it certainly has some interesting hack design implications to make madness something that tends to be passed around rather than increased or decreased by itself.

Yeah, if you want to play it safe once you're mad, opportunity cards usually lower your nightmares without any risks.  And sometimes they let you burn the whole place down or give you other such fun options, depending on your dream qualities :)