I've said over the years that I didn't like the rigidly mechanistic language used by most RPG psi systems, too jargon-y even for most contemporary and future usage, let alone suitable at all for most fantasy milieus. Time to see if I can take a framework I'm pretty fond of—the D&D 3.x psi system as overhauled by Dreamscarred Press—and put it in other language as well as streamlining it for use as HeroQuest keywords.
The Disciplines
The D&D 3.x/Pathfinder names appear in {brackets}, wherever I felt like it might help others to be reminded of what I'm adapting in each specific bit. As a matter of design, I've snipped out the psychic warrior class as a distinct thing. My feeling is that in HeroQuest terms, the psychic warrior is just a person with fighting talent who draws on bodycrafting and true shaping, and maybe some of the other disciplines as well. Likewise, I ended up deciding that the wilder is just a true thinker focused on emotion, and the vitalist is someone using true thinking and true seeing with an emphasis on healing.
Bodycrafting {Psychometabolism}
You start by learning how to reshape yourself in relatively minor ways, including taking on the general form of anything about your size and weight (but not most of its properties). You can heal yourself, strengthen your physical abilities, absorb wounds from others into yourself, and physically (but not psychically) blend in with your surroundings like an increasingly competent chameleon. You cultivate an awareness of the distinctive properties of all living creatures around you, and can imitate select traits of theirs—as usual for this discipline, for one for a little while, then several, and for longer durations, until finally you can manifest many qualities not your own for as long as you care to keep them.
You then learn how to revive a body whose soul hasn't yet left for a new incarnation, and how to work more radical transformations of yourself, including ethereal intangibility and fully detailed shape-shifting, first to creatures and objects about your own size, then to ones much larger or smaller or than yourself. You can sacrifice mental reserves for vast but short-term boosts in your speed and physical prowess, and sustain long-term boosts without significant harm. You can regrow severed body body parts, first ones you've lost and then ones lost by others you wish to help, and you understand how to unweave psychic curses and lingering psychic damage and traumas.
As a master bodycrafter, you learn how to change shape to almost anything you can imagine, to split yourself like a fissioning jelly creature, and to temporarily or even permanently fuse yourself with other people and objects.
Soulfighting {Soulknife}
In the other disciplines, psychic resolve is usually an end in itself: you want something, you learn how to go about it, and then you do it. As a soulfighter, you practice arts with an intermediate step: you shape psychic force into nearly tangible forms, which you then use as weapons.
Your basic tool is the soulknife. It's by no means always a knife, but you start with simple blades and move on to more complicated weapons from there. Whatever its form, the soulknife is a faintly luminescent thing, almost like glowing fog, barely solid to your own touch and capable of passing through almost anything else material. It nonetheless harms living flesh (and, with a great deal more effort on your part, inanimate matter), acting as a focus for your sense of desirable violence and destruction in that particular moment. It's not a general-purpose tool; that's reserved for the peaceful arts, while the soulknife is always a weapon.
You can evoke your soulknife in the blink of an eye, and then it remains with you until you choose to let it go or lose your waking awareness. Once you know how to wield it in hand-to-hand fighting, you learn how to throw it and then how to project it like an arrow from an imaginary bow. At first it's limited to maneuvers you could make with a physical weapon, but then you learn how to have it strike at unseen enemies, whirl around you like a saw blade, change its form in mid-fight, cut at a foe's vitals without puncturing any skin, and many other such maneuvers.
As a master soulfighter, you can evoke your soulknife invisibly and direct it without obvious gestures, and sustain multiple soulknives at once, each doing something different. You can also instruct it in a series of maneuvers that it can keep executing even if you're knocked out or otherwise incapacitated.
True Moving {Psychokinesis}
You start by learning how to exert simple pressure at a distance: lifting and throwing small objects, and pushing with injurious intent on one or more people out of your physical reach.
You then learn how to refine your thought-effort for fine gestures, and also how to push as hard as you could if right there physically, then much harder than that. At the same time, you learn how to deflect the motion of objects in your vicinity, starting with simple reflection, then adding absorption and redirection to your arsenal of shielding possibilities. You learn to erect very powerful but fleeting shields for yourself and others, and to create longer-term barriers, finally even permanent ones around designated sanctuaries.
As a master mover, you can make bubbles several paces wide and whisk everything inside them to wherever you wish, and create powerful spreading whirlpools in both air and water. Finally, you learn how to apply the negation of all psychic movement to create bubbles in which no psychic powers can work.
True Seeing {Clairsentience}
You start by learning how to create and use momentary flashes of awareness beyond your normal senses. You can see (and hear, smell, and taste) a glimpse of somewhere else, or of the previous owner or user of an object you handle, or of an emotionally charged moment in the past of the place you now occupy. You can boost any of your natural abilities for a single effort with intuitive insights into the problem you're trying to solve. You also learn how to force this kind of fleeting glimpse onto someone else, creating a very unwelcome, unnerving moment's distraction.
You then learn how to sustain longer shifts of awareness, how to open others' perception without it being distressing, and how to weave together souls' experience so that the sharers feel each other's pain, benefit from each other's rest and healing, and so on. You learn how to mask yourself from the psychic searches others may make, and how to make yourself more prominent to psychic senses. You also learn how to make an object or place so that true movers and true travelers can reach it more easily. You learn how to combine several separate effects so that you can observe a remote location and interact with others in it, your voice a whisper in their ears, your touch the gentlest of pressures.
As a master seer, you understand the workings of causation, coincidence, and fate. You can read likely paths into the future for yourself and others, and shift the balance of luck toward allies and away from enemies. You develop a total awareness that lets you see all the major highlights of a target's past, present, and future.
True Shaping {Metacreativity}
You start by learning how to craft ectoplasm, the barely-tangible stuff produced where psychic, astral, and material forces converge: you can make temporary objects of simple shape, barriers to slow strong opponents and halt weak ones, and to animate ectoplasmic blob as "living" weapons. Then you learn how to work with more solid and real materials, both to infuse them with ectoplasm for temporary modifications and to speed and slow their natural processes under psychic guidance to alter them as if by tools and the normal effects of aging. With practice, you learn too how to reverse those changes, fixing damage and even un-carving machines back into their component plants and minerals.
You then learn how to work with the forces of crystallization, turning other things into gems and other crystals and making crystals fluid, misty, or even explosive. You also learn to work with larger quantities of materials in other ways, from the handfuls and spoonfuls that are all a novice shaper can handle up to more than you can carry.
As a master shaper, you turn away from material things to work the same kinds of transformation on other planes. You can sense them, though not as well as a true seer, and step to them, though not as briskly as a true mover, and once there you can change them in almost any way you can imagine. It's not always possible to bring any of the results back to matter with you, but only a master shaper can even try.
True Thinking {Telepathy}
You start by learning to feel emotions in others—every mind constructs the elements of what self-awareness calls a thought or feeling out of complex elements, and taken raw, the pieces of anyone else's mind are a barely comprehensible jumble. As a true thinker, you are always a translator of internal experience-language. As you come to understand what's going on the flows that lead to fully formed thoughts and feelings, you learn how to create relatively simple ones, like a desire for or aversion to a particular target. You also learn how to associate bits of thought and memory in others' minds about yourself with other elements, so as to make them think of you in a certain light, like "friend" and "trusted authority". You also learn how to issue short mental commands that make recipients want to carry out a simple order, or stop moving and even interrupt automatic actions like breathing.
You then learn how to create new internal experiences out of nothing but your own wishes, including false memories and lasting moral and emotional imperatives. You also learn how to change and suppress existing memories, and the present-moment tastes and judgments that build on them. You gradually learn parallel transformations in yourself and others, including suppressing one body's awareness of injury and shifting to another, so that one person now suffers another's wounds while the first is healed. You learn first how to lift the thoughts and feelings that go with mastery of a particular ability from someone else's mind and use them yourself, and then how to copy them without also temporarily removing them from the source. You learn the arts of psychic self-defense at a deeper level than the practitioners of the other disciplines, including how to calve off subordinate minds within your own to act as tempting targets for others' psychic incursions. You learn how to meld multiple minds harmoniously into a psychic concert {metaconcert}, in which all share in the strongest version of any ability the participants wish to call on.
As a master thinker, you learn how to suppress more and more of a target's thinking, culminating in the ability to induce immediate death. You learn how to transfer your mind with another's, first temporarily and then permanently. You also learn how to make your sense of self infectious, so that over time a target actually becomes a mental duplicate of you, complete with all your memories, desires, and destiny.
True Traveling {Psychoportation}
You start by learning how to recognize when others are using arts of true moving and true traveling nearby. You can speed yourself, and exchange places first with willing targets and then with unwilling ones. You learn how to turn any path into a way into or out of the astral realms, moving there safely yourself and guiding ever larger groups of non-psychic companions.
You then learn how to fly and swim at preternatural speeds and without hindrance from complications like gusts and floodwaters, how to instantly jump miles at a pace, how to shift around the parts of an enemy in ways that inflict tremendous pain and damage, and how to arrange a gateway or stepping-stone to open up when specified conditions come true. You also learn how to banish creatures of the non-material realms back to their homes, and how to ward your vicinity against incoming efforts at true travel.
As a master traveler, you can create permanent doorways and bridges between distant spots (or matching posts on different planes of being), and slip through knots in the fabric of time so as to loop back or forward a few seconds.
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