Psychics

Your mind is unchained and your powers are whatever you choose to cultivate. You may select three disciplines of choice from any theme as well as from the unthemed list.

Your mind tilts in a particular way. It limits the things you can do, but what you know you’re quite good at. Select either the Physical, Sensitive or Healing theme. You may only select psychic disciplines from that theme or the unthemed list, but may re-roll the first failed will roll for that theme in a scene. Choose three psychic disciplines, two of which must come from your selected theme.

You have an especial affinity for manipulating some physical phenomena. Select one discipline from Kinesis theme, one psychic discipline from any theme except Kinesis and psychic mastery for the Kinesis discipline you selected.

The Astral Arts are a set of related psychic abilities that deal with the Astral Self, the Astral Plane and it’s denizens. The Astral Self is invisible to any who can’t perceive the invisible, so it’s handy for things like spying and quiet communication or interacting with spiritual beings. Students of the Astral Arts also learn to enter the astral realm and even cast their perceptions through it to see far off places. As a side benefit they also learn to manipulate ectoplasm, the malleable ‘matter’ of that plane, using it as an extra set of hands or even coating themselves with it and shaping it to alter their appearance.

Empathy is quite simply the ability to sense emotions from others and transmit them back. Some view it as a lesser form of telepathy, though experts more often describe it as telepathy to those parts of the mind that don’t think with words and ideas. Empaths are capable of reaching out to determine someone’s emotional state and with some effort capable of influencing it as well, turning raging anger into sanguine calm or driving men to unreasoning fear.

Special Note: Empaths are capable of engaging in offensive mental conflict with their targets and inflicting mental consequences upon them. See the notes in the psychic abilities rules on how mental manipulation and compulsions may be applied to PCs and major NPCs.

The mind sees what the eyes do not, and to be honest there’s a lot the eyes miss. Psychics versed in ESP can sense the presence of other psychics, of magic, of supernatural evil, of tears in the fabric of reality. They can sense the passage of time down to the nanosecond. They can see auras and creatures that have been made invisible by mystical or psychic means. Some are even capable of projecting their senses out of their bodies and seeing all around themselves at once.

Objects carry echoes of the things they go through, imprinted upon them by the emotions of the people who experience them. Some psychics can pick up on these echoes and reconstruct them to peer into the past. There’s not a whole lot of versatility to this trick. Psychics versed in it can meditate upon objects to see the echoes of emotionally charged events in which they have taken part. A knife used in a murder, for example, might reveal the murderer. A wedding ring on the other hand might take an object reader through every significant event in a marriage in which it was present. It’s a simple trick, but the information it can impart should not be underrated.

Control of the mind is absolutely essential to a psychic and this is nowhere more true than when danger rears its head. Some times the best thing or the only thing that can be done to fortify the mind is to suppress any feelings of fear. Against more esoteric threats, psychics can shield themselves and their companions from having their mental and metaphysical energies harvested by those creatures – such as psi-stalkers – who feed on them. Finally, against mental intrusion psychics can engage their ultimate defense: closing themselves or their companions off. This utterly prevents the use of any psychic power at all, but also prevents any intrusion into the closed off minds.

Sometimes the best defense is not being noticed. Just as there are abilities to perceive things about people – sense their presence, read their auras – there are abilities that deceive and deaden those senses. To that end psychics who study more subtle applications of their power can mask their own mental strength and abilities – making themselves appear normal or at least less powerful than they actually are. They can deaden the physical senses of those around them, allowing them to slip by unnoticed by suddenly the less observant. They can alter their auras to hide their nature and their mental and emotional states. To aid in knowing when they are being sought, they learn to sense the presence of other powerful minds and as a last resort they learn to shield their mental energies from being siphoned away just like their more defensively minded brethren.

The ability of one mind to touch another is a powerful one and nowhere is that more directly expressed than in the telepathic gifts. At its base level this is the ability to touch and influence the conscious minds of others. The most basic expression of this talent is mindspeak, allowing one or more minds to communicate to one another with mere thoughts. From there telepaths learn to influence others thoughts in ways both subtle and direct: planting ‘suggestions’, broadcasting a simple thought that says ‘you don’t see me’  or even outright attempting to take over someone’s body. Reading others thoughts as they become hostile, or even as they form the intent to attack can also give a telepath some major advantages. Perhaps the deepest and most complete form of telepathic link is the ‘mind bond’, a form of communication that lays both sides completely bare to the other. Perhaps understandably, it’s not often attempted.

Special Note: Telepaths are capable of engaging in offensive mental conflict with their targets and inflicting mental consequences upon them. See the notes in the psychic abilities rules on how mental manipulation and compulsions may be applied to PCs and major NPCs.

There’s a lot that can be accomplished by manipulating a body’s natural healing abilities and psychics learn how to cultivate these beneficial biological rhythms in both themselves and others. A moments’ concentration can send the sleepless into gentle sleep or deaden the pain of illness or injury. More advanced applications can considerably speed up the body’s natural healing or even – with great effort – turbocharge it, causing injuries to knit together in minutes instead of weeks.

Special Note: This Discipline is capable of healing stress and mild or moderate injury related consequences. See notes on Psychic Recovery and Psychic Healing in the psychic abilities rules.

Those same talents that are used in service of the healing arts do have other uses. Many healers choose not to pursue them simply because of temperament but they most certainly exist. Manipulating the bodies of others to strike them blind, deaf or mute, paralyze them or simply leave them in agony is all within the reach of those used to telling the body to ignore pain and heal itself. Some can even convince a body that it’s ill, causing the victims to grow feaverish and weak even though its all in their head – as it were.

The body can recover from a lot on its own, but some things require intervention. Mental Medicine is less the art of encouraging the body to heal itself and more the art of manipulating it back to wholeness. Like those psychics trained in bio-feedback, the ability to deaden pain and put patients to sleep is invaluable. From there the paths diverge though. Mental Medics listen to the body tell them what’s wrong, gaining a very complete picture of injury and illness – even when neither are obvious. From there they learn to set bones, repair arteries, mend flesh and even excise infection and necrosis with the skill of any surgeon. They also learn to purge illness and for those of a metaphysical nature who are faltering, even restore some mental and arcane energies that are faltering by sacrificing some of their own.

Special Note: This Discipline is capable of healing stress and consequences. See notes on Psychic Recovery and Psychic Healing in the psychic abilities rules, but requires time, space and quiet to work.

Healers encourage the body to do what it does naturally, just faster and better. Psychics versed in mind over matter, though, force the body to do things it doesn’t normally do. Using mental energies to deny fatigue, hunger and thirst is just the beginning. Eyes can be manipulated to see better in the dark, ears to hear better. The body can even be forced to appear as if dead – for a little while anyway. Pushing the limits of the body, forcing it to go on by literal sheer force of will is where those versed in Body Control excel.

The ultimate expression of mind over matter to some is mastery over the very physical properties of matter. Those versed in Body Transmutation learn just this. Whereas Body Control allows a psychic to enhance the capabilities of his physical form through force of will, psychics who learn this discipline approach it from the other direction. Alter the body so that the limitations of flesh no longer apply. Hardening skin against bullets and punches is just the beginning. The paragons of this discipline can take railgun shots, laser blasts or even assault by supernatural beings. Some even learn to physically alter their forms, turning themselves into beings of living stone or metal.

This power serves as narrative justification for being tough enough to stand up to high tech and supernatural sources of harm. Mechanically this ability confers armor as per normal for psychic abilities. It may also be used in any situation where toughness or endurance are the primary factors.

Finally, psychics with this discipline absorb three stress instead of two when taking a mild physical consequence.

Telekinetics learn to exert force on the world around them using their mind. Some take that gift and apply it to their own forms. The leap from building to building effortlessly less by muscle power and more by giving themselves an extra ‘push’ with their gifts. They lift and run faster with the same trick. Some even learn to add that kind of force to physical attacks, turning fists, feet and simple weapons into deadly threats.

Manipulating physical phenomena sometimes means manipulating them to go away. It’s one thing to tell the body that it isn’t hungry, thirsty or tired. Preventing oneself from being frozen, burnt, electrocuted or poisoned is another entirely. Resistance is that branch of psychic discipline that can inure the form to various natural hazards. The emphasis here is natural. A psychic can prevent himself from being frozen in antarctica or burnt by lava (which isn’t as hot as most people think it is) but plasma shots and magical fire? That’s something else altogether.

Telekinetics is the study of turning the will into pure force and for as simple as that sounds it has a lot of application. ‘Arms reach’ becomes an antiquated notion for telekinetics. If they can see it, they can affect it (or at least try). Pushing, pulling, lifting, levitating. All of that is simple. Some psychics can take it to an extreme, using their mind to accelerate small objects like a firearm, or a railgun. Others learn to put up walls and fields of pure force, blocking things out or holding them up.

Hydrokinetics are the masters of the most common liquid on earth. They can sense it and call it to them. They can tell at a glance what’s in it and what it might do. They can freeze or boil it. They can hurl it around with a thought. Unlike other forms of elemental kinesis, they can’t create it ex nihilo, and can’t pull tricks like boiling the blood in someone’s veins but they hardly need to do either.

Bursters. Burners. Pyros. Psychics with the ability to manipulate fire are among the more feared kinematics in the world. Pyrokinetics can conjure flame from their mind, control combustion, focus or put out flames, create shields with metal melting heat and toss tongues of flame around like toys. The ability to create and control flame on a level dangerous even to hardened modern materials makes them amazingly destructive and while that’s not the only use for their talents, it does tend to be the one people remember.

Often called Zappers or Thunderers, Electrokinetics can create, control and manipulate electric fields on a macro scale. The ability to hurl literal lightning bolts is the most striking but perhaps the crudest expression of their power. They can manipulate the flows of power in unshielded machinery, provide power where none exists and even create and manipulate magnetic fields with the right equipment (but where will we find fifty feet of coiled copper tubing at this hour?!).

Psychic Offence: The fine art of killing someone with your mind. Psychic Offence is the study of creating highly destructive physical forces and has two primary expressions. One is the feared ‘Psychic Sword’, a difficult to master manifestation which concentrates mental energies to conjure a weapon that can rend modern body armor, robots and similarly tough material. The other is a flung ‘mental bolt’ with similar power, but at greater distances.

This is the study of marshaling the mind to preserve the body from harm. Many of these gifts are similar in nature to telekinesis, but more potent and refined. Mental energies form fields like armor and shields that ward off physical harm as well as anything technology can provide.

Special Note: Psychic Defense allows for psychic shields which enable the user to defend against physical attacks with his Will skill.

A rare and unusual ability, Psi Ghosts can cause their bodies to become insubstantial and pass through physical barriers. Walls, laser fences and the like are no obstacle. Detection means that rely on a physical body crossing them – trip wires, pressure plates and similar – do nothing. The psi ghost can be seen, and any arcane or psychic barriers still prove formidable but otherwise they go where they will.

The phrase ‘ghost in the machine’ gains new meaning when dealing with a telemechanic. These people have a mental affinity for machines, able to immerse themselves in computers to read hard drives, understand and operate machines with their mind or in extreme cases actually submerge their consciousness into machines and use them as if inhabiting them. Which in that particular case is true.

The Astral Arts are a set of related psychic abilities that deal with the Astral Self, the Astral Plane and it’s denizens. The Astral Self is invisible to any who can’t perceive the invisible, so it’s handy for things like spying and quiet communication or interacting with spiritual beings. Students of the Astral Arts also learn to enter the astral realm and even cast their perceptions through it to see far off places. As a side benefit they also learn to manipulate ectoplasm, the malleable ‘matter’ of that plane, using it as an extra set of hands or even coating themselves with it and shaping it to alter their appearance.

Empathy is quite simply the ability to sense emotions from others and transmit them back. Some view it as a lesser form of telepathy, though experts more often describe it as telepathy to those parts of the mind that don’t think with words and ideas. Empaths are capable of reaching out to determine someone’s emotional state and with some effort capable of influencing it as well, turning raging anger into sanguine calm or driving men to unreasoning fear.

Special Note: Empaths are capable of engaging in offensive mental conflict with their targets and inflicting mental consequences upon them. See the notes in the psychic abilities rules on how mental manipulation and compulsions may be applied to PCs and major NPCs.

The mind sees what the eyes do not, and to be honest there’s a lot the eyes miss. Psychics versed in ESP can sense the presence of other psychics, of magic, of supernatural evil, of tears in the fabric of reality. They can sense the passage of time down to the nanosecond. They can see auras and creatures that have been made invisible by mystical or psychic means. Some are even capable of projecting their senses out of their bodies and seeing all around themselves at once.

Objects carry echoes of the things they go through, imprinted upon them by the emotions of the people who experience them. Some psychics can pick up on these echoes and reconstruct them to peer into the past. There’s not a whole lot of versatility to this trick. Psychics versed in it can meditate upon objects to see the echoes of emotionally charged events in which they have taken part. A knife used in a murder, for example, might reveal the murderer. A wedding ring on the other hand might take an object reader through every significant event in a marriage in which it was present. It’s a simple trick, but the information it can impart should not be underrated.

Control of the mind is absolutely essential to a psychic and this is nowhere more true than when danger rears its head. Some times the best thing or the only thing that can be done to fortify the mind is to suppress any feelings of fear. Against more esoteric threats, psychics can shield themselves and their companions from having their mental and metaphysical energies harvested by those creatures – such as psi-stalkers – who feed on them. Finally, against mental intrusion psychics can engage their ultimate defense: closing themselves or their companions off. This utterly prevents the use of any psychic power at all, but also prevents any intrusion into the closed off minds.

Sometimes the best defense is not being noticed. Just as there are abilities to perceive things about people – sense their presence, read their auras – there are abilities that deceive and deaden those senses. To that end psychics who study more subtle applications of their power can mask their own mental strength and abilities – making themselves appear normal or at least less powerful than they actually are. They can deaden the physical senses of those around them, allowing them to slip by unnoticed by suddenly the less observant. They can alter their auras to hide their nature and their mental and emotional states. To aid in knowing when they are being sought, they learn to sense the presence of other powerful minds and as a last resort they learn to shield their mental energies from being siphoned away just like their more defensively minded brethren.

The ability of one mind to touch another is a powerful one and nowhere is that more directly expressed than in the telepathic gifts. At its base level this is the ability to touch and influence the conscious minds of others. The most basic expression of this talent is mindspeak, allowing one or more minds to communicate to one another with mere thoughts. From there telepaths learn to influence others thoughts in ways both subtle and direct: planting ‘suggestions’, broadcasting a simple thought that says ‘you don’t see me’  or even outright attempting to take over someone’s body. Reading others thoughts as they become hostile, or even as they form the intent to attack can also give a telepath some major advantages. Perhaps the deepest and most complete form of telepathic link is the ‘mind bond’, a form of communication that lays both sides completely bare to the other. Perhaps understandably, it’s not often attempted.

Special Note: Telepaths are capable of engaging in offensive mental conflict with their targets and inflicting mental consequences upon them. See the notes in the psychic abilities rules on how mental manipulation and compulsions may be applied to PCs and major NPCs.

The phrase ‘ghost in the machine’ gains new meaning when dealing with a telemechanic. These people have a mental affinity for machines, able to immerse themselves in computers to read hard drives, understand and operate machines with their mind or in extreme cases actually submerge their consciousness into machines and use them as if inhabiting them. Which in that particular case is true.

There’s a lot that can be accomplished by manipulating a body’s natural healing abilities and psychics learn how to cultivate these beneficial biological rhythms in both themselves and others. A moments’ concentration can send the sleepless into gentle sleep or deaden the pain of illness or injury. More advanced applications can considerably speed up the body’s natural healing or even – with great effort – turbocharge it, causing injuries to knit together in minutes instead of weeks.

Special Note: This Discipline is capable of healing stress and mild or moderate injury related consequences. See notes on Psychic Recovery and Psychic Healing in the psychic abilities rules.

Those same talents that are used in service of the healing arts do have other uses. Many healers choose not to pursue them simply because of temperament but they most certainly exist. Manipulating the bodies of others to strike them blind, deaf or mute, paralyze them or simply leave them in agony is all within the reach of those used to telling the body to ignore pain and heal itself. Some can even convince a body that it’s ill, causing the victims to grow feaverish and weak even though its all in their head – as it were.

The body can recover from a lot on its own, but some things require intervention. Mental Medicine is less the art of encouraging the body to heal itself and more the art of manipulating it back to wholeness. Like those psychics trained in bio-feedback, the ability to deaden pain and put patients to sleep is invaluable. From there the paths diverge though. Mental Medics listen to the body tell them what’s wrong, gaining a very complete picutre of injury and illness – even when neither are obvious. From there they learn to set bones, repair arteries, mend flesh and even excise infection and necrosis with the skill of any surgeon. They also learn to purge illness and for those of a metaphysical nature who are faltering, even restore some mental and arcane energies that are faltering by sacrificing some of their own.

Special Note: This Discipline is capable of healing stress and consequences. See notes on Psychic Recovery and Psychic Healing in the psychic abilities rules, but requires time, space and quiet to work.

Healers encourage the body to do what it does naturally, just faster and better. Psychics versed in mind over matter, though, force the body to do things it doesn’t normally do. Using mental energies to deny fatigue, hunger and thirst is just the beginning. Eyes can be manipulated to see better in the dark, ears to hear better. The body can even be forced to appear as if dead – for a little while anyway. Pushing the limits of the body, forcing it to go on by literal sheer force of will is where those versed in Body Control excel.

The ultimate expression of mind over matter to some is mastery over the very physical properties of matter. Those versed in Body Transmutation learn just this. Whereas Body Control allows a psychic to enhance the capabilities of his physical form through force of will, psychics who learn this discipline approach it from the other direction. Alter the body so that the limitations of flesh no longer apply. Hardening skin against bullets and punches is just the beginning. The paragons of this discipline can take railgun shots, laser blasts or even assault by supernatural beings. Some even learn to physically alter their forms, turning themselves into beings of living stone or metal.

This power serves as narrative justification for being tough enough to stand up to high tech and supernatural sources of harm. Mechanically this ability confers armor as per normal for psychic abilities. It may also be used in any situation where toughness or endurance are the primary factors.

Finally, psychics with this discipline absorb three stress instead of two when taking a mild physical consequence.

Telekinetics learn to exert force on the world around them using their mind. Some take that gift and apply it to their own forms. The leap from building to building effortlessly less by muscle power and more by giving themselves an extra ‘push’ with their gifts. They lift and run faster with the same trick. Some even learn to add that kind of force to physical attacks, turning fists, feet and simple weapons into deadly threats.

Manipulating physical phenomena sometimes means manipulating them to go away. It’s one thing to tell the body that it isn’t hungry, thirsty or tired. Preventing oneself from being frozen, burnt, electrocuted or poisoned is another entirely. Resistance is that branch of psychic discipline that can inure the form to various natural hazards. The emphasis here is natural. A psychic can prevent himself from being frozen in antarctica or burnt by lava (which isn’t as hot as most people think it is) but plasma shots and magical fire? That’s something else altogether.

Telekinetics is the study of turning the will into pure force and for as simple as that sounds it has a lot of application. ‘Arms reach’ becomes an antiquated notion for telekinetics. If they can see it, they can affect it (or at least try). Pushing, pulling, lifting, levitating. All of that is simple. Some psychics can take it to an extreme, using their mind to accelerate small objects like a firearm, or a railgun. Others learn to put up walls and fields of pure force, blocking things out or holding them up.