The seventh characteristic

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The seventh characteristic, and how it is thrown.

Psionic Strength is a seventh characteristic, abbreviated Psi, and it is the only one that is both a rating and a resource. It powers every psionic talent you have, it supplies the characteristic modifier for every psionic check you make, and it is spent to use a talent — so the more you use your gift in one stretch, the worse you get at using it.

Whether psionics exist in your referee’s setting at all is the referee’s decision, and so is whether you may have them. You cannot roll or buy Psionic Strength during character creation without the referee’s permission. A character who never learns psionics simply has no seventh characteristic — not a zero, an absence.

Psionic Strength

2D6 - terms served in any career

The subtraction is the point of the throw: the gift fades with the years unless it is used, so every term you spent in a career is a point off what you have left. Someone who tests late in life is testing what survived.

Because the characteristic modifier for a psionic check is read off your CURRENT Psionic Strength, spending points makes the next talent harder to use than the last. A psion who has drained themselves is not merely out of fuel; they are also worse at everything they have left.

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Spending psionic strength, and getting it back.

Spent Psionic Strength comes back at one point an hour, and the clock does not start immediately: recovery begins three hours after the last time you used a talent.

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Learning talents, and what the institutes teach.

Psionic training is four months of work costing Cr100,000, and the first step is not the training but the test: your Psionic Strength is determined as 2D6 minus the terms you have served, and if nothing is left there is nothing to train.

The order you attempt them in is yours, and it matters, because the cumulative penalty falls on every check after the first. Attempting the hardest talent last means attempting it at its own modifier minus one for each earlier try.

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The check a talent takes, and what failure costs.

Using a talent is a skill check with the talent itself, adding your Psionic Strength modifier and whatever else applies — and then paying for it: the full listed cost on a success, and a single point on a failure.

There are five talents, and each one works like a skill: Awareness, Clairvoyance, Telekinesis, Telepathy and Teleportation. A trained psion develops them over time exactly as they would ordinary skills. Unlike ordinary skills, though, a talent cannot be used untrained at all — there is no penalty to attempt a talent you do not have, because you cannot attempt it.

A talent is a whole tree, not a single power. Holding it at level 0 gives you access to every ability listed under it — a telepath at level 0 can detect life, read surface thoughts, or assault a mind, as the moment demands. What the level buys you is the modifier on the check, not the list of things you may attempt.

Using a talent in combat is a significant action. Most abilities can be projected at a distance, and the range costs are paid on top of the ability’s own cost — Awareness is the exception, because everything it does is done to yourself.

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How far a talent reaches, and the penalty for distance.

Reaching beyond arm’s length costs extra points, read off a band rather than a measured distance — and what a band costs depends on which talent you are using, because pushing an object across a room is far harder than looking at one.

Telekinesis has no entry past Very Long, and that is a limit rather than an omission: you cannot shove something you cannot reach, however much strength you have left. Awareness has no column at all, because Awareness never leaves your own body.

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Sensing and controlling your own body and the psionic field.

Awareness is control of your own body, and it is the one talent that never reaches outward: every Awareness power is used on yourself, so none of them ever pays a range cost.

Suspended animation puts your body under for seven days at a time, without food or water and on very little air, and without cold sleep’s risk of never waking. It ends early only if something outside wakes you — a friend, or an alarm — so you cannot rouse yourself on a whim.

Psionically enhanced Strength converts Psionic Strength points into Strength, one for one, up to your level in Awareness and never past your species maximum. The boost arrives at once, holds for ten minutes, then drains away at a point a minute until you are back where you started. It is not a heal: a wounded character’s Strength returns to the wounded value, not the healthy one. Enhanced Endurance works identically, on Endurance, and is no more a heal than the other.

Regeneration is the real repair, and it is expensive: one Psionic Strength point restores one point of Strength, Dexterity or Endurance lost to injury, disease, poison or other trauma. You may spend as much as you like in a single use, but you cannot use it again until every spent point has come back. It will grow a replacement limb or organ and it will mend old wounds taken before you trained — it will not undo ageing, and it will not do anything at all for anyone but you.

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Perceiving somewhere you are not.

Clairvoyance is perceiving somewhere you are not, and it is undetectable: nobody notices a clairvoyant looking at them, including another psion.

Sense is the cheap, blunt end of it: you learn the most rudimentary facts about a place — a room with four dogs in it, an open plain with a tree and nothing living — and no detail. You must state the range you are applying it at, and you will generally pick up the most interesting or important thing there. The Effect of the check decides how accurate and how clear that impression is.

Clairvoyance proper is remote viewing rather than a snapshot: you observe as though you were standing there. You state the range as with Sense, and the Effect decides both how much detail you perceive and how many rounds you can hold the vision. Clairaudience is the same ability for hearing instead of sight, and clairsentience is both at once.

The difference between this and telepathy is worth holding on to. Telepathic life detection finds minds; Sense finds a place. Life detection tells you a closed room has people in it, and Sense tells you whether the room is occupied or empty at all.

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Moving matter without touching it.

Telekinesis moves matter you are not touching, and it costs more the heavier the object and the further away it is — the two costs stack, which is why a telekinetic works close.

What you lift, you handle as though you were holding it — there is enough sensory feedback for genuinely intelligent manipulation, so you can work a catch or turn a key, not merely shove. What does not come through is physical danger, pain or any other stimulus: a red-hot bar tells you nothing about being hot. The Effect of the check decides how many rounds you can keep hold.

You can throw what you lift. A thrown object attacks as a ranged (thrown) attack, using the greater of two distances — the one between you and the target, or the one between the object’s starting place and the target — and does the damage the table gives, plus the Effect of your attack check. If what you threw was a creature, it takes the same damage the target does.

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Reading, sending and shaping thought.

Telepathy is mind-to-mind contact — usually subtle, occasionally not, since the same talent that lets you send a feeling lets you knock someone unconscious with a thought.

Life detection is the simplest of them: you sense that other minds are present, how many, roughly what kind — animal, human, something else — and roughly where. It tells intelligent minds apart from bacteria and unimportant animals, and it works best on the intelligent ones. A shielded mind is undetectable, whether the shield is natural or built. Someone you already know will be recognised.

Telempathy communicates emotion rather than words. It is excellent with animals and beasts of burden and can be turned on people as a psychological weapon — sending love, hate or fear to sway them, though not necessarily in the direction you intended. It reads emotion as well as sending it, and the Effect decides how strong the projected feeling is. Another telepath always knows when their mood is being bent; nobody else does, and they will put the change down to their own temperament.

Reading surface thoughts gets you what someone is actively thinking right now and nothing deeper, and unless the subject is a telepath they never know it happened. Another telepath’s natural shield keeps you out unless they lower it willingly. Sending thoughts is the complement: the recipient need not be telepathic at all, and a telepath who finds your sendings tiresome or threatening can simply shut you out.

A probe goes deep and takes minutes rather than rounds. You reach past the surface into innermost thoughts, and you can question the subject to force specific information out — you will know at once if they are deliberately lying, because you are reading the thought and not the answer. A shielded mind cannot be probed at all.

Assault is violence. An unshielded mind goes unconscious immediately and takes 2D6 plus the Effect in damage, and that damage does not land where ordinary damage lands: it goes to Psionic Strength first if the victim has any, then Intelligence, then Endurance. Psionic Strength and Endurance come back normally; Intelligence returns at one point a day. Against a shielded mind the two telepaths make opposed Telepathy checks, and the victim takes the damage only if the attacker wins.

Every telepath learns to shield, and the shield is always up: it costs nothing to maintain and it protects against unwanted interference automatically. The price is that you cannot use any telepathic power while it is raised. Lowering it — to accept contact, or to use a power of your own — is a mere thought, and a free action in combat.

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Moving yourself without crossing the distance.

Teleportation moves you from one place to another instantly, with no regard for what is in between — but only you. Your body goes, your clothes and possessions go if you are skilled enough, and nothing and nobody else does.

You must have a mental image of where you are going before you go. You get one by having been there, by having viewed it from a distance, by having had it planted in your mind telepathically by someone who has been there, or by looking at it through clairvoyance. Somebody has to have actually seen the place: a recording is not enough.

On a planet’s surface a jump is limited to Very Distant range or less, and a jump at Very Distant range leaves you disoriented for 2D6 x 10 seconds after arrival. The reason is momentum: two places on a spinning world are moving at different speeds and in different directions, and a jump from the equator to a pole would put over 3,300 kph of velocity difference between you and your surroundings. Teleporting to or from a fast-moving vehicle carries the same problem — arrive on one and you take damage as though it had run you down at its current speed.

Height is the other constraint, and it is thermal. Moving to a different gravitational potential turns the energy difference into body temperature: a kilometre straight down heats you by 2.5 degrees Celsius, which is enough for extreme fever, brain damage or death, and a kilometre straight up cools you by the same amount with equally serious results. Keep a single jump under 400 metres of elevation change, and keep the total under 600 metres in an hour. Energy compensators and heated suits get round it — psions have been known to invent such things, commission them, or go looking for whoever already has one.

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The devices built around the talent.

Where psionics exist, so does the hardware built around them — drugs that suppress the talent, drugs that restore it, shields that block it and devices that answer to it. Whether any of it is legal where you are standing is another question, and there is a black market for all of it.

Inhibitor drug, TL 9, Cr500 a dose. It dampens the brain’s ability to generate psychic effects: -4 DM to every Psionic Strength check and no recovery of spent points at all. It is more often injected into someone than taken by them. Each hour you may make an Endurance check to throw it off, with a cumulative +1 DM for every previous attempt. It does nothing whatever to a non-psionic.

Psi-drugs, TL 8 and up, do the opposite. Taken when you have already spent points they restore some; taken at full strength they push you temporarily above it.

Stacking them is dangerous. Take more than one dose of Standard or Double, or a single dose of Special, and you must make an Endurance check at -1 DM for every psi-drug dose taken in the last week — not counting the one you have just taken. Fail and you fall seriously feverish, take 3D6 damage, and lose a point of Psionic Strength permanently.

Psionic shield, TL 12, Cr40,000. Any armour with a helmet or hood can be fitted with one, and it blocks Telepathy. It is harder than the telepath’s own shield in two ways — it cannot be assaulted through, and it blocks sent thoughts as well — and worse in one: it cannot be lowered without taking the helmet off. Buildings and vehicles can be shielded too, at ten per cent on top of their cost.

Teleportation suit, TL 12, Cr50,000. Built into armour or worn as a body-suit, it cools or warms you fast enough to absorb the temperature swing a jump produces. It lets you move up to 600 metres up or down in a single teleport, or up to ten kilometres in an hour across successive jumps.

Psionic interface, TL 14, adding twenty per cent to the price of whatever it is fitted to. Any weapon or device can take one. Using it, you substitute your Psionic Strength modifier for your Dexterity modifier — and someone with no psionic ability cannot use the device at all. You have to touch it, or reach it with telekinesis.

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How worlds and powers treat psionics.

A world holds one of three attitudes toward psionics — hostile, neutral or friendly — and which one you are standing on decides what happens when somebody sees you use a talent.

In a psi-hostile society something happened once that turned public opinion, and psionics were banned. At best the use of a talent is forbidden and punished as a capital crime. At worst, governments and mobs go hunting — lynching, lobotomising, imprisoning or exiling whoever they find. Ordinary people may be informants, or may become informants at the first sign of a talent in use. The government will denounce psionics publicly and quite possibly run a secret training facility anyway, because the powers are too useful in espionage and war to leave alone. Even sympathising openly with psions is enough to get you shunned. This is the commonest setting in play, and the rules generally assume it.

In a psi-neutral society there is no stigma. The public knows psions exist and treats the talent as one more thing a person might be good at, like athletics or marksmanship. Use is regulated by law level, because everyone can see the potential for abuse, and abusers are punished rather than the gift being banned. Training is easier to find and is treated much like a trade school: anyone who can pay is tested and taught. Psionic technology is more likely to be available, at the referee’s discretion. Telepaths turn up in serious corporate and government negotiations, teleporters do courier work that is sometimes quiet, and anyone protecting secrets has an extra layer of security to buy.

In a psi-friendly society psions are revered and the talent marks you as socially elite. Children are tested repeatedly as they grow, and those with potential are taught from a very young age. Psionics run through every level of society, sometimes hardening into a caste structure with psionically gifted people at the top, stratified further by strength or mastery. At the extreme, non-psions are second-class citizens without the vote or personal rights. What such a culture is actually like is your referee’s to decide.