What would an all psionic world look like?

[diaglo]

written by Denny Zager and Richard Evans and released in 1969 was a #1 hit.

In the year 2525
If man is still alive
If woman can survive
They may find........

In the year 3535
Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies
Everything you think, do, or say
Is in the pill you took today

In the year 4545
Ain't gonna need your teeth, won't need your eyes
You won't find a thing to chew
Nobody's gonna look at you

In the year 5555
Your arms are hanging limp at your sides
Your legs got nothing to do
Some machine, doing that for you

In the year 6565
Ain't gonna need no husband, won't need no wife
You'll pick your son, pick your daughter too
From the bottom of a long glass tube

In the year 7510
If God's a comin' he ought to make it by then
Maybe he'll look around himself and say
``Guess it's time for the Judgement day''

In the year 8510
God's gonna shake his mighty head
He'll either say ``I'm pleased where man has been''
Or tear it down and start again

In the year 9595
I'm kinda wondering if man's gonna be alive
He's taken everything this old earth can give
And he ain't put back nothing...

Now it's been 10,000 years
Man has cried a billion tears
For what he never knew
Now man's reign is through
But through the eternal night
The twinkling of starlight
So very far away
Maybe it's only yesterday...

In the year 2525
If man is still alive
If woman can survive
They may find.......

 

[fafhrd]

So, I am turning to people here to help me think of what this world would look like.

There will inevitably be more bald people.

 

[DreamChaser]

I've actually been working on an all psionics game. The PC races were genetically/psionically engineered by an Illithid empire that vanished thousands of years ago.

In terms of some of the basic, day to day PC issues.

Healing can be done the psychometabolic way (Empathic Transfer + Body Adjustment)
I have also created two new powers:
A clairsentient power that is obverse to Recall Agony and Death which converts damage into nonlethal damage.
A psychoportive power which accellerates time for the target creature, curing but fatiguing them.

Clearly none of these are as freeflowing as the endless healing of the wonderfully broken cleric but this can easily add to the fun of the game, plus it makes sense to increase the amount of healing since there are negative concequences to it.


The reason I opted to start work on a all-psionics game is because the rules from the XPH are 98% sacred cow free. The system actually utilizes the rules new to 3.x (like the energy descriptors) without the tacked on feel of the magic system. The embrace the freedom of a point based system and offer concepts (such as psionic focus) to integrate the idea of being a psionic creature into other aspects of the game.

Anyway those are my thoughts.

DC

 

[Aaron L]

Take some cues from Dune. Mentats and Bene Geserit are good exmples of psionic subcultures/institutions. The Butleria Jihad made development of human potential necessary to replace computers, and many of the ideas from the books could be mined for what you are looking for.

All of the ideas you presented yourself are very good. Self discipline would indeed be very important (you have to understand yourself pretty well in order to be able to project your willpower outside of your body)

How prevalent do you want psionics to be? Is it just going to replace magic and be no more common than magic is in a normal setting? Or is it going to be deeply enmeshed in the society?

Psionic learning institutions would be somewhat different than wizardly schools. There is an element of physicality necessary for psionics that the purely scholarly wizards dont need. Bodily conditioning would be important, so Im thinking that psionic learning centers would end up looking much like the typical D&D monk monastary, though not isolated, just using the same type of theme. Mental discipline and learning combined with excersize and physical improvement.

Crystals would inded be important, and may even be used in architecture. Imagine cathedral sized crystal buildings that act as cognizance crystals, holding vast resevoirs of psionic power usuable by the occupants!

Many of teh standard fantasy roles would have to change. Instead of a court wizard, he king would have a court psion (mentat by another name ) Probably a Seer, using prescience and calculative abilities instead of magic to advise his king.


Elans, if you use them, could become a powerful noble cast of a psiocracy, immortal beings powered by thier own mental discipline.

You hit religion perfectly. For a further idea, in my campaign world I have a psionic culture roughly greco-roman based, where psionics was developed by philosophers during meditation, and seeking self perfection and Paltonic Truth became thier religion. As another use for Elans , (I love Elans ) they could be holy figures of such a church, men who have altered thier bodies through thier psionic mastery to achieve immortality. (I envision Elans as being created through a process of deep psionic training, not a pseudomagical ceremony)

Imagine a psiotheocratic empire ruled by milennia old Elans, hehe.


With the presence of psychic warrions, many of the roles filled by fighters (kights and such) could be filled, sometimes better, by psywars. No reason psywars would be any less common than fighters if psionics are common enough.


One thing I never liked about the XPH is the stated lifestyle of psionic characters, living in communes and the like, with a definate x-men feel of being alienated because of thier powers. Psionics isnt liek sorcery, where you need a bloodline of power. Everyone has psionic potential and just has to learn to use it, akin to wizardry. You just need the intelligence and discipline. Wizards and sorcerers dont commonly form communes, why should psions?



Anyway, just some random ideas for you.

 

[Tatsukun]

Hey thanks everyone keep the ideas (and error corrections, I guess “psyonic” is a guy with levels in Psion and Psychic warrior) coming!

I really like the ideas about monastery life being the place one improves him/herself. Improving your mind will lead to power, but it’s not an easy path. In our (real) world, you can improve your mind while leaving your body and spirit weak (anyone seen Bill Gates in a Speedo? Anyone want to??) but in a psionic world the three improve together (as you gain levels and PSP).

I don’t really want to have this world dominated by dragons, though I would like to play in such a world. I am looking to just sneak out magic and sneak in psionics without changing too much else.

Right now, my cultural model is old China. The warriors have a wuxia feel to them (Couching Tiger Hidden Dragon et. all) and the powerful magic is used at the user’s risk (wilders).

Religion is part of life, but it’s more of a cultural thing (as stated before, now refined to fit the Chinese model). If you ask a person why they do one particular thing, they are often not sure if it’s a religious thing or a cultural one.

Monsters exist in the world, but they rarely use magic. The ones that do are very dangerous.

I also am interested in what has been said about the effect of psionics on manufacture. I can see how a shaper can make a fortune, but is it really more than a mage in the current system? I am looking at Ebberon for a model of how a magic rich world would really look. Maybe I can steal the best of those ideas for my world.

Yes, there should be a lot of bald people! Great!

I really love the idea of “Cuthulu with Crystals”. That fits the idea almost exactly, but maybe I would amend it to “Crystal Wuxia meets Cuthulu”.
--

So, I am still worried about healing. What do people think about making Body Adjustment a level lower, and have it heal 1D10 per PSP used. That makes first level Psychic Warriors more powerful, but it will keep them alive until 4th level.

Side note: Has anyone played with taint rules? Did it work?

Thanks everyone, this is really helping!

 

[Andor]

I love Elans too. I wonder if their is a way to rework them (or just have an alternate path) by making them a prestige race. IE a 3 (or 5 or even 1) level prestige class that covers the transformation like Dragon Disciple does for half dragons.

If you want more options than the 4 XPH classes you might think about the incarnum stuff too. It's trivial to change incarnum from soul stuff to ectoplasm and make it into an alternate approach to psionics.

 

[DreamChaser]

I love Elans too. I wonder if their is a way to rework them (or just have an alternate path) by making them a prestige race. IE a 3 (or 5 or even 1) level prestige class that covers the transformation like Dragon Disciple does for half dragons.

If you want more options than the 4 XPH classes you might think about the incarnum stuff too. It's trivial to change incarnum from soul stuff to ectoplasm and make it into an alternate approach to psionics.

Too funny. I had the same thought. My world is psionics/incarnum based.

DC

 

[Jackelope King]

Too funny. I had the same thought. My world is psionics/incarnum based.

DC

Ditto for me. My incarnum is just heavily modified enough that it doesn't look anything like neon-glowing soulmelds anymore

 

[fnork de sporg]

I was thinking about the psychological effects of an all psionic world. Since developing psionic potential is essentially random there would be a much greater emphasis placed on fate. Some people are destined for greatness, and those without that destiny can never hope to achieve it. Heavy shades of Neitzche and existentialism probably dominate in the popular literature and philosophy. Power derives power. Power in the world comes from internal power. Leaders lead because they are the most capable, or the strongest. Practical concerns would tend to trump ethical and idealistic ones. Fatalism would be common. Someone taking to something naturally would be considered superior to someone who had to labor long and hard to master the techniques. Minor divinations based on things like horoscopes, blood types, and personality types would be popular, things that seem to reflect on your own inner nature, much more so than things like tarot and rune casting which appeal to random external factors.

While for nonpsionics communal living and identifying with the collective might be for second nature for the psionics individualism would be just as natural. Psionic communities themselves are based more on common interest than shared genetics or ancestry. People would be free to come and go as they want, and with most civilization consisting of far flung self sufficient communes the decision to leave you home would be a major one. But there would be a signicant minority of Wilders, exiles, and malcontents living as they want out in the sprawling wild lands. Most new communities would be founded in this manner, some by communities that became divided and some by small groups of loners who manage to become succesful. With the all important psionic ability not necessarily follwing the genes there would be all together much less emphasis on ancestry and family trees. Royal dynasties based on blood would be uncommon or even unheard of. Popular forms of geverment would lean towards learned councils of elders, or more likely whoever happens to be the most powerful telepath in town. There's a very good chance psion telepaths will be considerd the equivalent of royalty, the mere fact that your in the class ensures you a role in politics.


Psionics is severely limited in regards to healing. Combat would be much deadlier, as would life in general. Death in general would be much more likely to be permanent. There are also a lot of particularly gruesome psionic powers, like Fuse Flesh for instance, that would combine with this to give an all psionic world a much darker and brutal quality, with violence having real consequence and not being something a person would resort to carelessly. You'll be seeing a lot more heal check, splints, and fighting infections than you would in any normal campaign. Disease becomes a thousand times nastier, especially for the local populations and the nonpsion commoners.

There's also practically no psionic summoning. If extraplanar creatures , like demons or devils, want to intrude on this prime material plane they pretty much have to do it themselves. They would be quite rare, knowledge of the outer planes would be pretty spotty, and things like the bloodwar and the grand battle between good and evil would be very distant inconsequential things. This would lend strongly to the world's tendency towards neutrality that I mentioned earlier. Good and evil would be looked at personal decisions rather than part of some cosmic struggle. Cerebriliths and Psionic Couatls are in the XPH, so its not like the outer planes and good vs evil would be unknown, but they are just two amongst a number of creatures, and would not be given the same place of importance that fiends and celestials do in a magic world.



With the far flung insular communes and relative sparcity of trade and travel going on there will be no taverns. At all. There might be breweries but most socializing would take place in town squares, village feasthalls, or local temples if the inhabitants are actively religious. Instead of an inn your going to have to find some one with a guestroom or at least and extra bed, but since visitors are rare chances are if they let you inside they'll be willing to let you stay the night. If they let you in. Exile would be an incredibly common form of punishment, more common than execution, so if you're not living at home there's a relatively good chance you might be violently insane. Strangers will initially meet distrust and, unless they have some pressing need to be there, might well be asked to leave immediately.

 

[Andor]

I was thinking about the psychological effects of an all psionic world. Since developing psionic potential is essentially random there would be a much greater emphasis placed on fate.

Err.. Why would it be random? That's completely campaign dependant. Just like magical aptitude. And whether or not the gods listen when you pray. And if you can talk to the animals.

And why do people associate psionics with sparse populations? I'm missing that one completely. Even if you do have a psionic elite the image that springs immediately to my mind is Byzantium or India. Teeming hordes, with stratified societies, lots of plots and fearsome secret police.