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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jackelope King" data-source="post: 2567067" data-attributes="member: 31454">I'm running such a game now. Psionics is the major casting force in the game, with warlocks being secondary "witches" living outside the mainstream casting method of "the scientific study of psiocalculus". The major differences I've noticed both in developing the game and running it have been:- Groups have less endurance, since psionic casters have poor spell endurance to begin with and the game largely lacks effective healing magic. Furthermore, psionics definitely lacks creature comfort spells (like the ol' rope trick, tiny hut, secure shelter, magnificent mansion, hero's feast and the like).  Between a lack of magical healing, the difficulty in raising the dead, and a lack of "convienience" magic, psionics fits what I see magic as slightly better than core magic.- In order to access the more powerful (and often indespensible) magicks of a given level, a character needs to be a specialist, or he needs to be willing to sacrifice a feat to do so long after the power became accessible to a specialist. All the big-tickets like teleport fall into this sort of power structure... either a specialist has access to it or the party suffers through until a non-specialist can spend a feat on it a few levels lowers.- All my favorite abberations have a much nicer home in the setting <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />- Magic seems a little darker and a little more sophisticated in most cases. I'm not creating a magical missile of force: I'm impaling you with a piece of otherworldly crystal. I'm not scaring you to death: I'm actually disrupting your autonomic nervous system and interfering with your normal breathing patterns.- The setting itself is one of a stalled Age of Enlightenment, where an Age of Exploration was brought to a crashing halt with the destruction of the motherlands of two great empires, leaving the colonists and natives of the land of Aedin more or less alone in the world. Because of the atmosphere of the game, I have psionics representing all at once the divine power of the church, the scientific understandings of natural philosophers, the ancient magic of shamans, and even the enlightened traditions of eastern philosophies of all stripes. It's a very one-size-fits-all system, and the lack of definite divine magic means that uncertainty about the nature (or even existence) of the gods of the game is quite reasonable, which again fits the ambiguity and confusion I'd like the game to represent.- The psionic races described in the XPH translated very well to either otherworldly spirits from beyond the veil (the dromites, elans, giths, and druegar) or as different human societies (the half-giant, maenad, and xephs) with very little tweaking. The only non XPH races in the game at the start were an Aztec-like race of my own design and a very slightly modified race of humans, though as I developed the setting further I included heavily modified illumanians, aasimar, and even neanderthal. I also experimented with including kalishtaar for awhile, but decided that I was happier without them... though I did steal plenty of their racial background from Races of Eberron.</blockquote>

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