I'm happy to hear about the high bars he'd have in place.
I'm cool with the pulpy sci-fi aspects of Psionics, but I get that that's a dealbraker for some.
So lets do a bit of digging...
Psionics in old-school D&D is mostly a mutation
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This is the Dark Sun / Githyanki / Githzerai version of psionics: some creatures are born with the ability to harness their mental powers. Others are not. Some go on to harnass this ability for personal power (psions), others simply have a weird trick they do (wild talents), but all creatures with psionic power are born that way. This makes it not unlike 5e's conception of sorcerer abilities: it is a thing that chooses you, not a thing that you choose, a power you were born with.
In this vein, it's important that it not be involved with any extraplanar whatits. It's natural. In Dark Sun, it's creatures finding a way to live in a transformed world. The Gith races were created by manipulating evolution.
Themes: Life, evolution, transformation, the future, lineage, heritage.
The Main Problem Here: This is pretty explicitly science-y. When you start talking about evolution and breeding programs and adaptation and biology you're out of the realm of the mythic and into the realm of the pulpy sci-fi stuff. There is no deity who created psionics or maintains psionics like there are deities of magic. There is no otherworld of psionics like there is of the fey or of shadow. For a chunk of players, this is like midichlorians in their Jedi - it's going to mess with the vibe their world has going on. While certainly appropriate for pulpy sci-fi games (or D&D games that loot from that fantastic tradition, as Dark Sun does to a certain degree with Barsoom), it ain't a comfy fit for medeivalesqueries. When someone in the tradition of misty isles and maidens in the lake hears a voice talking in their head, it is a fey or a demon, it isn't "telepathy."
The Attempts to Thread: In 3e, it was just accepted that psionics was one part pulpy, one part new agey, and three parts "exotic." So your dungeonpunk brain-ninja got crawling tatoos. Cool, maybe a bit dated, but we've left the land of misty isles and maidens in the lake
far behind at that point, and it's not necessarily a great match for Dark Sun's stone-age brutality vibe, either.
In 4e, psionics was from the Far Realm, basically, though the Far Realm was never really milked for its pulpy connotations as much as it was just another villain in the Nentir Vale. This made it outside and alien and foreign and invasive - but something new and strange that some folks mastered. Again, didn't mesh well with Dark Sun's vibe.
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The Mechanical Vibe
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At their introduction, psionics was a potential power-up your character might get. This fits the "quirk of evolution" narrative quite well.
In 2e, psionics was something you could train to be, and could fail to use. Or you could get it "wild" 1e style. But the powers required an internal effort on your part that, often enough, wouldn't take. Works pretty well for a "trying to master this power you've been saddled with" vibe.
In 3e, psionics was spells. Using power points could change the dynamic a bit - you could nova bigger, resulting in a more spikey power curve. But that was just "being a wizard, but MORE SO." The experience was to burn bright and hot and then run away.
In 4e, psionics was powers. Again, using power points could change that dymanic a bit - you could be more flexible, more adaptable. The experience was to be able to slide one effect into many different categories depending on need - and also to nova bigger.
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...so taking those raw ingredients, here's some ideas....
Decadent Nobles
The medieval idea that the rich and powerful were so exotic as to be
different people is literally true in this version of the story: their breeding has created psionic potential. Children with the Gift are considered especially choice husbands or brides. Their powers give them a power and force of personality that others can only hope for. In this model, the psionics is largely about persuasion and influence - a psionic person attracts others, ensures loyalty, can motivate others to do great things. Psionics is mostly telepathy / empathy. Perhaps the Gifted can hear the cries of their people. Perhaps they can simply, Machiavelli-style, manipulate them. The base system is one not of mental domination, but of rewarding people for doing as you desire (perhaps a la some 4e-style leader mechanics), and of picking up on their subtleties (Insight!), and of perhaps punishing those who don't perform with withering scorn (
vicious mockery +++!). The Gifted cultivate a certain aura, a glamour, that others naturally fall in line with.
When you go to something like Dark Sun, this is represented by the sorcerer-kings and the infleunce they wield. It also is just one small part of the potential galaxy of psionic talent - the Gift takes many forms, and you expand it with some more...biological...aspects, honing in on Dark Sun's themes of evolution and transformation. If the Gifted of your medievalvania are the nobles, the Gifted of Dark Sun are mutants, transformed by their world into something no longer quite (demi)human anymore. There's a man with an eye in the center of his head, there's a woman whose touch feels like ice-knives, there's a guy over in Nibenay who they say is blind, but who can see the minds of people. And perhaps there's one in Tyr who is amassing an army of loyal followers with a slight sparkle in their eye...
Mechanical Schtick: This version of psionics might use an expanded version of 3e's psionic focus: when you have it, you have a constant effect on those around you (an aura), and you can spend it to achieve a powerful momentary effect, and harness it again by using your actions. You don't "run out of it," it's like you always have a concentration slot filled, but can choose to end it to gain a momentary effect. "Psionic Combat" is as much a political battle as it is a mental one, and have often caught innocents in the crossfire. For more overt, pulpy effects, you might make the aura more of a literal thing, or even a psychical transformation.
Heroes and Villains: A PC may be one of the Gifted (regardless of background - perhaps it showed up in an urchin!), and thus attract the attention of other powerful Gifted, and of those who seek to end the Gift. Many of the other Gifted are ambivalent characters at best - the worst manipulate others without conscious, seeing themselves as greater than them. The best try to use their empathy to make the world a better place, but also find it taxing and exhausting, the great burden of knowing how much everyone is suffering.
Dreams and Nightmares
In this version of the story, psionic energy is the power of dreams. Those who have it would be said in our world to be 'honing their subconscious,' but in the medeivalesque world, they are dream-travelers, shamans, witches, creatures of the night and of the moon, akin to the dark shadow beneath the druids. Clad in black and silver, these agents fight a battle that many are not aware is happening - a battle over minds, over souls, happening while we sleep. They travel the ethereal, the astral, the dream-logic of the feywild, the nightmare realms of shadow - they may even be more at home there than they are in our world. They know the mushrooms to pick and the herbs to collect to travel through your mind, to help you confront the burdens on you, and to vanquish them. The things that you dream about are real, and can really affect you, and this includes the horrors that you dream about, the nightmares that haunt you. An illithid isn't just a horrible entity from beyond the stars, it is
literally a creature of nightmares. The githzerai and githyanki are scarred and changed from
living a life enslaved to their internal horrors.
In a world like Dark Sun, this ability is the dream of the sorcerer-kings: a power they could control that wouldn't destroy the world. They're making this dream a reality through the practice of the Will and the Way, but of course, as they dream, others do, too. Wild talents are those born due to the sorcerer-king's dreams of power.
Mechanical Schtick: Meditation calls up the dream world for you to interact with, and while you are in a trance-like state, you can perform certain special actions. Think of it like a barbarian's rage, only while raging, a sort of sphere of influence expands out, and within that sphere, you exercise your psionic abilities - make your dreams a reality. You might even go super flexible and open-ended with it, not unlike illusion and phantasm powers. You might steal an idea from early psionic combat - you have to "open" your enemy to influence, and then you do with them as you please.
Heroes and Villains: This version does use aberrations, but as nightmares, not as aliens. Cthulu isn't from beyond the stars, he's from barely-remembered primordial fears. It's more "Lovecraftian" in the sense that it is madness, dream-logic, fey-addled (and the fey and the shadow should have a big influence - maybe they are subclasses!). He's incomprehensible because
you cannot know yourself. Illithids aren't just brain-eaters for the body-horror of it, they're that dream where you are trapped somewhere dark where there is screaming and moaning and a horrible cold moistness and the things that lurk in the darkness crave you for your utility.
The heroes who fight against these nightmares are experimenters and artists and mental healers, creatures of twilight and dawn who also know that the darkness contains light, and that dreams and hope are the best fight against hopelessness and futility. There's a potentially Tolkeinish conflict there, between the things that would cause you to give up hope, and the little lights of joy that you can find there.
The Champions
In this version of the story, we bite the bullet: we say that Dark Sun is the most popular version of psionics, so lets go all "loot the best things from the best settings" and say that Dark Sun's psionics is now
the psionics. What does this mean in practice? Psionic power is like a knighthood - something that elevates someone into a noble echelon based on their utility to their patron. Every knight has a lord, every psion has an owner, a powerful person who uses a psion to achieve their own goals. It costs a lot of time and money to train someone properly in the use of this ability, and, once they have it, they owe a great debt to their benefactor that they spend the rest of their lives repaying. They must be loyal. They must be willing. They must be pliable. Psions are commanders, conjurers, war-casters, honed tools of their patron's will.
Many psionic patrons are good folks, leaders and generals with a particular sort of need for an elite member of society. Like knights going around with horses and swords and emblazoned shields, psions go around branded as well. But, of course, a common psion origin story for a PC might be one of rebellion: I decided that I didn't owe that loyalty anymore. Like a ronin, you may be come an outcast, a turncoat...but that doesn't mean you're bad, or that your lord was good.
In Dark Sun, you don't need to do much to change this - the patrons are just all sorcerer-monarchs, maybe add some of the more "mutation"-style abilities.
Mechanical Schtick: The patrons are domain-like subclasses that change what you were taught or what you are good at. The core, though, is a core set of abilities that all psions get that are perhaps exemplars of the six sciences - every psion gets some one ability to represent each of the six. So, like, a psion can use
The Speech to talk to others without being heard (telepathy) and can then maybe enhance that with a resource like points. Another example would be using
The Avatar (psychometoblism) to enhance an ability check of someone, and spending points to undergo a more drastic transformation (wings! reach!), or
The Sight (clairsentience) to get an inkling of what is forthcoming, and spending points to change that outcome! This gives you a 2e-like system of sciences and devotions (or Senses and Sharpenings or whatever). The key is that the basic use of the ability is
party-friendly, something you can use on the "troops." (Also: did someone say inspirational healing?!
)
Heroes and Villains: This narrative was made for duelin': you will face off against the psions of your enemies in deadly mental combats to weaken them, so that the "troops" can more easily fall. They become strategic members of your war party, beacons that call others to their side. The vilest are those who work for vile creatures - the champions of wicked kings or the champions leading armies of undead. The best are those who defend the innocent in their homeland by leading armies out to valiantly protect the home base, using violence only to guard life.
