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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Joël of the FoS" data-source="post: 2191306" data-attributes="member: 17665">Mind Over Matter - a great option for low powered psionicsStarting note: I am a Ravenloft DM and these lenses were used when making this review: After way too long (blame real life), here’s my review of Steve’s Mind Over Matter book (MoM), an option book for psionic in the d20 system. It is made for any setting in mind, including d20 Modern, so some parts of the book do not apply to Ravenloft ("A television? A computer? A PsiCop? Just the words sound weird to me", would say Viktor Hazan) First, I have to say that the MoM system is very simple, compared to other psionic systems in 3rd edition. It is based on feats and skills. Simply put, first, you take the Psychic Ability feat, and this feats enables you to take psionic skills. That’s the beauty of it: just skills. So the system is self limiting: if you take the feat and add ranks in psionic skills, you do not take ranks in other class skills. The consequence is that the MoM system is lower powered then other d20 psionic systems we know. You do not need to be psioniscist to use psionics, but the psionics skills are more subtle. So you use the skills as often as you use other skills, like Spot or whatever. That means the skills need to be well balanced, of course. They are, for most. For example, the heal psionic skill. You can give a round of curing to everybody with you, including you. On average, you restore 3d4 hit points. For retry, the DC for the same injury is augmented by 10. So you get one round of cure, perhaps two if you’re lucky. It’s not too powerful and still useful. The following lists the psionic skills included in the book. You’ll notice there is nothing to melt the brains of your opponents, just cool psionic powers to enhance your game. Many great roleplaying opportunities here. • Astral Projection (should be switched to Ethereal Projection in Ravenloft, with usual limits on domain closure); • Autohypnosis (great skill: to resist fear, memorize something, tolerate poison); • Aura Reading (race, health, state of mind and cool new concept: aura strength; Will save to resist it); • Clairvoyance; • Empathy; • Ghost Sight; • Heal; • Postcognition (cool skill: get impressions of events that happened in a location); • Precognition (to see parts of the future and guide your actions); • Probability Manipulation (influence something in your favor); • Psychometry (know more information about a person from an object); • Pyrokinesis (start fire at a distance); • Spirit Channel (speak with the dead); • Stabilize Self (when at -1 hp or lower); • Telekinesis; • Telepathy. The book explains in lenght each of these skills, devoting about a third of a page to half a page to each skill. That said, the bad points: some of the skills still do not seems to be well balanced and can quickly become overpowered. First example: Pyrokinesis. The skill inflicts 1d6 point of fire per rank in the skill. Let’s say a 6th level rogue with 3 ranks would make 3d6 of fire damage each round. Since a skill can be used round after round, this can be devastating, unless there is a limit to it. The limit imposed to this skill is that 5% of the time, the fire is uncontrolled (as long as it’s on the target, not really a limit in this case) and if you roll “20” on your skill check, you take half of the damage you inflict. So, statistical wise, our 6th level rogue with 25 hit points could inflict up to 120d6 of fire damage before getting seriously hurt (half the damage = 1.5 d6 x 4 times to get to about one hit point x 20 times before getting a backlash). That’s much more powerful then a wiz! Second example: Spirit Chanel. To speak with the dead, the DC is 15 and the highest limitation is +6 if the dead has been in this sorry state for more then 1,000 years, for a DC of 21. The limitation is a DC increase, unless you take a full minute of quiet meditation to clear your mind. So a very low skilled person in that ability (say rank 2), with a lot of time in his hand, could get one success every half an hour if he does only that, i.e. try the skill, clear his mind, try again and so on. So if he spend an afternoon on it, our low skilled person could ask 8+ question to a person dead a thousand year ago, which is much more powerful than a priest with a similar spell. Not to mention taking 20. That said, the two examples are easy to solve, if you add a time limitation to these, like for example the pyrokinesis skill is limited to a few uses per day only (ex: three times the number of rank you have), and that Spirit Chanel takes one hour of meditation to establish contact with the spirit, or similar limitation you can think of. So, even if one needs to correct a few things (in email, Steve said these limitations are needed and probably fair), the book is a great addition to the Ravenloft setting and I strongly recommend this book to anyone looking for a painless, more subtle way to introduce psionics to your campaign. I will surely add parts of it in my campaign in the next game. It is sold at <a href="http://www.rpgnow.com" target="_blank">www.rpgnow.com</a>.</blockquote>

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