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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steampunkette" data-source="post: 8320302" data-attributes="member: 6796468">The first portion of the Will and the Way from 2e:Zeranna looked over the new class of students with an angry scowl. As the school's Master of Psychokinesis, she should have been exempt from such basic instructional duties. She enjoyed working with the advanced students who had selected Psionics on Athas her discipline as their own, but these children had not even been taught the most basic modes of concentration! Spoiled young nobles and wealthy merchants, she thought to herself: Well, one must begin somewhere. And their parents' tuition kept the school open. "Good morning, students, she began. I am Master Zeranna. You will address me as such. Do any of you know why you are here today?"The class fell silent. The children fidgeted under her gaze. "You are here to learn how to harness the power of your mind through the Way, Zeranna continued. All creatures possess the Will, the potential for psionic power, but without schooling in the Way, they will never be able to use their hidden gifts. Some of you will listen and learn. Others of you will spend months here without comprehending a thing I say. The decision is up to you. Now, shall we begin?"There's also this bit from page 4..."There are schools of the Way in every city of Athas, and merchant houses and noble families often pay dearly to have their scions educated by the best. Rarely, the academies waive tuition for a promising student of the free classes."Psionics are very old on Athas. Stretching back almost to the Blue Age. There was plenty of time (6,000 years) during the Green Age for formal scientific naming conventions to be created and handed down and that's just "What they are". The basis of psionic powers are "Disciplines and Sciences", after all.Which is based on, much as I hate to say it... Robert E. Howard's work. In various Hyborian stories there's talk of "Strange Sciences" of the Elder Things. Like how the Valusian Serpentfolk used Strange Sciences to make monstrous animals with limited intelligence to serve them and eventually pissed the Gods themselves off with their Strange Sciences which is why the Dragons (Dinosaurs) were brought to the Earth as a punishment...That said... there's a whole other layer: The example you use, Iion. Etymologically speaking it wasn't "Leo" for most of history. It was Leon to the Greeks. The Romans would use Leo for a singular noun but Leon- was a prefix form in Latin. And then the Norman-French made it Liun, and then Middle English made it Lion. Calling it any variation of "Leo" would be a pretty "Sciency" way to talk about it, sure... But Lion (or a variation of it) is the original word, not the other way around. For Telekinesis there was no "Original Word" to sciency up by explicitly ignoring the common vernacular to use words from a dead language to describe the thing in question. There's no Old French or Middle English or Northern Germanic or Indo-European term for Telekinetic that we're ignoring because the concept didn't exist before the 1800s when the "Let's name everything in Latin 'cause it'll just stay dead" came into vogue.It only sounds sciency because it's using that same dead language which we're mostly used to hearing only used for Sciency stuff in the modern day. Which influenced Athas's design, playing up the Howard angle with ancient science-cultures ruined by magic.I wouldn't say you have to be "Very" selective since Psionics, from the start, were explicitly separated from magic narratively, and magic still existed in the setting, and that magic was used by the big bads who were destroying the world that you could never hope to actually defeat without massive external help.The setting also has the core motifs of Sword and Sorcery beyond the trappings. Smaller-Scale victories in a dark world with inch by inch progress, Existentialism, Nihilistic choices, Sorcery itself being inherently evil and corruptive making it unsuitable for use by all but the most incorruptible people dedicated to a higher cause, and a general recognition that humans are small in relation to the great dangers around them, with lives no more meaningful than a grain sand rolling across a Dune. (Never mind the fact that enough grains of sand rolling down means the dune itself is gone, because the grain of sand itself doesn't get to see that day)And you're 100% right that it -absolutely- doubles down on the Weird Fantasy angle. With crashed alien spaceships, an undead dragon-king, one entire realm getting yoinked into Ravenloft, not to mention core artwork by the artist who envisoned the setting showing an elf with buzzsaw blades mounted on a weapon, a bicycle gear necklace, and a grenade hanging from his belt...<img src="https://i2.wp.com/www.immortalfantasy.altervista.org/Gerald%20Brom/brom_grave_expectation.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />Because while Howard wrote about Pre-Historical Swords and Sorcery, Athas was always meant to go for a Fantasy-World-Future postapocalyptica based in some part on both the movie Wizards (1977) and Mad Max (1981, 1985) with a heaping helping of Conan (1982, 1984) and Red Sonya (1985)Because we are nothing if not a product of the society (and thus media) that we are raised in.As to the "Psionics was core"... yeah. It was. But when I was 9 and the setting and the book came out I had to pick one or the other 'cause I didn't have the saved up allowance and birthday money for both...</blockquote>

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