Pushing Psychic Powers
I want all of the psychic powers to have at least one ability that qualifies as "regular use" and one that qualifies as pushing the power. Pushing it involves additional risk and often strips you of the power for hours.
- Rending: ability to temporarily enhance the power of your natural weapons by projecting Chi through them. Can be pushed to inflict a blow which ignores all armor; just touching your opponent is enough to disrupt the soft spots behind their armor. This should be easier to do, too, since it doesn't require a solid strike. Oh, you can also push it to enable you to boost a blow with a melee weapon, which it normally won't do.
- Armoring/Toughening/Protection/Shielding/Invulnerability: ability to temporarily enhance your personal toughness and grant you some extra armor. Can be pushed to grant you a lot of additional armor, but this requires near complete concentration so you can't do much else while using it. Also, if you push it, you can choose to define one very particular kind of attack that you are prepping for and gain a ludicrous amount of armor against that attack alone. For example, if you knew that you were about to be stabbed in the gut, you could use this power to block that strike... but then it wouldn't help you if someone shot you.
- Sixth Sense: ability to pick up on subtle energies that others miss. You can sense the presence of active machinery, detect water (particularly water flows), or sense danger. It is often triggered passively. It can be pushed to use it as your primary sense, enabling you to fight or navigate in complete darkness.
- Scry: ability to divine information about the past, future or present of an object or creature that you have some sort of link to. Normally gives only short, vague info, but can be pushed to experience a full-fledged vision. Scrying the future is always iffy, but can be done.
- Empathy: you can sense the presence of strong emotions in your vicinity. This is often triggered passively. It can be pushed to scan a wider-than-normal area, to study someone's aura so intently that you can generally identify truth from falsehood (this often requires touching them) or to try and project a particular emotion in all directions.
- Focus: the ability to put yourself in various trance states. Can be used to enter suspended animation, focus all of your energies on a particular task, to resist environmental cold or heat or to aid your memory. It can be pushed to enter a much deeper trance, which improves the benefits but generally leaves you incapable of communication and unable to perform any other tasks besides what you're focused on.
- Projection: lets you send a mental construct of yourself to a person or spot you know well. It can be pushed to enable your projection to do more than just talk for a bit. If you push it and decide to bring an object back, you'll have to push it still further, a dangerous and risky proposition. While projecting, your body appears to be asleep. If you are pushing your power, your body will turn somewhat translucent and look sort of ghostly, although it will still be present.
- Ghostwalking: lets you see the ghosts of the past as though they were really there. Often triggered passively. You can push it to actually enter the spirit world for a time and interact with these ghosts, but this is a rather dangerous thing to try. Most ghosts are insane with grief or anger. On the other hand, the spirit world is very powerful, and doing this can produce some very "plot device"-ish effects.
- Channeling: you hear strange voices, which sometimes offer you advice. It's most commonly used passively, but you can actively ask a question, too. It can be pushed to allow one of the voices to take control of your body and perform a task for you. This is generally harmless, but very spooky, and your voices go away for a long while afterwards.
- Sending: lets you send messages (verbal or otherwise) to someone else's mind telepathically. It can be pushed to send a powerful emotion or sensation, including pain. It normally only works on one target at a time, but you can also push it to perform a regular sending that touches multiple minds.
- Illusions: I may drop this one. It just doesn't seem to fit, somehow. If I do include it, you can probably push it to create a surreal dreamscape over a large area.
- Empathic Healing: you can share the strain or pain of an injury or illness afflicting another person. This means that you suffer some of the effects, but it's easier for the other person to recover. It can be pushed to try and revive the recently deceased, but this is risky and each use tends to age you a little as you lose some of your own lifespan.
When you push a power, it disappears at the end of the scene, generally for a full day. Note that this means that you can use the uber-Rending touch multiple times, it's just that when the fight is over you won't be able to use it again for a full day.
If you double-push a power (it might be good to provide examples of this, too), then we add a random factor to how long it goes away. It will generally range from days to weeks, with a small chance of being permanently reduced by a die size.
Posted by Kiz at June 13, 2004 09:24 AM