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Psionics

How Psionics Works

I could go by the Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition 2023 Update rulebook, and reproduce their strict rules on psionics, {provided in Fantasy Grounds as part of the source materials} but here's a bit about how psionics looks like and how it works.

In addition to having some or all of the five main Talents, psions have an additional characteristic, Psionic Strength (PSI) which has a characteristic DM just like STR, DEX, and INT.

There are five main Talents of psionics - Telepathy, Clairvoyance, Telekinesis, Awareness, and Teleportation. Some of these are incredibly subtle, in that they do not seem to have any openly macabre manifestations - Clairvoyance, for example, is never overt in its appearance, because users seem gifted with the most incredible insights into things, like having a nose for trouble, or a profound danger sense.

Telepathy: The basic abilities of Telepathy include Life Detection (can scan for, and identify, lifeforms, identify their type such as animal, human, or alien, and their general location); Mind Link which can connect the thoughts and feelings of two (or more) people; Telempathy which is the power of receiving and sending emotions; Read Surface Thoughts and Send Surface Thoughts, which are how most non-telepaths think Telepathy works; and then some mighty applications of psychic muscle, such as Suggestion (control minds, wipe memories), Probe (invading a mind), and Assault (blast a mind with a directed psychic scream). Lastly, there is Shield, which blocks Telepathy, but doesn't do much to block anything else such as Clairvoyance, Telekinesis, or bullets.

Clairvoyance: This one tends to be forgotten, but a really good Clairvoyant could make a mint as a PI, a scout, or a spy, or even just someone you go to if you're looking for lost items, buried treasures, underground water, and mineral or petrochem deposits. Clairvoyance includes such abilities as Sense (you get an image, or sense impression, without detail); Tactical Awareness (your character can see through darkness, smoke and so on, and pinpoint the numbers and exact locations of foes); Clairvoyance (your sense of sight is projected to a range, and you can see whatever you would see with your own eyes, but you cannot move a thing to see what is underneath, for instance); Clairaudience (you hear things at a distance, with the same kind of restrictions as Clairvoyance), and Clairsentience (a combined Clairvoyance and Clairaudience).

Awareness: The powers of Mind Over Matter, manifested in the body. Psions with Awareness are capable of feats of enhanced strength and endurance, can heal themselves of damage very rapidly, can toughen their skin to turn blades and claws, and even place themselves in suspended animation. There are rumours that the most advanced users of Awareness have learned to regenerate damage due to aging, though that is considered little more than superstition. What is known least of all is the ability of Inspiration, which in Mongoose First Edition was called Insight. In First Edition, Insight allowed you to use your Psionic Strength DM on any mundane skill, and it could be switched on and left on until the psion sleeps. Inspiration is a lot shorter in duration - it must be activated before using a single mundane skill (less than one minute before you begin your task) and the DM is only +2, but at least that is always a +2, no matter how weak your Psionic Strength DM actually is. This is part of a campaign to nerf psionics - the original rules allowed psions to be way more powerful, but each subsequent edition of Mongoose Traveller has weakened psionics to little more than parlour tricks. Kids, if your player wants to be a Traveller answer to a Jedi, give them the full Jedi powers. You wouldn't want to nerf Gun Combat skill, would you, even though all that Gun Combat skill is for is to kill people?

Teleportation: This Talent only does one thing - you vanish from one place and rematerialise somewhere else. There are complications, such as being required to visualise or otherwise see the destination - live video feeds are good, and you can use Clairvoyance and/or Telepathy's Mind Link to the same effect. There are other restrictions. Teleporting over longer distances (longer than Very Long) can result in disorientation for a time, and there are considerations of energy conservation, which means that if you teleport over a higher altitude change than 400 metres for a single jump, or more than 600 metres accumulated in a bunch of little jumps over the course of an hour. Differences in momentum and energy in a gravity well can literally cook the teleporter's tissues or freeze them.

Telekinesis: When Imperial citizens think of Telekinesis, this is that they fear the most. There are plenty of legacy science fiction movies and vids depicting telekinetics in long, flowing robes marching down corridors, gesturing and wiping out hordes of robots or underlings, slamming characters against walls with some whooshing noise, starting fires with their eyes, crushing guns in people's hands and choking people from across the room. For some reason, there's an enduring image of them carrying long glowing blades, but nobody's sure such technology can ever exist. To be fair, some of these abilities do exist. Telekinetic abilities include your basic lifting and manipulation of objects; some kind of levitation; a telekinetic punch; fine detail telekinesis to manipulate locks, perform surgery, defuse bombs and so on, but the range is often limited.

Psions of all kinds require rest after exercising their abilities. Many of them feel a real need to eat more food than is usual. However, the same can be said of people who have had surgical cybernetic implants - and some of those implants can do more or less what psionics can do, so sometimes you really cannot tell if somebody is a psychic, or just augmented.

How Psionics Are Perceived

There are many camps among the unawakened. There are the ignoranti who don't know or don't believe that psionics exist; the sympathisers, who see themselves as "Great White Saviours" and see psions as poor wretches to be led to Salvation ... or killed quietly if they don't come along and play ball; the true sympathisers who may have had psion relatives suffering; and will help even if they themselves have no psionic abilities; the despicable scientists who would like to find out how to detect and identify psionics, so they can devise weapons such a spoisons or germs to "cure" or eradicate them; the Imperials who seek out psions to capture them and force them to work as invisible slave labour, little more than slaves or property, for who is going to step in and help those wretches; and the activists who seek to overturn the barbaric laws written 300+ years ago.

The psions also have a number of camps - those who just keep their heads down and hope nobody sees them; those who gather on stolen ships and head for the stars; those who keep their abilities hidden, so they can pass for mundane in their jobs; and those who use their powers covertly for power and personal gain. Then there are the psion Travellers, who use their abilities any way they can, to stay alive and keep on travelling.

Outside the Imperium, different species have differing attitudes.

Sword Worlders think that psionics is kind of cheating and dishonourable, yet they've never had a problem with someone who uses psionics through the lens of Norse myth, such as "channelling" Odin or Thor, or casting runes.

Darrians of the Darrian Confederation are more forgiving of psionicists, though their little polity is only a handful of worlds, mostly devastated by a disaster which reduced their advanced tech to the Stone Age.

The Aslan are wary of psionics. They are honour-bound warriors. Psionic powers are also considered to be cheating.

Hivers are null-psi. Those strange beings cannot be read by any kind of telepathy whatsoever.

K'Kree don't care about psionics, as long as those who use psi have never eaten meat.

There are four known clades of Vargr (the wolflike bipeds), one of which is VERY psionically endowed, and also quite blind - a congenital defect of all members of that clade.

Then there are the Droyne, bat-winged creatures somewhat between lizards and giant bipedal insects, who are all mightily psionic. Rarely encountered outside of a handful of worlds, namely Andor and Candory in Five Sisters Subsector of The Spinward Marches.

The Solomani, whose Confederation is far to Coreward of the Imperium, are descended from Terra, old Earth. Their attitudes towards psionics are roughly the same as that of the Third Imperium, but they aren't averse to hiring specialists with psychic abilities to spy for them against the Imperium under the protection of Solomani Security, SOLSEC.

The last big polity lies to Coreward and Spinward of the Imperium. Enigmatic, swarthy, slender, the Zhodani of the Zhodani Consulate are heavily into psionics. Their hierarchy of nobility is said to be a psionocracy, with the mightiest minds having the highest ranks. They also have a Thought Police, the Tavrchedle', whose job it is to keep their Proles in line by monitoring their thoughts for deviancy.

Imperials are not welcome there.

Beyond the Imperium, in places such as the Vanguard Reaches, The Trojan Reach Sector, the Outrim Void, and other such regions, psionics are not monitored any more than piracy is. Without the Imperium's oppressive influence, Psionic Institutes can form and flourish, psions can put down roots and teach their kids the basics, and Naval fleets can boast psions in prominent Bridge positions if they like. Same goes for the few Megacorporations who have reached their fungal capitalist hyphae into these outlying regions of space.

"The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices - to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own - for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to The Twilight Zone." ― Rod Serling [closing narration: "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street", Twilight Zone episode aired March 4, 1960

Players Discussions on the topic 2024-01-20 - TMO

I guess I'll ask it here instead of the Discord channel.

"What is the general opinion about psychic abilities in Traveller? Is getting your mind read without your knowledge an everyday part of life there that everyone just accepts? Because from a modern day perspective, reading some of the stuff she's doing feels skeezy to me. But I'm also a fairly private person with a mild paranoid streak. You would expect it to maybe bother me more than most folks. Sultana, of course, doesn't know it's been happening, unless you can detect or block such intrusions somehow?"

2024 01 20 - Alex

The current year of this adventure is 1104 - that's 1104 years since the founding of the Third Imperium. The current Emperor is Strephon Alkhalikoi, of the Alkhalikoi Dynasty founded by Empress Arbellatra. These two names, one from history and one from the present day, are to all intents and purposes good, wise, and benevolent. You can check your cynicism at the door.

In contrast, Empress Paula II (768 - 836) was a monster.

Psionics had been openly practiced throughout the Third Imperium, as well as its two predecessors the Ziru Sirka ("First Imperium") and the Rule of Man ("Second Imperium", whose fall led to an 1100 year Long Night). In the Third Imperium, psionics was just beginning to achieve some impressive goals when Empress Paula went all karen, and passed a law outlawing psionics out of hand. Possibly because her star was waning, and she needed a scapegoat before someone would come up and shoot her and take over.

She enacted the Law in 800. They must have been waiting, because it didn't take long for the Psionic Suppressions to begin. In fact, it might be said that they all began on the same day, as though they'd all been given the same instructions in advance.

So the Imperials just saw footage of buildings being closed down, and people being hauled away in chains, heads held down, and endless trials which showed snarling, defiant psions ranting in court as they were being hailed away, followed by triumphant news anchors proclaiming that the State executed such evil miscreants at midnight local time.

But the psions remember things differently, as any oppressed people would. Cries of "J'accuse!" on the street, mobs, police raids, kids being hauled away, men and women being shot and hanged, or offered as children the choice of sterilisation, lobotomy, or a life spent in isolation on some hellish undeveloped world - which psions read as "killed by carbon monoxide gassing in transit, then dumped in space".

The Suppressions were completed 26 years later, with not one official Psionics Institute left standing, and a generation brought up on popular vids to hate psions, with some actor always popping up in the soaps to menace the mundane population with his "headbending voodoo" until he gets taken out by a cop or something, or they have a scene where the cruel, wicked psychic gets some dreadful death in a fire or such.

It's been 304 years since those days began, and in the Third Imperium, people still hate psions because of relentless legacy propaganda, even though less than one in ten million could say they ever met even one. And people can go to jail, have their careers ruined, their reputation trashed, just for having one too many wins at the poker table, or one too many lucky hunches.

But the Pioneer is not in the Third Imperium.

It is at Marduk, in the Outrim Void of the Trojan Reaches. When The Pioneer left Fist, it left the Imperium behind. Here, there are no laws against psionics. There could be a PI (Psionics Institute) anywhere, and anybody could practice psionics openly.

2024 01 20 - Alex

To psions, Paula II was viewed the same way as Native Americans viewed Custer, and President Jackson when he inaugurated the Trail of Tears. She was to them what Churchill was to the people of Tonypandy in Wales, and India during the Raj when his deliberate actions led to a famine which killed six million people.

No official Traveller publication has ever been written from the point of view of the psion community, and how they view these butchers the same way as Cambodians saw Pol Pot, how Russians saw Stalin, and how the Irish Catholics saw Oliver Cromwell, King William of Orange, and Queen Victoria during the Potato "Famine."