A totally legit scientist uses Zener cards to tests for psionic ability.
The canonical explanation for psionics is that they’re from the Far Realms: weird Lovecraftian planes beyond mortal comprehension, where squidgy creatures use psionics to do squidgy things. I think this doesn’t tell the whole story.
If you look at D&D psionics through the editions, you find a system that’s similar to magic – often overlapping with spells in effect but with a decidedly pseudoscientific bent. No psionic ability name is complete without suffixes like “-kinetic” or “-pathic” or even references to the id or superego. Unsurprisingly considering D&D’s age and influences, it all has a mid-20th-century Earth feel, more than you’d expect from supernatural abilities invented on an Oops All Tentacles dimension.
Traditional D&D magic, on the other hand, was clearly harnessed during a period with technology akin to Earth’s ancient or medieval eras. Magic involves meditation, memorization, alchemy-like formulae and material components, and religious prayer. If ancient or medieval people could train themselves to use supernatural powers, this is probably the lens they would use.
Now imagine an Earth-like world where, for whatever reason, magical power was discovered in the mid-20th century. (In an X-Men-style twist, maybe something was unlocked by the atomic bomb.) Magic wouldn’t be studied by alchemists and mystics but by scientists with electroencephalographs and Latinate jargon. This budding field would look a lot like D&D psionics, with names like “cryokinesis” instead of “cone of cold”.
So what if, in D&D, psionics was invented not in a Far Realm but in a very nearby realm – an alternate Material Plane where magic was discovered later in history? In this case, psionics isn’t a new power source but regular old magic harnessed with different rituals: those of 20th century science. If this 20th-century discipline somehow jumped planes into a D&D fantasy milieu, you’d probably get something that looked like the divide between D&D magic and psionics: a traditional approach threatened by an alternate system with alien trappings and complicated names: a system understood by few, suspiciously bare of ritual, decried as dangerous by the wizards and clerics of the existing magical elite.
But what about all of D&D’s psionic mind flayers, aboleth, and other tentacle wavers? Are they just pro-traditional magic propaganda? Is psionics just a different magic system from a perfectly pleasant alternate Material plane, one that boasts both magic and important scientific advances like penicillin, pulp novels, and penny candy?
Maybe, but maybe the story of this 20th-century magical Earth has a dark end. What if their psychic researches did awaken something bad: something from the dark pitiless depths of space or from a Tentacle World dimension? If mind flayers invaded, 20th century Earth wouldn’t have high-level wizards and clerics to defend it, just some weedy scientists with newly-learned psionic powers. Maybe that alternate Earth world is long gone now, replaced by, you guessed it, lots of tentacles. And that’s why aberrant creatures harness psionics: they learned it when they ate our best scientists’ brains. And now they’re coming to your D&D world, to eat their brains too.
Let me go one step further, and I don’t blame you if you don’t want to follow me here. Let’s say that the earthlike planet was VERY earthlike: maybe it was an alternate Earth that diverged only when scientists discovered real psychic powers in, say, the 1950s. It wasn’t many years after the discovery of psionics that the mind flayers showed up: to be cute, let’s put this armagedden in 1976, the year Eldritch Wizardry first introduced D&D psionics rules. That would mean that slunbering deep in some Elder Brain’s ultra-retentive memory is the history of Earth, as understood by all the Earthling brains it ate. It remembers Leonardo Da Vinci, World War 1 and 2, and maybe even some psionics-infused version of the 1960s space program. And since it ate a lot of scientists’ brains, it probably even knows specifics about all of these. That would kind of make sense, given the high level of tech exhibited by mind flayers and their ilk – nautiloids, grenades, curious contraptions that go boing, and so on – all stolen from Alternate Earth and the other worlds that were the mind flayer feeding grounds.
There’s a kind of gameable outcome of this. Usually the Far Realm is presented as a place so inimical to mortals that you can’t really adventure there. That may be true of the mind flayer home world, but maybe not of their closest planar outpost to the D&D world: the remains of alternate Earth. When adventurers try to plane shift to the invading mind flayers’ home base, they find a dead planet, overrun by squirming bad guys, but a world filled with breathable adventure locations. And this world is filled with eerily silent Earth locations: the Statue of Liberty; labs filled with Zenner cards and experimental weapons; Area 51. Adventurers can find cool treasures and lore: flashlights, bazookas, books of atomic theory, newspapers with headlines about the alien invasion – all timelessly preserved by layers of disgusting alien goo.
Sounds like a fun campaign. I have never heard of psionic powers originating on some Cthulhoid plane, though. Mental powers were a popular story theme back in the days of the pulps. Mostly in SF or superhero stories, which is why it was sometimes said to be a bit out of place. If they just occur as mutations, or are inherited, there’s no need to “explain” that they come from mind flayers or whatever. But as I said, sounds like a fun campaign.!
That is a really cool origin for psionics.
Nice work!
I’m one of the silent lurkers to your website, but I want to jump in here and tell you that I do appreciate your musings about how the game works and how the underlying world works in a way usually hidden to the players. I do the same. So, this is kudos and encouragement and appreciation to keep going! Thank you.
MY D&D multiverse is a mashup of the three games I loved as a teen and college-aged fellow. I’m 62, now, and still playing with my adult sons and their friends. (I call that a life well-lived!) But at our table, we start with Traveller. Technically, that’s the game we’re playing.
But! Yaskoydray left behind a sterile planet in the Final War, with a planet-spanning computer and a copy of his personality in it. The inspirations are obvious: the Krell machine, the Pleasure Planet from Star Trek TOS. Magic, here, is simply figuring out how to reach the mental state that attracts the machine’s attention. The machine just does what it does, but occasionally looks to other Wildspace Systems and gets an idea. “Hey, look! Dragons! I’m going to copy those!” And yes, we play in a Spelljammer setting, but a DM can keep their adventure grounded and ignore all that if they wish.
Of course, there’s a super-wizard in Kalork III’s history, who has dreams from other realms. And one dream he keeps having is of mighty space vessels, battling for territory, or resources, or survival in a realm that has a strange affinity for hexagons. So, to try and purge himself of these dreams, he built a set of living constructs that copy those dreams, on a handy subcontinent of our world and let them go at each other. This is where you find a giant setting of Star Fleet Battles* on the world of Kalork III, and can interact with living starships that look like the Federation, Klingons, Romulans, and all the rest.
So, from our D&D setting you can expand out to Spelljammer, then out further to discover that you’re really just one world buried deep in a rift (i.e., far away from other worlds) in the Traveller galaxy. That chunk of broken spaceship in the Barrier Peaks? That’s where that came from. Or, you can go inward and discover Yaskoydray, the OS of the great machine—except, it’s been 350,000 years and it’s getting glitchy. Maybe he needs to be unplugged and plugged back in? “Inward” also includes finding the place where you can play Star Fleet Battles if you want—and have your character be part of that game, too!
*(Federation Commander is the quicker-playing tabletop version of SFB, and it is MUCH easier to align the FC and 5e rule sets than the SFB and 3.5 rules from back when I had this particular symptom of early-onset whackadoo. Just FYI.)
Look, I know this is all crazy, but this is what you get if you let MY OS run with a fantasy realm in it since a friend introduced me to the game in 1977. (Jeez, I haven’t done the math…48 years!) Like Yaskoydray, I’ve gotten a little glitchy. And I have one player who rotates into the DM’s chair from time to time who HATES this whole idea—which is why every step is optional.
And ALL of that is to say; I’m TOTALLY stealing your idea! All the squidgy tentacles come from a Wildspace System where psionics rather than magic rules the day. Yaskoydray happened to spot it, some time in the past, and what we have in our campaign is the result of him playing with the idea for some millennia—much to the dismay of the people on Kalork III who just want to live a life.
Thanks for that! And thanks for your work, here. I always find it interesting, even if I rarely speak up.
Hello. Cool post as a worldbuilding point of view, but I have a few criticisms.
What I tend to see in all these post about psionics = magic is they miss the goal. If they are the same, there is no point in having them in the first place. The point of having psionics is to have magical effects that aren’t actually magic. Also, there is a specific flavor in psionics, more related to Sci-Fi than to the Fantasy genre. A Telepath isn’t the same as a Bard, although there is some overlapping (both “charm” the unsuspecting victim). So, in a fantasy setting, a psionic is a different type of beast than a mage. Although ultimately they achieve similar goals, it is like to say that using a sword and maneuvers is a type of magic, because the ultimate end is to defeat a monster and apply some kind of effect. But the game treats them as different things, with different rules and systems, with some overlapping (EG: many weapon masteries have Saving Throws, and many spells require a spell attack).
I am aware of the common arguments against making a new system, and dealing with psionics as if they were not magic, but I think that those arguments are more nitpicking than valid. We could separate them in 3 categories that are actually related: 1) Weird interaction with magic (counterspell, dispel magic and antimagic field)
2) Overpowered characters (capable of stepping in every area of the game and very difficult to stop.)
3) Complicated systems (learning a new system is difficult for new players and GMs, designing them is difficult for interactions).
As for the first argument, I would say it is not really an issue. The point of using psionics as its own thing is that they aren’t affected by the same spells. And that’s ok, as long as there is a way for characters and monsters to deal with the psionics in their own way. And for that matter, there is nothing in a martial character that allows them to counteract a spellcaster… and that WAS a thing in previous iterations of the game: if you hit a spellcaster when launching a spell, you interrupt the casting; now, you only can affect concentration. So, there is no actual way in which a martial can deal with magic: only resist the effects via Saving Throw or the undefined “gagging” the spellcasters. The same can be said about martials: you cannot, as a magical character, prevent a martial to take a bonus action, trunk extra attacks or avoid an Action Surge. You can, theoretically at least, prevent damage or incapacitate the martial, but that would also affect a magical character. So, for the sake of the argument, the “I cannot use an antimagic field against a psionic” is like to say “I cannot use an antimagic field/counterspell/dispel magic against a fighter”.
As for the last two arguments, they are linked but not the same. Designing is difficult, yes, but you can make the system inuitive enough that you don’t need to deal with extra book keeping, nor being OP. Just give psionics their own, autocontained, limits, and use a different approach than spellcasters, to avoid overlapping. So, for that reason, I would give psionic characters a different route than that of spellcasters. I would NOT make them cast spells at all, but to have some other resource/system to use instead.
To design a new system for psionics is its own can of worms, but an alternative route could be making them not immediately tied to a resource and instead making them more alike a martial character, and make them skill-based. Also, their powers would be less than that of a magical character, but more versatile: the same power would be used for different, but related and logical, effects. EG: a Telepath type character could make things like communicate at a distance, deal psychic damage and apply some mental conditions (like charmed) to their enemies. A skill check or a saving throw would be enough to passively deal with OP characters, and you can limit the psionic effects when the psionic is under some conditions that render him incapable of maintaining their link to the effect. EG: stunned, incapacitated, blinded, charmed, confused or even pain could hamper the effects of a psionic. Even poisoned could do the trick, if you rush me. So, a wizard could not counterspell a psionic, but casting Blind or Thunderbolt in them could disrupt their effects. Also, I would rely HEAVILY on concentration for effects. That for limits. You could, also, give the psionics some resource you need to take care of, but I am not sure that’s the route I would personally go through.
That said, this is my old take on the mystic. It is free: https://site.dmsguild.com/product_reviews.php?products_id=214099