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I am looking to start up another adventure path for the gang and I was thinking of asking the players to use only dreamscarred press classes for flavor. The campaign would take place on Golarion, where obviously psionics are rare. I have had positive feedback from the players who are excited to delve into the novel classes.
I am looking for a few ideas to help with imersion--what excuse to give the PCs psionics? Touched by a deity? Which one? Born under a strange star? Radioactive spiders? I don't want the fact that they are the only 5 psionic users they have met or heard of to feel like it was shoehorned in (if possible).
Any ideas?
P.S. The players are voting for Reign of Winter if that helps.
Well you ARE shoehorning it in. I would suggest that you simply learn to accept that with grace and run with it.
Simply ask them. If you need a reason...um...mana waste mutant births.
That doesn't seem to be an issue... according to the post, the players WANT to use psionic classes.
Though psionics might be rare, maybe they come from a small, little known nation where psionics are more common. Or the powers manifested when they were younger and they are now just coming into their own with them.
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Though psionics might be rare, maybe they come from a small, little known nation where psionics are more common. Or the powers manifested when they were younger and they are now just coming into their own with them.
Small, reclusive, remote nation could work pretty well. It wouldn't take much to adjust the start of Reign of Winter for it. I like it, thanks!
Though psionics might be rare, maybe they come from a small, little known nation where psionics are more common. Or the powers manifested when they were younger and they are now just coming into their own with them.Small, reclusive, remote nation could work pretty well. It wouldn't take much to adjust the start of Reign of Winter for it. I like it, thanks!
You're quite welcome!
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I don't want the fact that they are the only 5 psionic users they have met or heard of to feel like it was shoehorned in (if possible).
I'd suggest don't do that.
The biggest problem I see is that you're constraining yourself as a DM. You should have access to the same abilities that the PCs have. That's the best way for it to come off as natural.
Like DungeonmasterCal says, throwing Vudra into the mix makes sense. I wouldn't have the PCs be abnormal where they originate. Akasha, psionics, and martial initiation can be common, giving them some grounding. Home. Making them unique would only make them "outside" the setting.
Also, it's best to have a reasonable source for replacement PCs if something bad happens. That a brother, uncle, or family friend might show up to fill a gap if someone dies is useful.
Supposedly in Vudra psionics are much more common. Use some of the 'occult world' stuff from Occult Heroes and remember that the standard idea of the positive/negative sphere is part of their cosmology. Have them all be part of a tourist or diplomatic group going to Taldor, which is really only just north of them a ways anyhow, and where the AP starts.
The other thing to do would be...
When the party meets the Black Rider they psionically 'awaken' as part of the deal. Our GM used it to give us mythic power, but a mind-quake could just as easily tackle those PCs given the rider's immediate death.
Supposedly in Vudra psionics are much more common.
Psychics are more common. Psionics as you think of them, does not exist in Golarion canon.
Supposedly in Vudra psionics are much more common.Psychics are more common. Psionics as you think of them, does not exist in Golarion canon.
Incorrect. There's a whole two pages about them in the Campaign Setting book. Mind you a good chunk of that is used explaining what Psionics IS, and that it's relatively rare compared to magic on Golarion, and that it's EXTREMELY common on Castrovel, but there's two sections on it explaining where it's common on Golarion.
Monastic orders preach the value of sharpening and honing both the mind and the body, and it’s not uncommon in Vudra to find monks and psionically gifted individuals rubbing shoulders. Many of Vudra’s great heroes and legendary leaders are said to have had eerie and strange powers to affect the physical world with their thought alone. Certainly, one of Vudra’s most successful exports to the Inner Sea region—the faith of Irori, the Master of Masters—teaches the value of self-perfection and its inexorable connections to the mind and to knowledge. Yet just as with other forms of magic, not all who practice the delicate art of mindcraft (as it is known to some) are benevolent.
Vudra is a vast realm, and there are countless tales of those who rule isolated mountain valleys or islands hidden in remote lakes—legends of rakshasa lords, exiled asuras, and other fiendish outsiders whose mastery over psionics give them particular and potent advantages over the weaker minds and bodies of those they enslave.
There is another realm to the Inner Sea region wherein psionics are common—yet ironically, while this realm is far closer than Castrovel or Vudra, it is a realm of which even less is known—the Darklands. Psionic creatures become increasingly common in certain regions of these endless caverns, particularly deeper into the third realm of Orv.
Explorers of the mysterious vaults of this realm who had the good fortune to survive and escape back to the surface world tell of all manner of psionic horrors, but strongest among these horrors are three races in particular.
The aboleth are easily the most widespread of these three races, and certainly the most ancient, yet they have in large part apparently abandoned attempts to colonize the Darklands’ waterways. Likewise, it would seem that the mysterious ichthyic masters have largely abandoned their psionic skills as well, in favor of glyph-based magic, although verifying these assumptions is difficult at best due to their isolated nature.
Easily the most physically terrifying and imposing of the Darklands’ psionic denizens are the neothelids—vile, enormous worms who lay claim to at least three Orvian Vaults. Served by wormlike minions who exact their will upon the upper realms of the Darklands, the neothelids rarely emerge from these nighted depths. It does seem that the neothelids had some involvement on the aboleths’ abandonment of the Darklands, perhaps after an ancient and now-forgotten war. Whatever the cause, there is no love lost between these two deep-dwelling psychic horrors, nor should any surface dweller unfortunate enough to fall into either’s clutches or happen upon a lost, buried city of their ancient and alien race hope to cling long to life or to sanity.
Yet perhaps the most sinister of these deep races are the intellect devourers. Evidence points to the possibility that these horrid creatures aren’t originally from Golarion at all, but came to the world from the Dark Tapestry, finding a place to settle after an unimaginably long pilgrimage through the black places between the stars. Certainly an extrasolar source for these creatures would go a long way toward explaining their notoriously tough-to-kill natures. Whatever their original source, the intellect devourers were already established in Orv at the time of Earthfall, for early drow texts record of their first terrifying encounters with the body thieves.
Indeed, the intellect devourers are one of the few creatures of the Darklands consistently capable of driving the drow to fear and horror. The most horrific facet of these creatures isn’t their shape (though their four wickedly sharp-clawed limbs and the sheen of their brainlike bodies are certainly that) or their deadly skill with mental attacks and psionic warfare, but rather their ability to consume the minds and memories of other creatures they encounter, leaving their bodies as fleshy chariots for them to hide within and use to infiltrate the victim’s society.
Many drow families fell from within to the predations of intellect devourers before they learned what signs to look for and developed methods to cull and prevent the creatures from stalking them, yet no solution is final. Worse still are rumors of entire cities built in distant Orvian Vaults; cities inhabited entirely by creatures whose bodies have been stolen and whose cultures were consumed by these malevolent parasites. As the drow grow more adept at hedging out infestations and protecting their growing claims to Sekamina from intrusion, the intellect devourers seem only too happy to turn their ravenous hungers ever upward—to entirely new societies on the surface above who are ill-equipped at best to defend themselves from an enemy who can make your very memories a weapon and who can make enemies of allies with a thought.
And my memory is fuzzy on this, but I believe there's a Psionic character in an early AP or module. A Psychic Warrior I believe.
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Supposedly in Vudra psionics are much more common.Psychics are more common. Psionics as you think of them, does not exist in Golarion canon.Incorrect. There's a whole two pages about them in the Campaign Setting book. Mind you a good chunk of that is used explaining what Psionics IS, and that it's relatively rare compared to magic on Golarion, and that it's EXTREMELY common on Castrovel, but there's two sections on it explaining where it's common on Golarion.
** spoiler omitted **
** spoiler omitted **...
Actually, Drahl is correct, Psionics do not exist in Golarion canon.
The Campaign Setting book is 3.5 and was replaced with the Inner Sea Guide with the move to the Pathfinder system.
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Supposedly in Vudra psionics are much more common.Psychics are more common. Psionics as you think of them, does not exist in Golarion canon.Incorrect. There's a whole two pages about them in the Campaign Setting book. Mind you a good chunk of that is used explaining what Psionics IS, and that it's relatively rare compared to magic on Golarion, and that it's EXTREMELY common on Castrovel, but there's two sections on it explaining where it's common on Golarion.
** spoiler omitted **
** spoiler omitted **...
Actually, Drahl is correct, Psionics do not exist in Golarion canon.
The Campaign Setting book is 3.5 and was replaced with the Inner Sea Guide with the move to the Pathfinder system.
RETCOOOOOONNNNSSS!!! *Shakes fist*
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RETCOOOOOONNNNSSS!!! *Shakes fist*Supposedly in Vudra psionics are much more common.Psychics are more common. Psionics as you think of them, does not exist in Golarion canon.Incorrect. There's a whole two pages about them in the Campaign Setting book. Mind you a good chunk of that is used explaining what Psionics IS, and that it's relatively rare compared to magic on Golarion, and that it's EXTREMELY common on Castrovel, but there's two sections on it explaining where it's common on Golarion.
** spoiler omitted **
** spoiler omitted **...
Actually, Drahl is correct, Psionics do not exist in Golarion canon.
The Campaign Setting book is 3.5 and was replaced with the Inner Sea Guide with the move to the Pathfinder system.
*offers hugs*
I never need an excuse, just permission.
But in all seriousness, I actually played as a soul knife in a reign of winter campaign. The exuse we used is that I came from a place where psionics was more common, and basically fell / wandered through one of those portals that opened. Of course, this happened in book 2, so that excuse would not work as well in book 1.
I often mesh psionics with ki, and blend the mechanics together.
In this way, psionics in my game is more of "how to cast spells with ki" and uses the mind's/spirit's power over the body to manifest powers.