The Psionic Force

The Psionic Force
This force is the psychic ability of the mind to affect the world on its own. It is thought that this is an emergent property of sentient (sophont in Larry's terminology) creatures on Aesira.

In humans, this manifests itself into six distinct talents. Each talent performs a different operation through a tendril that must be established. These tendrils can be seen, affected, and even destroyed by other psiarchs.

Not all humans are capable of manifesting any psionic power, and each talent can manifest or not independent of the others.

Telekinesis
The Telekinesis tendril interacts with physical matter. It can apply forces, including very precise ones like that of a tool and vibration to the point of pyrokinesis.

Precognition
This talent allows one to turn a tendril into a locus that can be pushed around to view possible futures, the events of the past, or even parallel universes. It must be tied to something material, as the talent will then track that material object's path through time. The material can be a person, place, or thing.

Telepathy
A talent where a tendril is formed that connects two minds. Allows one to communicate, read minds, attack a mind, shield from psychic attacks, and repair/alter a mind.

Empathy
A talent capable of sensing and changing the emotions of others.

Teleportation
A talent where one instantaneously transports to a location by envisioning the location in his mind. Between jumping, one goes through a plane where time ceases to exist. Untrained teleporters have a chance to end up there on a failed teleport. Because the plane is timeless, it is impossible to get out without outside help.

Clair Perception
A talent where one projects one or more senses to obtain sensory data from a distance. Any sense can be projected, and one can project as many total senses as he can focus on.

Talent Fields
Each talent can project a field that prevents other psiarchs from moving a tendril inside the field. These fields do not interact with tendrils from other talents. For example, a Telepathic Shield does not prevent a Telekinetic Tendril from acting with it's area of effect.

Psion Fields
This theory says that there is a background energy field of psions. Psionics comes from mental manipulation of this energy. Evidence for this theory includes:
 * 1) Cases of Arrivees from Earth, who could not perform psionics their whole lives, suddenly have the capacity to.
 * 2) There exist zones where all psionics cease to function, and are not merely suppressed by a talent field. A psiarch of the White Lodge would know that these anti-psionic fields can be created by extremely skilled psiarchs.
 * 3) Psiarchs have a chance to detect psionic activity in an area around themselves, which is loosely analogous to the way hearing works in the ocean. This is consistant with the idea that there is a medium of psionic background energy that carries ripples from the actions that disturb it.

Null Psionics
Just as rare as those who are psionically capable, there are also those who have null psionic talents. A null talent absorbs psionic energy as opposed to regular talents that output psionic energy. A null talent also only opperates in that talent's field of influence, and so only protects from the powers that talent would ordinarily give.

Benefits of a Null Talent

 * 1) The creature has some amount of passive resistance to being affected by that specific psionic talent. This resistance is always in effect, with no known exceptions.
 * 2) If trained as a Null Psiarch, one may use this talent to absorb the energy of a psionic attack or to put up a shield against that attack. For opposed checks regarding this, a null talent stat is treated as (21 - Stat).

Zero Psionics
The Masters reportedly researched voyd in areas apart from magic. Their research revealed that there are psiarchs that can occur naturally that defy what's known about psionics and null psionics. Instead these psiarchs completely cancel psionics as a whole (presumably the background medium as well) in an uncontrollable fashion. This can also have an unpredictable warping effect on psionics and create unpleasant results.

All attempts to create a Zero Psiarch artificially failed. They have to occur naturally and even then they cannot be compelled to serve the Masters psionically due to their nature, so the research project was abandoned by them.

Mechanically this is a psiarch that has exactly 0 in a stat.