Psionics
When most people Attune, they tap into their instincts, intuition, and empathy to reach out to other people or to assess a situation. If you chose The Psion as a playbook during character creation, though, then Attuning also allows you to open your mind to the unseen world of otherspace and perceive things beyond your mundane senses. Your table might also decide that a “mundane” character awakens to their psionic aptitude based on the events that unfold in your game.
When a psion rolls Attune, they’re doing the same things an ordinary human does - they’re tapping into their intuition and reaching out with their feelings to those around them. But because they’re unusually sensitive, they get more out of it than others. They might:
- Telepathically communicate with another person whom they can see.
- Read the surface thoughts or sense the emotions of a nearby person.
- See the otherspace echoes of recent events, or feel the ghost of a strong emotion.
- Risk peering beyond the veil of rationality to gain mysterious insights about their current situation.
Most psions can’t use their gift as a weapon against others, or to move objects around in the physical world. Most psionics also struggle to reach out to non-human minds with their talents, though with training it is possible to commune with animals and even aliens. By picking up psionic talents, a psion can develop their gift and make it their own in this and other ways.
Psionic attunement can often be a shortcut to tasks that would otherwise require specialised skills. Why Charm someone when you can just read their mind, or Observe the situation when you can rely on your precognitive powers? But the hidden world that psionics tap into is never quite safe to take hold of. Tasks that would be relatively mundane with another specialty often carry a worse risk when you use Attune for them.
Because of how rare the psionic talent is, most campaigns should include at most one character with psionic abilities unless psionics are the entire focus of the campaign.