Alrighty, I am refreshed. Time to delve back in.
Psionic Powers
Almost, but not entirely, quite unlike this.
It would be remiss of me to
not say a few words about DnD and psionics before launching into this tirade. Psionics has been part of the DnDverse, in one way or another, for a very long time (basically, since Bruce Cordell decided to take up the mantle of Eternal Psionic Warrior), but it's always been a bit of a strange fit. Conceptually, it was a little too sci-fi for DnD when it was being played straight (i.e. not a post-apocalyptic modern setting or Spelljammer); from the point of view of rules, it was weird, often clunky, and frequently quite badly balanced relative everything else. As I don't have experience with editions prior to 3E (or really
post-3E, to be honest), I can't say much more than those generalisms (which I have, in turn, lifted from others on this very forum), but one thing that always struck me about 3E psionics is that it basically had no thematic niche. Everything it did was 'I can't believe it's not magic', except it was
worse in almost every way at everything that magic did that it also claimed it could do. Whether it was field control, utility, direct damage, or practically anything else, psionics always lost. From what I can tell, the trend continued into the future, because for some reason, paying in mechanics for flavour is something we're supposed to accept in 2017.
DSP, I'm looking at you
, you fuckers. Considering that one of your writers coined the Stormwind Fallacy meme, you should be ashamed
. Ahem.
With all this in mind, being that at the end of the day, anything written by Palladium is a dilute DnD clone from the eighties, it comes as no surprise to anyone that psionics would be a part of
Nightbane as well. Given that
Nightbane is dark urban fantasy, at least the
thematic fit isn't quite as awkward here. What of the rules? Let's find out.
We're firstly treated to a surprisingly coherent blob about what psionics are - nothing really new to see here. We're also told that there's a bunch of classes (called PCCs, in true acronym-wanking fashion) that deal with psionics extensively, but that we're only getting one of those here. I find it a bit surprising that Nightbane, which are extremely supernatural creatures, aren't given extensive psionic capabilities (or at least, none of these get mentioned here). There are also a couple of suggestions for ports from
Beyond the Supernatural, which unlike prior suggestions, actually seem sensible.
Much like (just about every edition of) DnD, psionics operates on a power point system, except of course, being that this
is Palladium, we have to give it a daft acronym (ISP). I find this one
especially jarring, as I interact heavily with computers, where that acronum has a very different meaning. Needless to say, in the context of psionics, it seems rather weird, but hey, whatever. It's not like we didn't know that Kev faps himself to sleep every night with acronym listings by now or anything.
No, I am not posting any pictures of any of the above.
Given that we've all interacted with (or at least seen) power point systems by now, I won't belabour them. We are then told about how we can recover our
power pointsISP: meditation and sleep. Apparently, one hour of meditation gives you 6 ISP, and one hour of sleep (or total relaxation) gives you 2 ISP. We're also given a note that one hour of meditation is equivalent to two hours of sleep or rest 'for the physical body'. Now, we can't really evaluate this recovery rate, as we have no indication of how many ISP we can expect to have at any level, but we're
already in confusing territory. As anyone who's ever pulled an all-nighter or been a graduate student knows, sleep has fairly non-trivial
mental benefits. However, according to this, meditation apparently does
not provide you with any of these. This is
extremely weird conceptually-speaking: meditation restores your ISP, which is your 'mind power', at
triple the rate for sleep, but yet somehow, gives you
no mental recovery. Maybe this is meant to smack down exploits for avoiding sleep? If so, it's a fucking vague and annoying way to do it.
We then begin some rules wtf. Let me quote directly; all emphases of all sorts are as in the original:
"All saving throws are made on a 20-sided die. Non-psionic characters must roll a 75 or higher
to save vs psionic attack."
Why such an elaborate scheme to say the equivalent of 'non-psionic stuff gets no save against psionic, tough fucking luck'? Why set up the situation where psis power through normies with no defence at all on the part of the normies? Is this a typo? What could it have been then? Minor and major psis need 12, and master psis need 10, so I'm not really sure what mis-combination involving 5 or 7 could have been involved. 17? 15? Some other thing? The fact that we get ME-based bonuses (yay, flipping back again!) doesn't really act as any saving grace for the poor normies - by the rules as written, you could be a normie with ME 30 and
still fail 100% of the time. I'm not even going to
discuss how pointless and stupid source-based saves (as in 2E, or possibly even 1E) are, because nobody on here is shadzar and therefore we all get it, but of course, this is yet another criticism we could level if we cared enough.
We then get a bunch of rules about ley line influence. Now, unless you've read
Rifts or happen to be a serious occult fanperson, you would not have the first, second or tenth clue what this has to do with anything. No discussion of ley lines has been done here (unlike in Rifts, where they're talked about extensively), and I strongly suspect copy-pasta from Rifts (or something else, maybe). However, they clearly weren't
just copy-pasting, because they managed to sneak in this little gem:
"Note: Most damage-causing psionic abilities are not described in this book, but will be in future Nightbane sourcebooks."
Clearly there's been some cross-pollination of ideas here - apparently Bruce Cordell thinks that blasters shouldn't get nice things either.
"You wanna do this? Fuck you, buy more books!" - Kev Siembieda, 2000
"You wanna do this? Fuck you, suck instead!" - Bruce Cordell, 2004
"I find it amusing that this art piece was meant to be for another useless power." - Koz Ross, 2017
Now the next part is where it gets really weird, and we get more information about the weird alt-reality that is the Nightbaneverse. Apparently, every damn animal everywhere is psionic! They don't use ISP to power these things (because reasons). They can also sense the supernatural in a 183 metre (or 600ft if you're a Murrican) area (what kind of area? Radius? Diameter? Square? Hemisphere? The fuck?). Animals also react quite strongly to supernatural displays (in the case of dogs of all sorts, they just go straight for you most of the time apparently). Let me just reiterate that last point for effect:
every single animal has psionic powers in the Nightbaneverse. Their power list isn't very long (5 powers, with one being restricted), but this makes your
dog a more capable psi than you are. Why is it that
humans specifically are excluded, but even very close ancestors of ours (like chimps) are not? There's also a bit of confusion here, where the text literally contradicts itself within three sentences - they first say only close human companion animals are psis, they then say that they're just the
strongest animal psis, and then everything's psi, fuck it.
Which one is it Kev? Stop taking bong hits when writing!
Inspiring sourcebooks since 1981!
Of course, this utter argle-bargle wouldn't be complete without Kev Viking-hatting away a sensible consequence of all this nonsense - apparently, we can't train
dogs to sniff out the supernaturals because reasons. Apparently, as it is their natural instinct to run away, they won't search these things out, and will flee immediately. Setting aside the fact that this
blatantly contradicts shit in the previous paragraph, I call bullshit. Dogs can be trained to detect a lot of things, and we've gotten
very good at conditioning away their instincts. Ever seen a guide dog? They are so well-trained that they'll ignore a
lot of shit before messing up what they've been told to do. I find it totally and utterly ridiculous that we can't train magic-sniffer dogs because Kev has a hateboner for players having nice things. It's inconsistent, disempowering and ultimately stupid - much like most of what we've read in this section. I'm also gonna jokingly mention that animals save against psi on 15s, which makes them more resistant to psi than normies, but not quite as resistant as minor psis, because fuck you consistency, that's why.
Just imagine this coming at you from the page with every line. That's pretty much how it feels.
With Kev having sufficiently demonstrated his incoherency credentials, his Viking-hat credentials, and his inability-to-worldbuild credentials, he now has to finish wiping his dick on the page and demonstrate his mechanical incompetence as well. We are now (for the first time) introduced to potential psychic energy (or PPE), which apparently everything has, and which doubles at the time of death. This energy can be used to power your psi. This is not only severely under-explained (Can I go over my max ISP with this? How long do I have to use it? Why aren't humans on this list, but 'apes' are? What's the range I can absorb from? What the fuck were you injecting between your toes when you wrote this?), but is also horribly open to abuse. I'd make a 'bag of rats'
joke here, except that this actually seems the most sensible approach - rats give 2d4 PPE (so 4d4 when they die) and only have 1d4 hit points. We now have a complete Kev breakdown - failing at everything.
The Psychic PCC
Let's just stop and recollect for a sec. We are at page
sixty-fucking-eight of this abomination. Character creation rules
ended over
twenty cockgrinding pages ago. We
only now actually get an actual fucking playable class,
which is not the Nightbane! No
words exist to describe how incredibly backwards all this is. I guess we should be somewhat thankful for the small mercy that this is at least
with the fucking psionics rules so that it's a bit easier to find, and the concepts it revolves around are fresh in our minds? I dunno, but fuck this book, seriously.
Don't fuck books. You might end up a Trump voter.
Well, now that we actually have our first playable class, let's see how it all stacks up. We start with what looks like a decently-long list of powers (nine, because meditation doesn't really count). Our ISP is equal to our ME (Will save stat for those too bored at home to remember this shit) plus 1d4 times 10. That means your average starting Psychic has 20-30 ISP. We now get our
first wtf: the recovery rate postulated previously is
way too slow! Let's take 30 as a good middle-of-the-road value. If you'd burned through your entire allotment, you'd need to meditate for
five hours to bring it all back again! Note that as you also need to sleep for eight or so hours anyway (because fuck you), we can actually get by on eight hours of sleep (16 ISP regained) plus three of meditation (for the rest). That's an awful lot, and it only gets
worse with time, as each level gives you ten more, which for the nice people counting at home, is two extra hours of meditation or so. Better start with those rat-bags - you're gonna need 'em. It's also worth mentioning that because your PPE has been spent in developing your psi, you only start with 1d6. This is likely to end up lower than your average
rat, which hasn't developed shit. Fuck you for being a human, I guess? I'm not even sure what could motivate this kind of thinking, and thus, I won't make any jokes about it, although I totally should.
We then hit the real motherlode of wtf. As usual, straight from the sphincter:
"Attribute Requirements: Only psionic powers, but a high IQ and ME are strongly recommended."
...
Let's try and unpack this shit. First of all, how the fuck are
psionic powers an attribute? They're ... well, psionic fucking powers, not something like ME or PP. Secondly, as far as we can tell, there are only two ways to get psionic powers in this game:
- Be a member of this class
- Be a dog
Clearly, thanks to this restriction, the first one is off the table. So is this a class only suitable for animals? What?
What? How did this even get past ... anyone? The more I think about it, the less sense it makes. However, it sure reads hilariously if you consider that the only species that qualify for it are
non-humans.
Pictured: Your next Nightbane
character concept.
We're then told to just make up a bunch of skills we apparently have based on background, add a few more, turn ourselves into an assassin if we're evil and we like, and that we have 3d6 times 100 (what? Dollars? Pesos? Rupees? Bars of gold-pressed latinum?) in cash and 1d6 times 1000 (again, what?) in possessions, as well as 'a basic car, pick-up truck or motorcycle'. So yeah, this is a class for driving, psychic dogs. You're welcome.
Me neither, doggo.
Alternative caption: Pictured: Your next Nightbane
character concept.
OK, this is about 3 thousand words, which admittedly covered few pages, but much hilarity. There's a big list of powers coming up, which I am sure is full of funnies. Old Palladium hands - I welcome suggestions for some of the weirder ones I should look into in particular.