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Why?
The obvious question is why bother with another mental powers system? The WOTC system for psionics was designed to be closely integrated with the other D&D systems, so it bears a strong resemblance to the system for arcane and divine magic. It uses power points (spell points) and models psionic powers essentially as one-shot spells, just as in the core D&D magic system. There are some innovations, like manifestations for psionic powers, multiple attribute dependencies, a number of psionic-related feats, and a lot of new equipment, much based on crystals. Psionic combat deals ability damage, and it is completely different for psionic animals and monsters. Some of these features have been changed in the new expanded book, but the basic theme is the same: Bruce Cordell has created a "D&D" system for mental powers that does not attempt to model them as they are usually used in folklore or fiction.
In those stories, mental powers are frequently taxing, causing physical and/or mental strain to characters. Characters can clash mentally by trying to break through each other's mental shields. There are no outward signs of mental powers, and they are essentially untraceable unless you have a sensitivity to them. Most "gifted" know only a few powers but can do a wide variety of things with them.
These two systems do not have much in common with each other. The Psychic's Handbook's goal was to prevent a system for mental powers that closely models the powers seen in fiction. For those who are interested in such a system, this is a faithful and fairly complete system for modeling these powers. In this case, you don't need to read the rest of the review. The Psychic's Handbook does a good job of modeling these kinds of powers. Just go buy the book.
For everyone else, I'll provide much more detail about the contents of the book and the goals of the system. Each header represents a chapter in the book. Along the way, I'll analyze how good a job the book does, and you can make up your mind at the end for yourself.
Goal
As previously mentioned, the goal of this 80 page book is to provide a new system for mental powers for use in all d20 games: fantasy, modern-day, and science fiction settings alike. The book is trying to mimic the mental powers seen in fiction and folklore, and chooses rules that aid that, instead of trying to shoehorn those stories into a "D&D" paradigm. Such a system has been somewhat lacking, since the Star Wars and Spycraft versions are much more specialized. The book succeeds brilliantly in this respect, covering everything required for such a system.
The system is based on skills and feats - feats open up broad categories, and then skills are picked based on that. For example, the Psychoportation feat allows one to learn the following skills: Apport, Blink Teleport, and Teleport. Thus, it is easy to create different levels of psychic ability, by allowing the skills only as cross-class, or using a class with bonus psychic feats (the psychic class). It's a very flexible system with many hidden design benefits.
The Psychic
The book opens with a description of the psychic class. It has medium BAB, d6 HD, good Will saves, 6 skill points/level, and a bonus psychic feat every few levels. They get access to simple weapons and no armor. The design constraints thus mandate that the psychic has only a few psychic skills (in contrast to the many spells or psionic powers available to others), but that they get much better with level, since they are skills.
Next is a discussion of combinations. Multiclass psychics work fine, since all psychic skills are cross-class skills for other classes. Should other character classes wish to take the Psychic Ability feat and develop Psychic feats and skills, they can do so at a reduced level of power. They can also become Wild Talents through the Wild Talent feat, which allows them to learn one Psychic skill.
They also provide sample psychics at 4th, 8th, and 12th level, which show the design choices in action. For example, 8th level psychics tend to have five or six psychic skills and seven or so psychic feats.
Next is prestige classes: the Beastmaster, who uses his psychic skills to create bonds with animals; the Fire-Starter, who is a master of fire in all its forms; the Ghost-Stalker, who destroy spirits and ghosts; the Mind Hunter, a non-psychic who hunts psychics; the Psychic Adept, a mystic who combines the mental and psychical into a seamless whole; and the Psychic Healer, who specializes in healing the hurts and diseases of others. In general, this is a good initial selection from the tropes of fiction on powerful gifted. The Mind Hunter is particularly interesting, since it is forbidden from having psychic feats, but gains many psychic skills that allow it to attack psychics, like Drain Vitality and Psychic Static.
One sour note: the prestige class requirements are frequently quite stiff. For example, the Beastmaster requires 7 ranks in Handle Animal, Mental Contact, and Survival along with two psychic feats. If you tried to do this straight from the psychic class, you couldn't get the required skill ranks until you were 11th level, since two of them are cross-class skills for the psychic. This is true for many of the prestige classes, like Beastmaster and Psychic Healer. Of course, it is much easier to qualify if you are willing to come in via alternate classes.
In general, the psychic prestige classes are a nice varied bunch that don't seem too overpowered. For example, it doesn't seem unreasonable to allow a psychic healer to raise the dead if they spent 10 levels in the class to get there.
The psychic is also presented as an advanced class for use with d20 Modern. If anything, this class seems a little underpowered when compared to the mage or acolyte, but that's probably fine. Note that a few things like Reputation and Defense bonus were left out, and the web enhancement (available here from the Green Ronin website) fixes these problems.
Skills
Here we get to the real meat of the system. When one wishes to use a psychic skill, one makes a normal skill check against a DC. In most cases, there are a number of DCs listed in the specific skill descriptions - the higher the DC you satisfy, the better the power. As an example, take the Telekinetic Shield (Int) skill. If you succeed at a DC of 15, you get a +2 bonus to AC (or Defense). Higher DCs give you a better AC bonus: DC 20 gives +4 AC, DC 25 gives +6 AC, etc. The power lasts for 10 rounds and costs 2 Strain.
What is Strain? That is how psychic powers are limited. Whenever a psychic uses a psychic power, it costs a certain amount of Strain, which is applied as nonlethal damage to the psychic's hit points. It's an interesting way to limit things. It also simulates well the fiction convention of mental powers taxing the user and possibly causing unconsciousness. It also means that a psychic has to be careful in battle, because his effective hit points go down as he uses his powers. I think it is a great mechanism and works well. It also is generally applicable outside of D&D only, though d20 Modern doesn't use nonlethal damage. (A fix to that we'll get to in a bit.)
The skill list is fairly complete, and a fair amount of care was taken with the effects and descriptions. For example, teleport is in there, as is apport (for objects or people), and blink teleport for combat 'porting from place to place. One interesting aspect is that psychic skills have their DCs adjusted for familiarity and weight, but not distance. This is meant to simulate fiction, where psychic powers frequently do not depend on distance, only on the level of knowledge one has about the subject. Of course, the Psychic Handbook doesn't force you to do things their way. In a later chapter, they present optional modifiers for distance as opposed to familiarity and suggest ways to tweak it to fit your campaign. It's just good design.
Even fairly obscure powers are in there, like Dreamwalking, Electrokinesis, Dimensional Phase, and Life Extension. Really, the skill list is quite complete, and I got many ideas just from reading the skills, like the dream vampire that enters others' dreams (Dreamwalking) to drain their life force (Drain Vitality), to the psychic warrior who has lived a thousand years (Life Extension) and exists only to defeat demons with the power of his mind (Psychic Weapon), to the psychic entertainer who uses holograms (Photokinesis) and illusions (Illusion) to entertain paying customers. There are many more, from the precog, to the healer, to the death-dealing telepath, to the psychic surgeon who reshapes personalities and creates drones. Pretty much anything you think of is already in there.
In general, the power of skills matches up well with their strain cost. One skill did however strike me as underpowered: Psychic Weapon. This skill allows one to manifest a weapon out of thin air that one uses as if one had the Weapon Finesse and one adds their Wisdom modifier to damage. The psychic weapon strikes as a touch attack and is considered a magic weapon for overcoming damage reduction. It is immaterial and has no effect on nonintelligent creatures or objects. This is pretty powerful stuff, but the problem is that it costs 6 Strain to use for 10 rounds, and the damage is relatively paltry: Result < 14, 1d4; Result 15-24, 1d6; Result 25-34, 1d8; Result 35+ 2d6. When you consider that a first level psychic probably has only 6 hit points to start with, this is a pretty costly power. I also think the damage is relatively paltry, even if it does strike as a touch attack. I might improve it by bumping the damage up one notch, so that it progresses from 1d6 to 2d8 or reduce the Strain. It doesn't seem like this power will scale to ridiculous heights, and one already needs to burn a feat just to get this one skill. Of course, it is always better to go for underpowered rather than overpowered, and one can always use Imbue Weapon (a feat) to add more damage.
Feats
The psychic feats have several different objectives. Some of the feats are Psychic Talent feats that provide access to skills, like Clairsentience, which provides access to Combat Sense (Wis), Cyberkinesis (Int), Enhance Senses (Wis), Psychometry (Wis), and Remote Viewing (Wis). Some of them are general feats which improve the abilities of the psychic, like Skill Aptitude or Mental Fortitude. Some of them are metapsychic feats that work somewhat like metamagic feats and cost more Strain. Finally there are psychic feats that grant new powers or change the behavior of psychic skills, like Cure Disease, Flight, or Multitasking.
There are a large number of feats, something like 40, so there is no way for one psychic to get them all. Many of them are equally useful, though one seems broadly useful for any psychic: Mental Fortitude. It allows one to add their Wisdom bonus to their normal rate of recovery from nonlethal damage, so instead of getting back their level/hour, they get back their level+Wis/hour. This is a particularly attractive feat for low-level psychics.
One of the interesting balancing tacks taken here is that the more powerful skills don't fall under general feats but instead custom feats for those skills. So you have to take the Psychic Weapon feat to use Psychic Weapon and the Dimensional Shift feat to use Dimensional Feat. One could easily expand or contract this to suit the specific campaign.
Some feats even give you extra applications of a skill. For example if you have Telepathy and are reasonably skilled in Mental Contact, you can make yourself invisible to others with a feat. In general, I agree with the way choices were made to restrict things to different feats. Of course, if you don't agree, you can modify things easily, since the scaffolding is already there. It's good design.
One flaw in the feats and skills chapter is the lack of a good reference table. It would be very handy to have a list of feats with prereqs and one sentence description all in one place. They do in fact have such a list, but with no descriptions, so it isn't as useful unless one knows all the feats by name.
In general, the feats add a lot of options and new effects to the skills, which mean that there are even more ways to distinguish one psychic from another. There is no reason to ever encounter the same list of feats and skills in a psychic.
Psychic Campaigns
This is a chapter which provides additional rules and options for psychics and tries to integrate them into a campaign. The first part covers Advanced Psychic Techniques. These range from damaging psychic shields to extending them to others to conditioning of others - creating drones. In a nice nod to the fiction, there are rules for creating gestalts, which allow psychic to merge their efforts to accomplish things they could not alone. This makes them much more powerful, but it also makes them all vulnerable to a single attack. It's a great rule for psychic covens which can do earth-shattering feats when linked together.
Also, in a burst of genius, there are rules for psychic grappling. This is psychic to psychic combat after mental contact has been established. You have broken through their psychic shield, and want to do some damage, or they want to do the same to you. It works somewhat similarly to the normal grappling rules, and this is a brilliant idea. From fiction, we have the image of two psychics wrestling with each other in mindspace, and here Steve Kenson has adapted the physical wrestling rules for just this purpose. You can grapple to occupy the other psychic while your friends finish him off, or you can try to get a lock and start causing him strain. You can even psychically pin him and then use psychic powers on him. You can even have multiple grapplers pile on. Forget the overcomplicated broken mental combat rules you have seen before. Here you contend with each others psychic shields, using Mental Contact, Psychic Blast or Psychic Weapon. Once you have broken through, you can try to use a psychic skill directly on them, or you can grapple them. You can do some strain damage to them or pin them if you win the opposed grapple check. If they are pinned, opponents get a +4 bonus to attack them, and they suffer a -4 penalty on psychic skills you use on them. It's a beautiful system and so much cleaner than the other systems I have seen.
Other rules are presented for changing your own memory, wielding weapons telekinetically, eavesdropping telepathically, and using teleportation for sneak attacks.
Next up is psychic equipment. Elixirs affect psychic powers when ingested and function much like potions. Crystals have various effects (power-enhancing, dampening, etc.) and are made with the Imbue Item feat. Potions and crystals fit the theme of the book, but the book even provides a small paragraph about the choice of crystals and suggests that they can easily be changed to other objects without affecting the rules. It's nice to have the book point out small changes that can be made within the system, especially on flavor issues like this that affect people's perceptions.
The next section discussed in detail how to customize psychic abilities to fit your campaign. Every book with its own new subsystem should have a section like this. For example, it points out that since the system is built on a very flexible hierarchy of feats and skills, it is easy to restrict or eleiminate certain skills or feats that are considered too powerful or unsuitable merely by changing the prerequisites or eliminating them entirely.
The system also discussed alternatives to Strain, from ability damage to Fatigue saving throws, to hit point damage, to psychic energy points, to XP cost, to even no strain. Each option is discussed in a lucid way with default suggestions and advice on how to modify this option to fit the campaign.
As mentioned above, there are options to change familiarity modifiers to distance modifiers should the GM desire it. There are even discussions on the use of action points to limit the use of powerful psychic abilities.
What follows is campaign advice on how to insert psychics in the campaign and how various organizations and society in general would react to the existence of psychics. There is also a short discussion of the interaction between psychic abilities and hi-tech, though no extra rules are provided. There is also advice on how to make psychic powers, magic and psionics interact.
Finally, since psychic powers can change the way characters interact with NPCs, some general advice on how to integrate psychic powers into campaigns is given. In general, I find this advice not very useful, since the situation should already have come up in a normal magic D&D campaign. After all, people still do use amulets of ESP or the equivalent spells, I believe? But this advice is usually seen as useful for many people not accustomed to GMing mind-altering powers, so I think it is a good inclusion.
After this is a nice concept: psychic phenomena. Essentially these are psychic powers anchored to a place or object that react in a preprogrammed way to stimuli. These can be placed purposefully - for example, memory stones that show an illusion depicting an historical event, or accidentally by a powerful dying psychic as a warning or last gasp. Several examples are given: the Stone of Heroes gives an Empathic Projection of Hope that gives a +2 morale bonus to attacks, damage, etc. to all good-hearted individuals within 30 feat for the duration of the battle.
Psychic storms (movable psychic static) and psychic viruses are also covered, which affect only those with psychic ability. A psychic creature template is given, though it would have been nice to see some original psychic monsters. It would of course be relatively easy to convert the mind flayers or githyanki to this system.
Finally, the book ends with the idea of psychic constructs. These are essentially psychic creatures that are given life from the mind of a psychic. It costs the creator both time (days) and XPs to create a construct, but it serves much like a summoned creature after it is created. It's a great way to create variable foes to challenge players.
Conclusion
This is a great book. Buy it if you are at all interested in playing a character with mental powers that simulate fiction and folklore. It is an ideal system for any d20 game, and it is both more and less powerful than magic. My only real complaint is that it would have benefited by being longer, with additional room for more psychic items, original psychic creatures, a detailed modern campaign setting, and perhaps a few custom NPCs, just to show off some of the many possible character possibilities made possible by this very flexible system.
For those of you who know GURPS, this is like GURPS Psionics done better in d20. It uses almost everything good from that book and fixes many of the balance issues to make a great system for d20.
Web Enhancement
There is a web enhancement, available at the Green Ronin website here. It gives some of the left-out information on the d20 Modern psychic and introduces a new race, the Illan, who possess innate telepathy and make excellent psychics. Otherwise they look exactly like humans, so they are an ideal way to introduce psychic phenomena in a low-key manner, since they blend in naturally with humans.
Style
Because the content is so exemplary, I don't think the style is that important. The cover image, of a psychic in a foggy night, is a great piece by Todd Lockwood that shows a lot more attention to composition than many of his posings for the D&D books. The moodiness and creepiness in the cover are a great introduction to the book. The interior art is in black and white, and varies from very evocative work by Kirtz to an oftern vert suitable combination of foggy and defined work to bargain basement sub GURPS level art. In general I thought the subject matter chosen for the artwork was quite appropriate and served very well to illustrate the many different settings and moods one could use the book for.
The book is well-laid out and clear. I didn't like the grey swirly background for tables and notes - the background is too dark and harms readability. This kind of textured background is almost never a good idea, but publishers continue to make the smae mistake over and over. In addition, I found the fat font used for section headings to be inappropriate and really a little goofy for the subject matter.
In general I feel the style did not impede the use of the book and made things in general clearer, so I give it relatively high marks for Style.
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