Chapter One: Mentalist Characters
In building mentalists, the book’s definition of “mental powers” is predictably vague; it says “a ‘mental power’ is any psionic or psychic type ability a character possesses… (a) mentalist (also referred to as a psionic, a psi, or the like) is a character who possesses such abilities.” To further complicate things, this definition includes but is not limited to what the game system refers to as Mental Powers (which are powers targeted and resolved with values derived from attackers’ and defenders’ EGO scores). The latter involve mind-to-mind contact and are thus only applicable to beings- however the classic definition of mentalism encompasses powers including clairvoyance (extra-sensory perception) and telekinesis (which having a physical effect could encompass all kinds of ‘energy projection’ abilities, depending on what the character’s power set is).
The book starts to define characters by going over the usual archetypes and origins for mentalists (some of which, like ‘Brain in a Tank’ are better suited for NPCs). It very briefly reviews Characteristics, since most mentalists are built around the EGO stat and the Speed Characteristic (including the option for buying extra SPD only for Mental Powers, to reflect some mentalists’ skill in using their powers). The Skills section lists several psionic-only or psionic-based Skills, such as Cloak, which makes it harder for other mentalists to detect the “signature” psychic impressions of the character’s powers in use. This section also has a rule that allows a character to boost one of his Interaction Skills (say, Bribery) by +1 for every 10 points of Mind Control (or other appropriate Power) used. This might make some Skills a bit too easy, but on the other hand Mental Powers in this game are relatively easy to break free from (to keep them from being too powerful, especially against PCs), and this idea is one way to give these mind-affecting abilities the power they should have without making them too effective in combat situations. This relates to a point about the “all or nothing” problem brought up in the Mental Powers section of Chapter One.
In the Mental Powers section the book reviews how mind-affecting powers work in HERO System: The power is targeted with an Ego Combat Roll (Ego Combat being further described in Chapter Four); if an attack hits, the effect dice (say 10d6 Mind Control) are rolled and compared to the target’s EGO, with more difficult effects having the minimum result adjusted by a factor of 10 (using Mind Control to make a target do something he might do anyway simply requires a result greater than his EGO but using the Power to make the target do something he’s ‘violently opposed to doing’ requires EGO+30) and every 5 points of Effect Roll above the threshold being -1 to the target’s EGO-based “Breakout Roll” to resist the effect. This means that against a target with a normal EGO of 10 it takes a bare minimum of 7d6 in a Mental Power to achieve an EGO+30 effect, but it usually takes 12d6, and then you have to factor in the target’s Breakout Roll ‘save.’ This is where the “all or nothing” problem comes up: The control established over the target can make PC mentalists too powerful (and make PC targets deeply resentful), while the “nothing” risk makes a lot of players avoid playing mentalists. This section only has a couple of mild suggestions for changing this mechanic, given that this is part of how Mental Powers are balanced. The “Skill boost” rule presented earlier is one way around this problem, though.
Another rule that the author introduced with the original TUM is that a given character’s Mental Power is calibrated to only one Class of minds, which in the default rules are Human, Animal, Machine and Alien. That is, if you have a cyberkinetic who can use Mental Powers on machines, then that is the default class of targets he can affect; he cannot use his Telepathy on Human minds and cannot take a Limitation like ‘Power Only Affects Machines.’ In my opinion, this poses a large number of problems, namely that many settings have rather elastic definitions of these categories (e.g. in Star Trek, telepathy can work even on non-humanoid sentients but not on Ferengi), and Long heads off any abuse of this rule by saying that all PCs have to count as “Human” for these rules (even when the character is an Alien or an android, say), but that just increases the inconsistency. There are also several suggestions given for GMs to modify this rule as they wish (one of which is to just ignore it).
Again, a major difference between this book and the other 5th Edition Ultimate books is that Long already made several of these changes in the original (4th Edition) version of TUM, changes that carried over to HERO System 5th Edition. Thus the details here simply confirm and clarify what’s in the corebook, for the most part.
Chapter One then goes over other Powers associated with psionics, such as Clairsentience, Mental Defense and Telekinesis. It then looks over Advantages such as Based on ECV (something that makes a non-Mental Power operate like a Mental Power), and various Limitations, one of which is Mental Power Based on CON (basically the reverse concept, where you have a physical item like truth serum that is applied to produce an effect like Telepathy).
The Disadvantages list is short, but does go over how to build certain famous psionic drawbacks of fictional mentalists, like “telepathic bleed” (where some telepaths suffer pain or disorientation from being overwhelmed by all the thoughts they’re sensing).
Chapter Two: Mentalist Powers
This is a standard-format list of powers as arranged by type, with the author coming up with a fairly large list of types (like ‘Emotion Control’ in addition to ‘Mind Control’). Close review of the chapter shows that in addition to obvious power constructions, there are some rather creative setups for buying powers based on a certain power set: Gambling bonus with precognitive powers, extra Hand-to-Hand damage due to mind control (basically making someone ‘walk into the punch’) and so forth.
Chapter Three: Mentalists Genre by Genre
As in some other Ultimate books, these write-ups focus on the villainous side of the Hero Universe, although there’s an interesting hero named “Brainstorm” who is perhaps a bit over-specialized in Ego Attacks. Most of the low-powered Heroic write-ups have to stretch the genre boundaries to count as mentalists (for instance, Dark Champions is supposed to be a realistic genre, but there’s one guy whose only power is the ability to read someone’s harmful secrets). Fortunately there are also big-headed mutants from the post-Apocalypse, an alien race of mentalists, and even a far-future character who sorta comes off like Veronica Mars with psi abilities.
Chapter Four: Mental Combat
This combat deals with the meat of mind-to-mind combat in HERO System, and presents new options for it. To recap, basic Combat Value for a character is derived from one-third of his Dexterity (26 DEX is a 9 CV, rounded up). The attacker’s CV with modifiers is Offensive Combat Value (OCV), the defender’s modified CV is DCV, and the difference between the two is a final modifier applied to the attacker’s “hit” roll of 11 or less on 3d6 (e.g. a 9 OCV versus a 7 DCV is +2 to the roll, or 13 or less to hit). Ego Combat Value works the same way, except of course that the base stat is not DEX, but EGO - thus, Ego Combat Value or ‘ECV’. This in turn leads to ‘OECV’ and ‘DECV’ although in my experience, these terms are little used in games given that there generally aren’t as many modifiers to ECV as standard CV.
This section changes that. Mostly it applies the standard Combat Modifiers in the corebook to ECV where applicable; for instance being Surprised does not reduce DECV but using the Set Maneuver does increase OECV when used with a Mental Power. There are also reviews of the best tactics to use with the listed Mental Powers as well as the best defenses against them. This chapter also lists special “Mind-to-Mind Combat” Maneuvers that can be used by anyone in Mental Combat (e.g. ‘Mind Bar’ allows a mentalist to effectively Block a Mental Power used against him, provided he has that same Power). However, the book also details three “mental fighting styles” that are essentially Mental Martial Arts – even though the book explicitly states that you can’t buy even Ranged Martial Arts to use with Mental Powers. Thus the rules should be treated as optional. (The book also doesn’t show how these Mental Maneuvers are built, unlike The Ultimate Martial Artist.)
This section also includes rules for combat in the Mind Zone – which is (for the sake of simplicity) deliberately patterned after the Speed Zone from The Ultimate Speedster. That is, it requires Extra-Dimensional Movement to access, and it effectively puts the character outside normal space and time, since he can only interact with other minds and is effectively operating at “the speed of thought” instead of normal physical speed. But also like the Speed Zone, the character with an Enter the Mind Zone power has to buy a duration on each use and an extra SPD rating to determine how many relative actions he gets with each jaunt (apparently, some people’s thoughts move quicker than others). Unlike the Speed Zone (which is the physical world operating at fractions of a second), the mentalist in the Mind Zone has no physical presence and thus can only interact with other mentalists in the Zone or any “mental objects” that may be there. This basically means that it serves to simulate fiction where psionic combat takes place at the speed of thought. But like the speedster power, it still raises the question of how the GM runs the rest of events in real time, especially if the Mind Zone combat between two mentalists takes place in the middle of a physical battle.
Chapter Five: Campaigning With Mentalists
This is primarily a GM’s-advice chapter that raises various questions and points that the GM needs to answer when allowing mentalist characters in a game. Even in an anything-goes superhero setting, questions arise as to how psi power works and how common it is; usually the default situation is that psionic powers are fairly rare, making them both unusual and hard to defend against. In a setting where psionics are the norm (with some SF alien races, for instance), there will naturally be several means of countering those abilities, and some “common” items will only be usable by mentalists (a telekinetic race that builds upper-story buildings without stairs, telepathically-accessed security codes, etc.).
Chapter Five is premised on the idea that campaign design will focus on the low-powered “Heroic” campaign, thus each broad power category is described largely in terms of its common Power Limitations; these Limitations also serve as a GM control on high-powered abilities or those that will not function with a low Active Point cap. However, a primary control on the psionic PC in the game is social- most people are naturally suspicious of psionic powers, even in a superhero game - as the author puts it, “even in a Heroic campaign, mentalists tend to be much more powerful than the average ‘man on the street’ – and unlike Energy Blasts and Suppress Magic attacks, Mental Powers tend to have a lot of non-combat uses.” This means that if psi powers are known about at all, there almost certainly will be regulations on them, and especially paranoid or ruthless governments will register psis or even have them killed at birth.
As an example, Long goes over the design notes for James Cambias’ Terran Empire campaign, which became the basis of Hero’s official Star HERO setting. The human empire has a small number of natural psis, literally one in a million people, with half of these having weak powers of 10 Active Points or less, with 1 in 2 million people having powers of 20 Active Points, and so on. Since the Empire is not at all democratic, it has no qualms about registering and monitoring its psionic population, and while the government is practical enough to keep psis in its bureaucracy, it also subtly encourages anti-psi prejudice in the general population (especially since one of the rival powers in the setting is ruled by a psionic dynasty). The result is sort of like the Babylon 5 setting with regard to its Human psionics: Most psis are effective enough to be player characters but not so powerful as to overshadow everybody else, and they operate under a certain social stigma that helps to limit their influence.
This chapter also reviews broad themes for campaigns centered on mentalist PCs, like Espionage, rebels against the oppressive government, School for Psionics, etc. It also touches on some of the problems presented by the appearance of a mentalist in the game, for instance the “Mentalist Sniper Syndrome” that occurs because Mental Powers in the HERO System operate with no Range Modifiers, allowing the character to snipe at great distances. Counters to this include Darkness grenades and other means of baffling the mentalist’s targeting, not to mention having another mentalist or sniper target him.
Finally, the book addresses a common theme in mentalist fiction, the concept of “mindscapes” or purely mental locales where mentalists can venture. The Mind Zone described earlier is one such realm, and others could exist, such as Astral Space or the Dream Dimension. These mindscapes are often very bizarre and allegorical realms that the hero may have trouble getting out of. One problem from a gaming standpoint is that there needs to be some way to get the entire group involved in the adventure, thus the suggestion is that there should be a plot-device mechanism for getting the whole group involved (as opposed to an Astral Projection or Enter the Mind Zone power).
SUMMARY
Style: 3
The Ultimate Mentalist gets a default rating for art and layout; some of the work is pretty good, much of it is average, and some is pretty bad but not as bad as some other stuff Hero Games has put out.
Substance: 4
The Ultimate Mentalist gives a necessary review for how Mental and “psionic” powers work in the HERO System, it gives the player a large number of new Powers and some new combat options, and provides the GM necessary advice for managing psionic characters and running a psi-based campaign.
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