By C. Demetrius Morgan
JAGS Psionics is a very neat, well formatted, and easy to read PDF supplement intended for use with the JAGS role-playing system by Marco Chacon. The art, B&W, is quite good. In fact it moved me to comment on the PDF. Which says something since there are only two illustrations in the whole file!
The rules are straightforward. There are three divisions of psionic ability, otherwise known as the "Major Disciplines", these are: Telepathy, Telekinesis, and ESP. However there are also Minor Disciplines, or so the rules state. But a quick look shows the section on Minor Disciplines to be a hodge-podge assortment of various psychic skills and abilities that seem to be included at the end of the document only because they didn't fit well into any of the aforementioned categories. As such this section could just as easily have been dropped, or the abilities put into some made up meta-psychic discipline.
In all honesty seeing a few dozen abilities placed at the end of the file made it feel like it was an after thought to append the leftovers as a grab bag assortment. Especially since roughly 30 of the 40 pages of this PDF are taken up by just the abilities and descriptions for the Major Discipline groups alone! Whereas only 5 pages are given over to the "Minor Disciplines", but that's neither here nor there. What matters is how the rules are presented and what you can do with them. Even at a glance the file looks to be well put together and the system looks to allow you to do quite a bit, though perhaps not enough for everyone's taste.
It is firmly established early on that these rules can be used in just about any genre from slipstream science fiction or fantasy to burned out post-apocalyptic future worlds or galaxy spanning space opera milieus. Very nice. Establishes up front that the rules need not be tied to any specific setting thus allowing the Game Master to freely apply the rules and develop their own style when using them.
As it stands the existence of three core Disciplines and then the addition of what feels like throwaway abilities that couldn't be fitted into the main categories is distracting from the style and flavor established early on, but a manageable one. So what is good about JAGS Psionics? For starters there are not a charts to stress players. The abilities don’t read like someone just took spell lists or supers powers and erased all reference to the original system used to call them psionic abilities. But best of all the rules only weigh in at 40 pages. Sure, the document could use an update to expand on certain aspects, like provide a few more rules examples, more sidebar commentary, and examples of how to use the rules in play. But then the same can be said of most systems.
In conclusion the JAGS Psionic supplement is a good addition to any working Game Master’s gaming resources. Whether you’ve heard of JAGS before or not the file is freely available-last I checked- for download from (http://jagsgame.dyndns.org/jags/index.jsp) and definitely a mine of ideas.
Happy Gaming!
