Backer Post: Psychometabolism and Perfected Biology

I've been tinkering a lot with House Apex and the Manticore Initiative lately, and that means diving pretty deeply into bio-tech and some ideas I've played with for awhile.

I've wanted to have Psychometabolism as a "rare power" for awhile, as it fits not only some of the bio-tech space opera elements we have, but the high-flying kung fu.  After all, characters should be able to meditate and heal their wounds, or focus on becoming very fast or very strong.  

The problem I ran into is that the "Psychometabolism" ability covers basically everything in the power, so what could I do to expand it into a full power-set? Well, Psychokinesis has the same problem: basically everything is just an extension of TK-Grab, and I've handled that by saying "Look, you can make it all techniques and alternative abilities if you want!"  The second problem I ran into is that most of these powers are static.  You either have more ST or DR or regeneration or you don't. If you wanted to "roll for it," you'd just use Psychometabolism and max out your skill there.

So I just embraced the supremacy of Psychometabolism.  All the rest of the abilities are static , permanent expressions of what the Psychometabolism ability can offer you.  They may cost fatigue, but they don't require a skill roll, and thus do not have a skill.  Psychometabolism becomes _the only skill_; you use if for clever tricks (techniques) or extra effort.  This reduces the utility of the Talent, so I buffed the talent to help with a ton of cinematic skills; arguably, this should make it cost more, but we've already allowed other psychic talents to improve a handful of cinematic skills, so when you account for that, the pricing is fair.

I've also wanted a super-science version of this for a long time. After all, this is just biology, and people can actually control quite a few "unconscious processes" with their biology. It's within the realm of super-science to say that extreme physical training and careful balancing of biology should maybe let you have similar abilities to what psychometabolism offers (after all, what is Chi but the extreme training of someone to make use of supposedly natural processes, and careful diet and exercise to balance those natural processes). So we could have artificially created kung-fu artists, at the hands of extreme physicians and bio-engineers.  The Shinei really could make flying leaps and punch through a wall, not because they have psychic powers, but because they have carefully honed what they can do and had very precise pharmaceuticals enhance their biology.  There are drawbacks to this, of course, but I've noted those as well.

This is available to everyone because, while this is written from the perspective of Psi-Wars, I'm pretty sure my treatment of psychometabolism should be useful to everyone.

With this, we have our first steps into the Sylvan Spiral and the culture around Xen.  If you have any feedback, leave it in the comments, or hop by my discord!

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