Wiki Highlight: Psychic Vampirism Power-Ups

 

I've been pretty busy behind the scenes working on Undercity Noir; the PCs are beginning to come together, but I feel like I'm still behind on a lot of elements.  One of those elements was psychic power-ups.  I wanted to have both Psychic Healing and Psychic Vampirism up, as the Ranathim and Keleni were going to feature prominently in the one-shot (though I didn't realize how prominently until I saw the proposed PCs), but my goodness are these power-up sets exhausting and time-consuming.

Why Psychic Vampirism and Psychic Healing? You're not buying the Keleni/Ranathim argument above? Well, I find that the act of writing material teaches you how to write better material.  The best RPG material of an edition tends to come more towards the end, rather than the beginning.  If I started with beloved abilities like Telepathy and ESP and ended with abilities most people don't care about, like Psychic Healing, then the most loving detail and cool ideas would end up in the least used abilities, so I'm trying to "learn the ropes" with these less popular abilities.

Psychic Vampirism was especially frustrating, as it forced me to confront overpriced afflictions, deal with weird, overly broad detection abilities, and a difficult cost structure that puts most "work horse" Psychic Vampirism beyond the budget of casual, minor psychics. In particular, I still find myself struggling with Power Theft and working that into more affordable categories.  Sure, I know, some people point out that if something is powerful, it should cost a lot of points, but a lot of people like the "Zero to Hero" journey of discovery their psychic powers and then slowly unlocking their abilities with them.  The cheapest you can possibly get for Steal Power is 55 points, which means you go from Weak Latent Psi (Psychic Vampirism) to absolutely minimum Steal Power with a little skill in about 12 sessions at 5 CP per session (which is pretty generous) without getting anything else.  There's a reason I break down upgrades down into 25 point chunks, and a lot of people still find that overly chunky.  So I'd like to break down Steal Power too, if I can.

I ran out of time.  I wanted to have more Rare Powers (Karmic Theft and Unstable Power Theft) but the end of the month is racing up at me, and it's better to have something than nothing.  I can always go back and add some more abilities.

You can check out the new psychic vampirism power-ups here.