Psionic-Focused Campaign/Plot Idea/Musing

[Metaphysician]

Okay, everybody ( well, most people ) like psionics, the cool powers for sci-fi characters. The biggest problem being, their absence in real life ( or utter marginality ). Hence, in a sci-fi setting, they have to somehow appear if you want humans to have them.

 

Idea: Instead of that being a plot hole, use it as a plot thread. Specifically, in the setting, psionics didn't seem to exist, until some point at which the parapsychologists testing suddenly turned up unambiguously positive results. Latter research at least partly quantifies psionics, learning to detect it, correlates it to areas of the brain, and so on.

 

The question remains, though: Why did humans suddenly develop psionics, when prior evidence never showed its existence?? In fact, this could serve as one of, if not *the*, deep mystery of the settting.

 

Ultimately, there are only two real possibilities: either humanity always had psionics, and something was keeping them from manifesting; or humanity didn't have psionics, and something altered humanity at that point.

 

Thoughts, ideas, comments??

[BcAugust]

Re: Psionic-Focused Campaign/Plot Idea/Musing

 

The Pegaus series from Anne Mccaffery had something like that. Basically Psionics were always around, they just had to be trained. And the training took a while to figure out, as did the testing for them.

[Curufea]

Re: Psionic-Focused Campaign/Plot Idea/Musing

 

Psionics is the technobabble name for magic. A way to bring elements of fantasy into a scifi setting.

(But that doesn't mean it's a bad thing)

 

There's no reason why you couldn't take a fantasy spell grimoire and just change the limitations for a psionic game.

 

In Babylon 5, psionics occured from a deliberate genetic manipulation over a long period of time by the Vorlons to produce anti-Shadow allies. You could have something similar.

 

Or you could have any of a number of superhero-genre origins. Radiation, virus, mutation.

 

Or, like the Scanners series of movies - if certain chemicals were fed to pregnant women, their children develop the abilities.

[Metaphysician]

Re: Psionic-Focused Campaign/Plot Idea/Musing

 

An idea I had was the reverse of your first one:

 

Specifically, some kind of Precursor artifact was *jamming* psionic powers, until for whatever reason, it turned off.

[Curufea]

Re: Psionic-Focused Campaign/Plot Idea/Musing

 

There's also the Julian May books too - where psionic power is the next stage of evolution. Intelligence derives from community, psionics is a further form of community communication -and tending towards cross-species...

The end result is a galactic conglomerate, somewhat like the Borg, but not so one-track and one-dimensional.

[Tamashii2000]

Re: Psionic-Focused Campaign/Plot Idea/Musing

 

Secret Goverment projects always works too, both the US and former Soviet Union both studied Psionics at one time or the other during the last 40 years.

[dbsousa]

Re: Psionic-Focused Campaign/Plot Idea/Musing

 

Are you familiar with a phenomenon known as The God Spot? ? I think it would be interesting if the god spot in the brain was designed to accept telepathic communication from a "higher being", and further research showed us how to use it for other psychic phenomenon.

 

The flavor of this campaign would take on a pseudo religious one, as those with powers would be working through the part of the brain that believes in magic, not science...

[sinanju]

Re: Psionic-Focused Campaign/Plot Idea/Musing

 

Secret Goverment projects always works too' date=' both the US and former Soviet Union both studied Psionics at one time or the other during the last 40 years.[/quote']

 

Or secret NON-government projects. I like Octavia Butler's approach. In her "Patternmaster" novels, a few humans have always had marginal psionic abilities. But these tend to have serious drawbacks--like madness, or at least serious twitchiness, as a side effect--or they get you shunned or abused or killed as a witch/sorceror/possessed/whatever.

 

Then Doro comes along. He's immortal. He exists by possessing one person after another and consuming their life energy. And he realizes early on that people with a hint of psychic power taste better. So he begins collecting them and breeding them, culling them as necessary, in exactly the same way humans breed animals for specific traits. Over the course of thousands of years, he creates communities of gifted individuals and some very powerful individuals. They stay out of sight out of self-interest, not wanting the government to know about them (and not wanting Doro pissed off at them for causing trouble).

 

Eventually, they do become known--but by then they've essentially taken over the world. Funny how a network of amazingly powerful telepaths can do that....

 

So, there you are. Remarkably powerful psionics exist because they were the object of a long-term breeding program by...someone or something. Just because they've been around for a long time doesn't mean anyone knows about them (pretty much by definition, anyone who claims publicly to have psychic powers is NOT one of them).

[freakboy6117]

Re: Psionic-Focused Campaign/Plot Idea/Musing

 

another good one is that psychic powers are a exceedingly rare latent gentic trait and it required a mingling together of lots of people from around the world with minor psychic gifts to create the first strong psychics the obvious place for this to happen would be california amogst the new agers.