Lone Knight

First post of 2025 isn't game stuff either. (behold, the universe.)


( People are making plans ... )


( Antisocial media ... )


( Making ... )


Honestly there was going to be at least more useful navel-gazing, or commentary on Where I Feel I Fit In (Or Don't), or something; but I don't have the energy and, in the end, does it matter?

*adds dandelions to angels, potions, and that make-your-own-Athas idea-thing*

Psionics! Some people hate psionics in fantasy rpgs -- and D&Dish stuff in particular -- and claim there’s no psionics in fantasy; and those folks can, putting it politely, go fuck themselves. Possibly with the entire Deryni series with a Valdemar series chaser, just to start.

I digress, though.

This here is a (slightly wordy because not trimmed down to fit tiny pages, ha) set of psionic powers + a class to go with them for Lindwyrm. There’s also two additions/tweaks to existing stuff, and a tiny faq because I do those on some class posts I guess, it’s not the first time.

Onward --



Psychic (Psionicist, etc)
d6 HD. Armour: light. Weapon: 1d6
- Awareness: mindspeech to 100’, 2-in-6 chance to sense psychic energy/effects/active minds
- The Gift: Choose two paths; choose a starting power from them. Gain 1 power/lvl, and 1 path/3 lvls. A psychic can use powers lvl/day freely, then 1 hp/usage.


Basic Psionic Rules

Psychics and other psi-using characters don’t carry spellbook equivalents; they know their powers innately.

It is possible to create a record of a power (an “imprint” or “pattern”), like a spell scroll, and they are used similarly. A psychic can learn a power from an imprint if it belongs to one of their paths; if it doesn’t, they can still use the imprint itself.

* Using a power: A psychic can use 1 power/level freely per day. More usages cost 1 hp each. Healing magic or psionics doesn’t restore psychic energy, only rest does.
-> a psychic can also spend extra hp to boost a power’s level, 2 hp : 1 lvl

* Psionic and magic interaction: Everyone always makes this complicated. It doesn’t have to be bloody complicated.
- a spell or power can only affect the opposite “category” if it says so explicitly (a magical ward against magic won’t stop psionics)
- a general effect can be affected by both psionics and magic because the effect is the significant part. Fire damage is fire damage, whatever the source and whatever the source of fire resistance.


( Sample Paths )


Tweaks To Existing Lindwyrm Stuff: Not much, basically this –

- The esper species in Lockbox instead uses psionics (I mean they’re espers, come on) and choose a path to pick their power from. Maybe two or three paths, if that’s what the group prefers.

- Talent (class modifier): Choose one psionic path. Gain one power and another every 3 lvls, access to a second school at lvl5. Have one power use / 2 lvls free before requiring hp.


( FAQ )

Now in Creative Commons finally as promised, as part of Lindwyrm Liberty --

Lindwyrm Liberty: more additions and fancies by E. A. Bisson is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

We interrupt the usual nonsense for a different kind of nonsense --

I like making zines.

( so of course I'm going to ramble along on the subject staring at my navel the whole way )

I'd like to say there was a point or a punchline to all this, but not really? Just needed to get the words into words, I guess?

But that's what this place is for, so --

I like cats; I like cats a lot, like, a lot a lot. (this is surely coming as a surprise to absolutely nobody, lol.) So cats, from tabbies to tigers, have a tendency to crop up in rpg stuff I write if I'm writing it for any real length of time --

But, hilariously, despite cat people being in at least two projects (one, admittedly, the unfinished "spacehack" here on this blog) and a few instances of folks who could have a feline other form here and there as well, there are no actual cat people in Lindwyrm (though there's the wise panther in Lindwyrm Lockbox, and in recent critters there's the clewe and the steelmender at least that I recall).

So what's an option for a cat person, for Lindwyrm or whatever? Hmm ...

How about:

- Felit: See in the dark; +1/lvl to tests involving athletics; 2-in-6 sense ghosts within 40'; unarmed damage half of weapon damage (claws)

What do felit look like? I don't know, you tell me -- I have my preferences (which can change with setting, lol), but it's not like I described the species options in Lockbox.

(maybe I'll do that in some other post some time, just for the giggles)


Can I add a few more other instances of felinity to this post? Let's see --


Pasht: Grey-coated cats the size of hunting hounds, with eyes like twin moons and glinting silver claws. Hunters of the dark.
2 HD, AC 13, +2 bite (1d3) or claws (1d4+1/1d4+1), ML 9, slash: if both claws hit, kick for 1d6 automatically; purify: claws deal double damage to shifters, demons and the dead; spellbreak, 1/4 actions

Tiger-Of-The-Sword: Sometimes an oath -- of binding, of fealty, of promise just that fervent -- calls forth a great burning beast of terrible majesty to witness it and hold it fast.
9 HD, AC 16, +9 bite (2d6) or claws (2d8/2d8), ML 12, mundane immune, 4-in-6 spell resist, ignore confinement, sword blessing: oathmaker receives +4 to an action in service to their oath, 1/month; sword's scourge: instant teleport to oathbreaker's location


And then, reaching ever higher --

* Ssefrrith, Queen Of The Sky
Great goddess, heavenly cat, whose patches are the clouds and whose spots are the stars, toy with the sun and the moon across the vault of the sky. Watch all below and send the rain, cool the land with the winds, rage tempests against those who raise violence against your people.
- Raise yourself up as I have raised myself up. Give hope -- more than empty words -- to those who need; have I not carried you in my own mouth, likewise, until you learned and walked? Defend your home and raise your people into light. -

As commented on before, here they are -- the fifteen core xD&D-type dragons, as tweaked by yours truly and statted up Lindwyrm-style.

A note or two:

* On breath weapons: Yes, I know I don't give a frequency of breath use here, or with a lot of other dragons I've written for that matter. This is entirely because there's so many idiosyncratic ways (3/encounter? 3/day? every [x] actions? etc etc) that, man, just go ahead and use the one you like. I'd advise that if you also decide to borrow in the xD&D version of "damage = (current) hit points" you miiiiight want to limit that breath usage, just saying *lol*

* No dragonfear?: Dragonfear is a pain in the arse. I believed that decades ago and I still do now. PCs should have a reason to be afraid of the scaly bastard that isn't "the mechanics made me do it" and automatic to boot.

Anyway, on to the beasties --

My comment about rambling on this subject was haha only serious at the time, but why not? I could probably use some navel-gazing atm (lol) and in a sea of 236453784357456856+ retroclones and bespoke systems, why another one -- and why that one?

( why did I make Lindwyrm anyway? )

Having finished up some other projects (and gotten some work- and family-related nonsense dealt with, at least for now), my thoughts are drifting back to my plan to do a new version of the Blue Lotus Hack using the Merry Mushmen’s CRACK! as a base.

(I’ll be changing the title when/if I get it done.)

Leaving aside questions like “but why not stick with The Black Hack as a base?” (answer: 1) CRACK! looks fun and I want to use it, 2) Lotus is using TBH 1e and if I’m tweaking at all, might as well go on, 3) CC feels more comfortable to use than OGL right now, 4) CRACK! looks fun and I want to use it), there’s some things I need to contend with, but that’s okie.

– The Lotus classes are front-loaded and most of them also get more ability picks as they level, which I wrote one-half because I like it (still do) and one-half because Lotus was written as much as an exercise in distraction from a miserable work situation as anything else and more stuff = more to write = more distraction.

Contrariwise, CRACK! jobs are pretty compact, which I also like. Also, if I don’t make super-elaborate jobs, then dropping in any other jobs that look cool from other sources will be easier for anyone who happens to pick up and poke at Lotus mkII.

So, how to reconcile? I could make beefier jobs — and I suspect I by and large already do, if the handful I wrote and posted up here already are any indication — but then the compact little job blocks get lost, and I like them. So what I’m probably going to do is split some up and pull out abilities and make even more jobs.

Might even use one or two of those blog ones besides.

Jobs jobs jobs.

Yeesssss.

– Related to the above: BLH has kinds, humans + three others, which amounted to a smallish bonus to one thing. CRACK! as-is uses heritage-as-job. I would definitely miss having Puss-In-Boots-but-a-wizard, though, so atm I’m thinking of working up new small traits or adapting the ones I have (and may also include optional kind-as-jobs, in case someone wants them).

– I am absolutely ripping out levels for magic spells and psionic gifts moohahahahahahaha

– The systems for the above I have no decisions on whatsoever yet and it’s not impossible I just brazenly adapt what I use in pocketrpg, lol

– There are some things that aren’t in Lotus as it stands that I am really tempted to use this opportunity to get off my arse and add in; hirelings-and-henchmen rules, frex, or (related) how to recruit in a dungeon or whatever (probably borrowing from my navel-gazing on incorporating that into pocketrpg sheerly for the lols of using it with Lost Emblem Saga).

And of course the whole general tearing out of a rules set and putting in a new one, etc etc.

In a perfect world, I’ll also be adding more critters/spells/gifts/trinkets, because I’m me. I am absolutely looking forward to writing up little starting equipment kits for each territory in Varas let me tell you (I love writing little equipment kits the last few years and now I have an excuse for Lotus ahahahahaha).


Do I have any idea when I’ll get this done? Nope. I am not putting even an estimate on, because that way lies screaming and black brain spirals and terribleness, and also every time I turn around something Stupid[tm] happens in my life and derails my plans so I’m erring on the side of “this is a personal project anyway so”.

But I want to do it.

So I’m bloody well going to try.

By this time tomorrow, it’s going to be a new year.

I just finished the last page in a scribble-journal I’ve kept for a year, after several year’s hiatus.

I used to use Moleskine journals, but I couldn’t find one that just had dates, and this was more stressful than it needed to be; in the end I was saved by finding, oddly enough, an unused and very old (1975 at the youngest, by the calendar on the inside cover) government diary-pocket journal-agenda squirrelled away in the bookroom. (the gods only know where I found it initially, and when.) And it’s served admirably.

In 2023 I’m going to use a Moleskine again, and will just ignore the bujo notations down the side of the pages, and not let them bother me. I will fill larger pages than the little green diary, the way I used to; word lists and fragmented ideas, bits of prose and imaginary quotations, descriptions of places that don’t exist and that I might write someday, or not, or just in an expanded form on some other journal pages. And when I’m finished this one it will go stacked on a shelf with the other Moleskines, and with the little green diary.

Yes there’s a point I’m getting to here.

Sometimes, I miss days, in the Moleskines or the little green diary. I make them up when I have the opportunity; it’s the filling of the pages that I like to do, not flagellating myself if I double up a day down the way. Some stories need more than one page in any case.

By this time tomorrow, I’ll be starting Dungeon23.

In the time since I decided to take part — spurred by being aggravated at someone on the webs taking pass-agg “humorous” potshots at folks’ happy preparations and chatter — I’ve gotten myself settled into what I plan to do, which is still what I already posted about, more or less. (I’m kind of predictable?) I may leave some dangly bits on my maps to make linking bits together later easier, if I decide to.

I’m also not planning to transcribe my dungeons afterwards, at least not now, because I don’t want this to be a Thing[tm] — it’s something I want to tinker with and poke at and add to, and I might miss a day and catch up a day.

Like my journals, and all their contents that sit contentedly in their pile.

I might snap a picture or roughly scan dungeons to show, if I remember to. (that’s the plan, we’ll see if the plan survives.)

And that’s fine.

Some folks are planning to release their dungeons (or cities, or environments, or spaceships) as finished products.

That’s also fine.

Some folks are making theirs expressly to be played as they go.

That’s fine too.

Others have made special journals and workbooks and the like, some for free and some not, some fancy, some not.

Also fine. (I’m using a little one myself, I like it a lot.)

Whatever we want to do with our work, that’s fine.

You know what’s also fine? Feeling that the Dungeon23 activity — in whatever form — isn’t for you. Not all things are. I was feeling that it wasn’t for me, until I realized that no, all the folks pointing out that it doesn’t have to be a megadungeon were right.

And also that I don’t need to be a brilliant artist or anything either.

I can just make my dungeons.

My dungeons.

For however many weeks I have ideas for.

And that’s fine.

And if someone feels the need to cut down folks who are doing this thing that — one hopes! — makes them happy; or if someone feels the need to try to guilt those happy folks out of their fun and their conversations and their plans, just because they don’t feel it’s for them themselves; or if someone decides to start a tirade about how dungeons (never mind that not everyone is even making dungeon-dungeons) are BadWrongFun and terrible and we should all feel bad —

Well.

Yeet them all into the sun.

We got dungeons — and spaceships, and maps, and cities, and towers, and a zillion other things — to make.

Over the last stretch of weeks, after contemplating the idea for most of last fall (I can be very slow), I’ve been putting together a set of psionic talents for pocketrpg stuff.

(I’m kind of thinking of tweaking the phrasing of a few of them and releasing a Creative Commons version of the talents themselves, like I did when I put out a hundred CC spells over the holidays)

And yeah, I basically used the tried-and-true thematic subdivisions, because

1) they work so why change it
2) they’ve existed through all branches of specfic as well as through sff rpgs
However! My end results have seven paths/schools/disciplines/whatever, instead of the “usual” (A)D&D six, for the following reasons and rambling train of thought to get to the end result:

1) I liked some of the ideas behind the Metapsionics discipline in 2e, but not all of them, and also the idea of locking stuff behind/into “the uber discipline” was and is annoying
2) similarly I really like the Metacreativity discipline in 3e, because making stuff is cool, manipulating ectoplasm — originally as much considering a psychic manifestation as a ~ghosty manifestation, thanks so much Ghostbusters *grumbles* — is cool, and why I never liked anything to do with crystal anythings why do you ask *shifty look*
3) if psionics is powered by your will, your “you”, your spirit/soul/insert-whatever-term, there should be spirit stuff in general
4) buuuut I hate the (often frankly creepy and not in a horror way) “occult” trappings that get slathered all over that end of things (a turnoff I have with Pathfinder’s approach to psionics, for example, because it lays it on thick)
5) I wanted to try to avoid the exoticizing/Orientalizing that keeps slinking into psionics stuff, from names to definitions

Also “telepathy” needed some tweaking, although in the end it really is about messing with people’s minds as much as talking to them and that’s annoying. I’ve avoided the worst mind control, though, I hope.

So in the end I have seven groups, labeled with one-word titles because frankly I think a good amount of the “psionics doesn’t belong in fantasy” crowd — aside from having missed whole branches of the fantasy genre in general for the many decades — are put off by the oft-deliberate pseudo-scientific name schemes in place.

To whit:

– Sight (“clairsentience”)
– Mind (“telepathy”)
– Body (“psychometabolism”)
– Forces (“psychokinetics”)
– Motion (“psychoportation”)
– Matter (3e “metacreativity”, tweaked just a smidge)
– Spirit (“metapsionics” 2e stripped down and recombined with spirit- and ghosty- and intangible stuff)

Twelve talents each, and I did my best to avoid jargon with the talent names also. (oh gawd I wrote another 80-odd thingers plz end me *lol*)


Hopefully I get some simple formatting done and these up by the end of the week or maybe next week. Definitely debating over a CC version also though.

And of course, nothing’s stopping anyone from using these, once they’re up, as just another pile of spells to add to a spell pool anyway; there’s nothing inherently different about them in the end. It’s all cool.

Or to system or not to system … That is the question, two questions in fact, when I have a notion rattling around in my head but not quite firming up quite yet —

There is an idea; it is most certainly a setting concept. I have my “pitch”, for lack of a better phrasing (lol), which would set the tone and also the thrust of, if not everything that a PC or several PCs would be doing, then certainly the flavour that would be overlaying what they did do a good deal of the time. But maybe “overlaying” would be a better plan in general? Instead of spinning out a whole new continent or part-of-continent again (though I do love making places), create a thing that could — at least in theory — be overlain over an existing location/setting/concept.

It’s a thought; a rather tempting thought. I could make up tables (tables ~!) to go with the broad strokes. Maaaaybe even a small community just as a jump-point, more easily insertable into an existing world.

But, oh, system. Wretched system.

Continue stubbornly pecking along using pocketrpg? Use Black Hack, or OSE, or Cairn, or another? (not Troika.) Give vague notations, hopefully easily parsed to a system of choice? Write up a new bespoke system, whether inspired by another or no? Or systemless, sort of like City Of Chains, which at the moment I think just might work.

I’d still need to decide just what I was making though, and I don’t think I’m quite there yet. Things are still percolating and firming up as the concept, and — just as important — I’m coming off a very rough spring and a miserable late spring, just in time to hit the start of summer and already breaking out in heat welts and tiny blood blisters for my pains. So things will probably still be slow, if they do start.

Maybe, if I get started, I could post it all on here. Maybe in chunks as I go; serialized setting bit-lets?

…

I haven’t forgotten my planar project, but I did burn out badly on it which is probably part the project itself (I need to dial back the sample planes to a drabble of words per plane, I think) and the lion’s share the above mess of the last few months. I have that other pocketmod of setting I’d like to revisit, also. And just write some more tables, and bits from prompts, and whatever else.

If I make it through the summer. Blegh.