Pyramid Review
The Psychic's Handbook (for d20 System)
Published by Green Ronin Publishing LLC
Designed by Steve Kenson
Edited by Dale Donovan
Art by Todd Lockwood, Drew Baker, Jonathan Kirtz, Kent Burles, & James Smith III
80-page b&w softcover; $16.95
It's not entirely clear in what order Green Ronin is trying to present its products, but it's covering its bases. The psionic creature collection Monsters of the Mind came before its related setting, Mindshadows. Now that there's a place to set the game and a book of foes to put there, The Psychic's Handbook finally gets around to giving Green Ronin's version of how mental abilities ought to work.
To be fair, this latest volume draws a distinction between the psionics of the original Dungeons & Dragons game and Mindshadows and its own psychic powers, but the differences are fairly cosmetic. Both are still powers of the mind, but they aren't managed in the same way.
Part of Green Ronin's Master Class series, the book starts with the psychic, the basic class for having psychic powers. A character must have the Psychic Ability feat to have and learn additional psychic feats and powers. Unlike d20 Modern, which treats psionic powers like spells in many ways, The Psychic's Handbook treats psychic powers as skills. A feat that gives you access to psychic skills is called a talent; once you've bought the Telepathy talent, you can buy ranks in any of the skills that sit under it, like Domination and Empathic Projection.
By default, psychic powers . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: March 26, 2004
Copyright © 2004 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.