(And new uses for old ones!)
by; S.Murphy
Empathic Purging:
Game masters are you tired of PC Mystics blowing through your hard created adventure by using Psychometry? Players has your GM gotten smart and started using evil Charon Mystics who possess Psychometry against you? Well fear no longer you now have a weapon to combat Psychometry.
This skill is a cascade of Project Emotion, however this skill must be learned after play has started, you do not receive this skill as a cascade initially. The sole reason for this skill is to render any use of Psychometry and Aura Reading useless against an inanimate object. The how and why of this skill is simple: You take an object in your possesion that you have had for awhile, and thus has your “aura” on it. If a Mystic uses either of the 2 skills mentioned above he can find out all kinds of information. So by using this skill you actually create a false “aura” on the object, by projecting only one emotion into it that overrides all other events and feelings that have ever transpired around it.
This skill uses the same difficulty table as Project Emotion. The usefulness of this skill should be obvious to all Empaths and GMs. To those of you who have not realized the true potential of Aura Read consider this, Mystics have Aura Read it allows them to see the “aura” of an object. If this object, lets say a favorite ring, was always on a person then this object “picks up” the persons uniuqe “aura”. Now consider that Mystics also possess a little known power called Psychic Tracking. Starting to see the big picture now?
New and improved uses for:
Dimension Walk (and its cascades)Having played a Mystic-Sorcerer for about a little over 5 years, I have found some creative uses for D-Walk. First things first, you have to understand that D-Walk exists completely outside the normal laws of physics. The reason I say this is simple, most Empaths are used to creating Gates that are either square or round, and are always on the ground for convenient use for travel. To this I say poppycock, this skill is a great weapon and the greatest defense you will ever have. (If you don’t mind the attention it brings.)
The next time you are being chased down the highway by some runaway truck piloted by either a controller or a possessing spirit, don’t worry. Why sweat the small stuff open a Gate to the Proto Dimension of your choice and say goodbye to it. Have some one sniping at you and you don’t have any cover to run to? Not a problem open a Gate directly in front of you and give them the “bird” from the safety and comfort of knowing that no bullet will ever break through.
Here is a new one I just came up with. Lets say you are in some god awful crap hole of a sewer and there is this big Darkling machine there that you came to destroy. Lets say that use of explosives is out of the question, what do you do? Well all you do is open a Gate and move the Gate forward to “swallow” whatever it is you want gone. Yes I said move the Gate. Like I said earlier in this article, Gates don’t comply to physics and as such are created solely by force of will. Obviously it takes great concentration to move a Gate.
Moving a Gate is slow, you can move a gate only your D-Walk asset in feet (yes feet not meters) per phase. Lets not forget that this is very hard to do so when moving a gate use the D-Walk skill difficulty table and add one level of difficulty to it.