11-29-2020, 05:12 PM | #11 |
Banned
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Bristol
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Re: ESPionage/Cold War and Psionic Powers
Get stuck into the films: Scanners, The Fury, Medusa Touch, etc
Try and think of what you want powers to do rather just opening up the book and cherry pick. |
11-29-2020, 05:38 PM | #12 |
Join Date: Mar 2013
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Re: ESPionage/Cold War and Psionic Powers
Stephen King seems to love the trope of "ruthless government operatives creating/using psychics" so Carrie, Firestarter and more recently The Institute might be helpful.
Main powers seem to be psychokinesis, pyrokinesis, precognition, telepathy, remote murder and mind control, both a crude and direct version, and a subtler suggestive type. |
11-30-2020, 04:33 AM | #13 | |
Join Date: Dec 2013
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Re: ESPionage/Cold War and Psionic Powers
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11-30-2020, 05:02 AM | #14 |
Join Date: Sep 2007
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Re: ESPionage/Cold War and Psionic Powers
A lot of people want to follow this observer-collapse philosophy, even outside of Denmark, but I've known a few old ladies that demonstrate that the many-cats interpretation is real.
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12-02-2020, 07:04 PM | #15 | |||||||
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Portsmouth, VA, USA
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Re: ESPionage/Cold War and Psionic Powers
Sorry for getting back to this so late, folks. My personal life exploded in a really bad way and then I got food poisoning last week. I'm doing much better now. I'm going to address some of the more interesting posts.
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Some more thoughts on the campaign itself. I'm thinking the Cold War only ended for some. I'm going to have a USSR agency that's still going and is only semi-rogue because they try to do what's best for Russia even if they don't answer to anyone there. They're still operating because of numerous black budgets they secured before the fall of their country in the 90s. "The Sixth Eye" is going to be the weird science/psi branch of the Five Eyes that are essentially operators on a global level to deal with strangeness. I'm also going to introduce rival agencies for each country as well since the Sixers are likely to be well-funded, but bureaucratic. One of these will be the Phoenix Directive which is the umbrella group in the US that took on the Stargate Project, MKULTRA, and all the other odd fringe science-y programs from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Any thoughts on groups or organizations vying for control of the weird/psi?
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12-02-2020, 07:57 PM | #16 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: ESPionage/Cold War and Psionic Powers
You might Google Project Stargate or Technical Remote Viewing for how participants claim Psi worked during the actual Cold War.
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12-03-2020, 11:20 AM | #17 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: ESPionage/Cold War and Psionic Powers
Chronic Pain would not work as a Backlash. Now, you could have Temporary Disadvantage (Chronic Pain), Temporary Disadvantage (Epilepsy), and/or Temporary Disadvantage (Neurological Disorder), all of which would be thematic for Psionics. For example, a telepath could have Mind Control (Telepathy, -10%; Temporary Disadvantage, Epilepsy, -30%) [30], in which using Mind Control forces them to make a HT roll during stressful circumstances to avoid suffering an epileptic episode.
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12-03-2020, 12:01 PM | #18 |
Join Date: May 2012
Location: New Hampshire, USA
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Re: ESPionage/Cold War and Psionic Powers
Isn't the whole idea of psionic powers as represented in the psionic powers book and sci-fi since the 60s all rooted heavily (if not entirely) in the mythos of cold war era psychic power investigations?
I'd definitely also use the Psi-tech book, and just make sure what psi-tech you use is TL appropriate. This was the era of "maybe the supernatural exists and can be scientifically measured." It was the era of using EEGs and drugs and sensory deprivation tanks, etc to try to measure or alter the abilities of the mind. Psi-tech as per psionic powers, psi-tech, and the literature they were based on, was basically invented in this era. But the idea of having lots of backlashes; using drugs that are addicting and have bad side effects; critical failures, particularly when under the influence of new experimental drugs, causing strange effects like temporarily de-evolving the user, etc is solid. This is the era in which this stuff is getting first pioneered. Making it a all a bit dirty and not totally understood is definitely aesthetic. |
12-04-2020, 06:02 AM | #19 | |
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Meifumado
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Re: ESPionage/Cold War and Psionic Powers
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Psi-tech probably lends itself more to the former though.
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12-04-2020, 03:52 PM | #20 | ||||
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Portsmouth, VA, USA
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Re: ESPionage/Cold War and Psionic Powers
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The setting itself is a mix of horror flicks like Scanners and Firestarter with the cult favorite Push tossed in along with the Mythos. Specifically the idea of the Dreamlands as a real place from the latter.
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