With Paizo’s announcement of Occult Adventures and its inclusion of psychic magic, many people were curious and concerned as to what that means for Dreamscarred Press. Indeed, I had the pleasure of discussing it with Erik Mona at GenCon 2014 in the minutes before the announcement was made.
We here at Dreamscarred recognized early on with Pathfinder that our psionics niche was only there as long as Paizo didn’t decide to support it themselves. Paizo, on the other hand, recognized that psionics as we like it, with power points, augmenting, etc., isn’t something they’re very keen on. And there’s nothing wrong with that – everyone has their own preferences, and we’ve certainly benefited from them not wanting to touch a power point system! But with psychic magic, the medium, the kineticist, and the other character options that Occult Adventures will bring, it does pose a question as to how we’re going to handle it.
After discussing for a little while, our solution was to simply adapt to the change and keep on doing what we do best! As a result, we’re working on the design for Psionics Augmented: Occult (tentative title) which will include new options for the classes found in Occult Adventures, as well as occult options for the psionic classes found in Ultimate Psionics, and probably more things we dream up as we work on the project. We’re tentatively planning for Psionics Augmented: Occult to be a 32-page softcover release that will be available at GenCon 2015 to coincide with the release of Occult Adventures’ release on the same day.
Want to participate? You can be sure we’ll be posting material as it’s developed for playtesting feedback, and we’re always open to new ideas of what should be included in the book! Let us know your thoughts and we hope to see you at GenCon 2015 for the release of Psionics Augmented: Occult.
For the record, I find Paizo’s version of “psionics” to be rather boring and a big disappointment. It does not stay true to the original roots of psionics, not like Dreamscarred Press does. They carried over so much material from D&D, I don’t understand why suddenly they felt like Mythic and Psionics had to be so drastically different as to be undesirable.
Yeah. I’m not really sure why you’d want to get involved in Mythic or Occult, at least not right now. Mythic turned out to be a gigantic disappointment, and Occult is looking really boring and poorly designed, at least from the playtest.
One thing we’ve learned is that even if something at first glance, or first try, doesn’t work or seem interesting, that doesn’t mean you can’t do something fun and interesting with it.
I find Occult adventures is like 4E. Step one don’t think of it as psionics its magic plan and simple. 4E its not dnd its its own system. That mentality has severed me well in enjoying a new product. I don’t know what mythic was suppose to clone as it definitely wasn’t epic. But i thoroughly enjoyed playing the mesmerist and the kineticist is just a 3.5 warlock. All together none of it says psionic it says real world occultism, which makes me jittery on my insides. I am interested to see how you guys decide to play with it and what I can do in my little homebrewers circle.
It will be great to see what you will do with the Occult material as a Psionics springboard