Psyker Ideas

[Lumberfoots]

So at the moment psychic abilities are all very much aimed at combat. I feel like this could be expanded upon to include more utility based abilities for day to day activities as well as drawbacks based on factors such as the pawns skill level, traits and background.

For instance pawns with psychic abilities but a high growing might be able to instantly harvest a patch of plants when they are at a certain skill level, possibly affected by their passion level. This could scale higher as their skill grows. Other ideas could be making rocks easier to mine and providing higher resource yields on an area for a certain time or increasing construction speed. This would essentially be them using their abilities on things they know about/ passionate about and would help flesh psychic powers out a little while making players choose who they want to have abilities a more strategic or roleplay choice depending on the colony rather than the pawn with high intellect and social.

Traits could also provide some unique abilities, such as iron will giving a mood buff to another pawn or pyro a unique ability to set enemies on fire, maybe even a controlled fire that wont burn your colony to the ground, although that would make a good story! Backgrounds such as glitterworld empath could also have some interesting abilities when it comes to other pawns, such as improving moods and stopping mental breaks. As well as maybe a new background for a natural psyker that lets them use abilities without amplifiers but at a greater risk of annoying the empire or mechanoids.

My last idea is new mental breaks to compliment these new abilities. For instance Psykers could have psychic breaks where the power lashes out around them wounding pawns and smashing buildings. This could potentially happen if a pawn somehow "like an event" loses control despite not having a low mood. Or an even bigger break for psychic pyros who bathe everything around them in flame but walk through it themself unharmed.   

It would be worth saying I got some of these ideas from "Shin Sekai Yori" which is a good sci fi book on what might happen if psykers actually existed. I would suggest a read if you can find the fan translation of it.