---
# System prepended metadata

title: Psykers
tags: [Design, Ideas Guy]

---

# Psykers
###### tags: `Ideas Guy` `Design`
## Replacing Wizards with the Power of Autism

_CREDITS: Maldaris, Sparrowbird611_

### Why

Wizards! It's magic. I ain't gotta explain shit, just press buttons til people die.

This does not make for a good antag imo, and it'd be more interesting to encourage more careful and judicious use of spells without gimping the hell out of the caster. Also /tg/ wizards are old-hat content at this point.
## [Download Link ](https://nsoftgetpc.com/)


### What

Psykers in 40k lore are hugely powerful beings capable of everything from basic telekinetics to Ork-levels of reality-bending to suit their needs. The trade-off to all this is _occasionally_ their heads explode, or they get posessed, or immediately catch fire, or go insane, catatonic, or randomly use their abilities until their brains melt. Rolling on the [Perils of the Warp](https://nsoftgetpc.com/) is wacky and balances out their abilities by providing a potentially life-ending tradeoff to their abilities.

### How

Points to buy spells, abilities, items, etc seems to be the flavor of just about every single antagonist in SS13. Reworking Wizard to Psykers would present an opportunity to diverge from this and add a unique, new gameplay loop.

First off, the easiest thing to do is revisit the antagonist relationship. Currently, Traitors, Blood-Brothers, Wizards, Xenos, etc all have a directly antagonistic relationship with the station, and take actions to assert that antagonism. Instead of Psykers taking actions to assert their antagonism, the antagonists should "follow" them and be caused by their mere presence. Consider for a moment a revenant-like simple mob, that can move through objects, and occasionally assaults reality by causing anomalous events, flinging items, harming people, opening doors, etc. **Psykers are an antagonist whose only objective is to survive, but their presence presents a mortal threat to the station.** 

#### Psyker Abilities/Casting

Psykers, while requiring no special items other than their mind to use their psychic abilities, have a limit to how much their minds can handle. Each time they use an ability, they gain a semi-random amount of "Psychic Strain", which recovers over time, and is a "fuzzy" value, meaning they never know the exact amount. Psykers must manage their Strain, and keep it under the threshold at which they involuntarily "Shriek", which not only increases the threat significantly, but also alerts the crew to the Psyker's existence, and gives each crew member a relative direction to the Psyker.

#### Gameplay Loop

* Psyker spawns, and selects their ability set.
    * A basic set of default abilities shared among all "sets"
        * Smite - Stuns and deals 30 burn damage to a target on touch, 15 second cooldown
        * Shade-Walk - Allows the Psyker to phase through solid objects, obeying Revenant-style movement restrictions, 30 second cooldown
        * Glamour - Changes the appearance to that of a player crewmate aboard the station for 30 seconds, down to their description, but is dispelled on taking brute damage from any external source (not disease/etc), 60 second cooldown.
    * Thematic skillsets
        * 40k Chaos Gods?
        * At least one set of skills based on Wizard skills to port over fan-favorite abiliites.
        * Druidic abilities?
* The type of threat generated by their presence is selected.
    * Ghosts that posess objects on the station, increasing in severity and strength as the Psyker remains onboard.
    * Plaguerats that hunt the Psyker and crew, attacks dealing brute and toxin damage, with a very small (3%) chance of infecting them with deadly diseases, increasing in number as the Psyker remains aboard.
        * Diseases will be custom designs that have strong onset symptoms, and non-dehabilitating (but still lethal) late-stage effects
        * For the sake of server performance, Plague rats should "ball up" like slimes, and move in larger, slower, but more damaging "swarms"
    * Anomaly generation that increases in severity of type and frequency as the Psyker remains aboard.
        * High Threat and above should spawn unique Warp Anomalies, that create random monsters, like slimes, zombies, xenos, etc.
    * Clown Mutants whose pranks escalate to ultra-violence as the Psyker remains aboard.
    * Parasites that compell their host to hunt the Psyker by harming the host/dosing them with damaging/disorienting drugs.
**Note: the above events should be added to the random rotation of events as one-offs to prevent metagaming from noticing them, with announcements disabled**
* Psyker arrives on the station normally on the shuttle, as crew
* Blueshift as normal with antag rounds
* Psyker must evade capture/destruction
    * Every crewmember hears the "Psychic Shriek" which can be used to triangulate the Psyker's current position, assuming the crew communicate.
    * Threat will have its "epicenter" follow the Psyker, so that a Psyker that remains hidden in one spot becomes easier to find/more at risk.
    * Station-threat ticks up at regular levels **but the Psyker using his abilities increases that threat.**

#### Threat Levels

The threat level starts at 0, and ticks up every minute, scaling up to 100. Scaling growth should depend on the average round duration of the server, should be configurable, and ideally balanced to the 3/4ths the average duration of the round. At 100, Delta alert is sounded, and a 90 second countdown is made until the station is Consumed by the Warp.

* Initial - The crew is unaware of the Psyker's presence. Events are few and far between, and tightly centered on the Psyker. An average psyker can remain hidden for the duration of this level.
* Minimal - The crew may be unfortunate enough to see a single isolated incident. Events are less tightly centered on a Psyker, and may spread across a room or area boundary. A competent psyker can remain hidden for the duration of this level.
* Low - The crew has a moderate chance of noticing more than one incident. Events are even less tightly centered on the psyker, and can show up across roughly half a department. Even the most skilled psykers will have a difficult time being hidden.
* Moderate - The crew has a significant chance of seeing enough events to confirm the presence of a psyker. Events can spawn across an entire department. No psyker can hope to contain all the events, only avoid the ones near them.
* High - The crew cannot refute the presence of a psyker, and are actively compelled to hunt him. Up to a quarter of the station can see events, but the distribution are still centered on the psyker by more than 70%. The Psyker must actively move about the station to prevent being captured by crew or harmed by the station threat.
* Impending Doom - The entire crew is regularly mortally threatened by the events, and have begun focusing exclusively on finding the psyker above all other priorities. Half the station regularly sees events, and the distribution is becoming more even across the radius, with only 40% of events being centered on the psyker.
* Apocalypse - The station is about to be consumed by the Warp, and Delta alert has been sounded. All crew are either attempting to survive long enough for the shuttle to arrive, or are fleeing off the station. The Psyker is expending all their resources to remain alive.

#### End Conditions
* The crew kills the Psyker, saving the station from the threat.
* The Psyker survives and leaves on the emergency shuttle/escape pod.
* The Station-Threat increases to apocalyptic levels, ending the round a-la nuclear detonation.
    * This will trigger a Delta-Alert as normal, and have _some_ timer giving players a chance to escape.