“There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times to develop psychic muscles." Paul Atreides Much like Firearms, psionics in D&D have this stigma around them, a very vocal group of people who think they don’t belong. My typical retort to those people is to tell them to browse Appendix N of any old D&D edition, and you’ll find psionics was quite a big part of the pulp fantasy that would inspire D&D.

Of all the classes, Thief receives probably the brunt of criticism regarding D&D’s early class design. I’ve even met some OD&D grognards who view the class as borderline heretical and excise the class entirely from their games, viewing it as a “forced niche.” The point of this article is not to debate the merits of the thief class, which I believe it has - even if not mechanically, certainly archetypically - but that is a bit beyond the scope of this article.

Considerations Given my last article was about firearms and all the ways they can make Humpty Dumpty fall, it’s probably a good idea to have mechanics for putting him back together. One thing about the game setting I’m designing is that it’s set in the modern day. While a character is unlikely to die from a simple infection from a cut, they can’t exactly instantly recover from any injury due to a greater restoration spell or anything of that sort.

“Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms” ― Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers Introduction Over the last year and change of running a playtest for a system I’m working on, I’ve been putting a lot of deliberation into the way firearms are handled.

Token Magic The name is a bit of a work in progress, as is the concept, but its place in a mechanical and cosmological context is pretty solid at this point. One of the design goals of this “magic system,” if you could call it that, was to backport some of the more classic OSR spells into my game system, Be Not Afraid. Because the setting takes place in a modern-day world imposed upon by the supernatural and occult—and because traditional D&D magic doesn’t really fit into any modern practice or real belief structure, nor does it even much resemble its Vancian roots—I designed this system to lend the spells a degree of plausibility.