With powers like Telepathy, who needs ESP? In all seriousness, Telepathy is a highly versatile power. If you look at my previous psionics posts, you will find that a significant number of the abilities are fairly low effort Telepathy abilities (and even lower effort ports to Ergokinesis). Following that trend, today’s post contains options for remote perception using Telepathy (and Ergokinesis).

Telereceive

Telereceive allows reading thoughts at a distance. This new technique allows reading sensory input.

Receive Senses

Hard

Default: Telereceive-2; cannot exceed Telereceive

You can receive sensory input from the target in addition to thoughts. You can see, hear, smell, etc. whatever the the target senses. This comes at a cost. You take any shock, pain, etc. penalties that your target receives. Additionally, if your target takes a major wound, is knocked unconscious or dies, you are stunned. The GM may also require a Fright Check for any significant and abrupt pain or death. You can avoid these negative effects by making a successful Will roll.

Telepathic Clairsentience

Skill: Telepathic Clairsentience (IQ/Hard)

This is identical to the Clairaudience/Clairvoyance abilities (Psionic Powers p. 40) with the a few differences.

You can project your senses into a sentient being. Select a sentient being in range and make a quick contest of Telepathic Clairsentience vs your target’s Will. If you win, you can project your senses out of that target. A willing target may choose not to resist. You have no control over your target, but you can switch targets with a concentrate action and a skill roll.

You have no control over the target’s facing, and your projected sense is identical to your target’s sense.

The techniques from Psionic Powers are available except for Darkvision. You always get the visual capabilities of your target.

Statistics: For the Clairaudience version, add Sensory, -40%. For the Clairvoyance version, remove Normal Sight, -20% and add Sensory, -40%. For both, change ESP, -10% to Telepathy, -10%.

Ergokinesis Variants

The Binary Translation technique from the Data Retrieval and IO Tap abilities already accomplishes the same thing as Receive Senses plus more. I believe it is based on Universal.

An Ergokinetic Clairsentience variant is obvious. Replace the power modifier and have it work on machines only. Sentient machines resist with Will like normal. Other machines impose a penalty equal to complexity instead as a special effect.

Designer Notes

The Receive Senses technique is the Sensory enhancement (B69). The details of the enhancement are a bit vague, so I added specifics. I am not sure why this wasn’t included in Psionic Powers. It is obvious.

When contemplating the limitation value for projecting senses to an existing being, I found Sensory limitation from Christopher Rice’s blog post. The limitation value was in the ballpark of my estimates, so I went with it. Swapping the ability to project your senses with your target’s senses is largely a special effect. If that seems like too much, you can impose familiarity penalties for unfamiliar senses or require an extra -2 penalty (extended). Another option is to use a penalty based on Using Abilities at Default (Powers pp. 173-174), but that would be involved and beyond the scope of this post.

Animal Telepathy versions are fairly obvious and are left as an exercise to the reader.

The material presented here is my original creation, intended for use with the GURPS system from Steve Jackson Games. This material is not official and is not endorsed by Steve Jackson Games.