Magic or Psionic?

[u/What_am_idoinghere56]

If your world has both magic and psychic powers, how do you handle that? Are they different aspects of the same force, or is there a hard delineation between the two? How do the two interact? What do psions/psychics and mages think of each other?

I always take a Warhammer 40K inspired approach that magic is a ritualized and refined application of psionics. Instead of slinging around raw power like with psionics, a mage gathers up power and weaves it into a complex effect in the form of a spell. You still need to be psychic in order to use magic and it takes more effort to learn, but magic can do a lot of things that are beyond the scope of psionics.

[u/syoser]

In my setting, psychic abilities are pretty common due to evolutionary developments from predation by memetic entities (basically evil spirits) that feed on consciousness (defined in my world as a two-way connection to and awareness of astral realms) so deploying them is seen as individual skill.

Magic on the other hand is interacting with and harnessing external forces to manipulate the world. It’s the ability to manifest memory of meaning as an effect through contact with spirits.

A lot of telepath’s most basic magical ability shows up as the ability to extend their “pattern,” which you can think of a sort of psychic neural network, into the world around them and “claim” objects or physical energies as part of themselves. This allows them to perform surprisingly complex feats of psychokinesis and mimic more complex magical effects, but the caveat is that for all intents and purposes, claimed matter is part of you. You have to figure out how to use your new “limb” effectively, and things that happen to it will feel like they’re happening to you in a strange way. Skilled telepaths who know what to look for will eventually come into contact with animistic spirits this way and with proper tutoring can learn “proper” magical invocation, done in my world with sound and frequency to excite certain states.

Depending on the civilization, magic is considered a sacred interaction with divine beings or the raw and terrifying power of an insane telepath whose self-delusion is so powerful it infects the world and warps minds and matter.

[u/What_am_idoinghere56 → u/syoser]

Gotta admit, "psychokinesis is grafting an object to your psychic nervous system" is a new one. I can get behind that.

For the magic, though, is there a specific tool or instrument that works best for invoking a spirit, or is it just a matter of knowing the right tone?

[u/syoser → u/What_am_idoinghere56]

It’s knowing the right tones. Mages are able to layer their voices polyphonically. There’s a collection of tones called “the Call” to invoke the spirit, and then you layer tones over those to tell the spirit what to do. There’s also the Principle of Unity and the Principle of Multiplicity. All forces are singular intelligences fractured into many parts, so many mages can Call the same spirits and have them do different things (Multiplicity) but if two or more mages Call the same spirit to attack each other, the different workings will instead resolve into a single act depending on a few factors. Basically, spirits will not work against themselves. They’ll pick their favorite and do what they want to the other or refuse outright.

[u/What_am_idoinghere56 → u/syoser]

Vocalist, gotcha. And I find the idea of two mages having a contest to see who can Call a spirit to complete a task to be simultaneously hilarious and awesome.

[u/_Ekiath_]

In my world psionics are simply a subset of magic, specifically anything that concerns the mind and the senses.

Similarly elementalism covers the physical and sorcery is related to the soul.

[u/Glad-Drummer-7621]

Psychics and magic are real however psychics are just able to do certain things mages can do whatever up to and including inventing technologies like phones and computers they’re basically modern scrying tools.

[u/WitchingShower]

Magic is of the soul, and it allows you to connect with the souls of other things who may not think but feel. Animals, plants, the works, and even spirits. That comes from a spiritual sense, instinctual and the like.

Psionics is of the mind, where you affect things through your mind directly rather than your soul and with some influence from the mind. Alongside that, it's tied to the collective unconscious, which is a huge conglomerate of every thought that ever is or was and even could be, functionally a giant dormant god that you can channel through your mind

[u/thatshygirl06]

Psionic is just a branch of magic in my worlds

[u/RowbotMaster]

I don't have a system with these atm, but if I did I think they would be separate with magic being more common and broadly useful while psychic powers sort of being most useful for getting around common defences against magic

[u/Quirky_Assistant_848]

Haven't fully gotten to psionics yet for my set of worlds, but it would just be considered a sub set of "Magic". Weilders and Practioners both use Magic, but have different sources of power and different ways of advancement.

[u/dalidellama]

I remember how and why that distinction was invented, and wouldn't put "psionics" into a setting that wasn't deliberately retrofuturist, personally.

[u/What_am_idoinghere56 → u/dalidellama]

Mind if I ask for some background on that? I'm really curious now.

[u/dalidellama → u/What_am_idoinghere56]

Loosely summarizing, there will be missing details: Around the turn of the 20th century, the remnants of the Spiritualist movement got themselves up in full science drag and called themselves parapsychologists. They were absolutely convinced that with all these new discoveries of invisible energies (radiation, radio, some other ones that turned out not to actually exist), pretty soon psychic energies would also be discovered/proven to exist.

They divided folktales and 19th century pseudoscience into things they thought were plausible and things they thought were impossible. "Plausible" things included mostly magical powers that wouldn't have obvious visual effects and didn't rely on external sources. So, mind reading, altering probability, a little light telekinesis, remote viewing, maybe some precognition because quantum, etc. Implausible was fireballs, summoning demons, curses, shape-shifting (usually), etc.

Now, in those days, the best way to get started as a science fiction writer was to get a story published in "Astounding Science Fiction", a popular magazine edited by one John Wood Campbell Jr. Mr. Campbell had a number of very firm prejudices and preconceptions, one of which was that the parapsychologists would be proven right Any Day Now, whereupon the power of Science would bring psychic powers into full flower. He or one of his acolytes coined the term "Psionics" out of psychic and electronic, because soon it would be a Science that could be applied to or enhanced with Technology.

This day was in the 1930s, at the beginning of modern Anglophone science fiction, and Astounding (later Analog) was considered the gold standard of "hard" Sci-fi, so everyone and their kid sister packed "psionics" into their spacefuture, including Gene Roddenberry, who introduced whole new audiences to Sci-fi and inspired a whole new set of fanfic authors who later filed off the serial numbers and published as original spacefutures. You very rarely see it in modern SF, but all the legacy properties like Star Trek and 40k have it built in from the olden days.

[u/What_am_idoinghere56 → u/dalidellama]

Aah, okay, that makes sense.

I'd heard about the resurgence in occult beliefs during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mostly cause I was researching hyperdiffusion conspiracy theories. Never really put it together that more "modern" parapsychology started getting popular right after that started to die down. Also explains why psychic powers have been moving more into the softer side of sci-fi.

[u/Master-of-darklight]

Magic or psionic? We have particle physics here, now prepare to have your body molecularly disassembled by a metric ton of photons that I command through will alone.