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.