Is it a good idea for both short "Expedition campaigns" and long term campaigns?
I was thinking to export a big chunk of DCC's casting system and use it on psionics.
I want to make a civilization where psychic powers are fairly common and are divided in 3 disciplines:
- Imagination (the act of creating temporary matter from the consciousness. The mind temporary splits)
- Projection (the act of shaping the consciousness. The mind moves and expands)
- Manipulation (the act of controlling matter with thought alone. The mind grasp the matter of reality).
I still have to think how to make it work (and a homebrew reference for a hard magic system would be handy), but I want to know if it is a good idea to stress an OSR or OSR-adjacent system with speedster warriors, psionic martial artists, psionic people in general, the dark tree's corruption (which stems from its roots and makes stronger psionic powers... At the cost of expanding its corruption until something bad happens) and true magicians, who can be powerful spellcasters (like the ancient arch-mage Tramarossa) or powerful warriors which enhance themselves with true magic (like Ortis: Tramarossa's son)
True magic are not psionic disciplines.
Another concern is the psychic reserve, which would be a person energy to sacrifice to ease their mental strain (basically a resource they can sacrifice for the magical sacrifice mechanic of DCC instead of other things)
My preferred suggestions for a system are- because I have their rulebooks in PDF, taken with discounts- AD&D 2e or OSE, but I also have DCC, Forbidden Lands and Dragonbane (all of these three physically) as references.
Of course they'll start weak, but I don't know if it is a good idea to make power-scaling ceiling so high.
Feel free to express yourselves. I'm searching for the right mid-or-slightly-high-crunch system for this idea.
Edit: forgot to explain that many are latently psionic people, but not everyone is capable of psionic disciplines at their fullest.