Pathfinder Occult

In my Paizo Iconics series, which I would like to finish off this week, I'm smack dab in the middle of the Occult classes, which launched as part of the Occult line in 2015 in the summer (at GenCon, I believe, which is when the first book debuted.) I'm also thinking of pulling these titles ahead and reading them, and even of getting physical copies of at least some of them. The occult titles were launched with Occult Adventures, which is the main system book, followed by Occult Bestiary and Occult Realms in the Pathfinder Setting line, and Occult Origins in the Pathfinder Companion series. Occult Mysteries actually predates the "Occult" subline by over a year, and was a part of the Setting series, but it's hard not to see it as connected via foreshadowing if, for no other reason, because of the title. It also works fairly well in tandem with the later Horror Adventures and Horror Realms books, although technically they are not the same thing and could be used independently. 

I've long thought the idea of replacing regular D&D magic with psionics would make for a fun alternative campaign type; something that felt very different while still using (essentially) the same rules. The way that I've posited that this would work, in a 3.5 environment, is that any class with a spellcasting progression would either be removed entirely (if that was its sole purpose) or modified to replace the spellcasting with something else (appropriate for the ranger and paladin, for example.) Of the core classes from 3.5, that means that you basically only still have the fighter, rogue and barbarian and ... maybe the monk, although I don't like it's Hong Kong theatre mumbo-jumbo very much. Bard, cleric, druid, wizard, sorcerer are all completely off-limits, and the ranger and paladin need to be somewhat reworked according to principles that are found in Complete Warrior I believe. (Or maybe Complete Adventurer. I can't remember anymore.) Or, if you've got a 3pp alt.ranger, of which there were many, that doesn't have any magical abilities or spellcasting, you could of course use that. Instead of all of this magic, you'd use psionics. The psion, psychic warrior, soulknife and wilder from the Expanded Psionic Handbook as well as the ardent, divine mind and lurk from Complete Psionic would replace these classes. They're not necessarily 1:1 replacements, of course, but among the seven psionic classes, you'd be able to accomplish everything that you'd need a more traditional "magical" D&D party to do well enough, but it would just feel very different. 

When 3.5 was updated to PFRPG, of course, the same core races and classes carried through, and EPH was in the SRD, but Complete Psionic was not. Paizo never addressed psionics officially, but they had some kind of partnership with Dreamscarred Press where they made semi-official psionics material for PFRPG in the Ultimate Psionics book (the compiled and revised version of several earlier products) that added ten new classes to the game, including updates from the 3.5 SRD to the four EPH classes, and then six other unique classes that rounded out the roster. You could, using this, do the same thing for PFRPG that I was thinking of doing for D&D. I say thinking of doing; I actually did it once, but nobody ended up taking a "psion" type character; I had a barbarian, a swashbuckler, a fighter/rogue, and two soulknives in that party. And something else, although now I can't remember what the 6th character was, but I think he might have also been a rogue or something similar. 

Paizo did eventually add psychic magic to the official stuff through these Occult books, but psionics and psychics are not really the same thing, and they don't really have the same theme and tone. Whereas Dreamscarred Press' PFRPG psionics, heavily based on the D&D 3.5 psionics, is often compared more to the X-men, Paizo's occult psychic powers are more compared to the psychic occultism of fiction like penny dreadfuls and gothic horror. But, if I could replace magic with psionics and like the result, I obviously would like replacing "regular" magic with "occult" or "psychic" magic and like the result even moreso. Making magic more magical, mysterious and edgy, focusing on mysticism of a hundred to a hundred and fifty years ago occultism makes it even more significantly less like D&D than even replacing magic with psionics does, in many respects, but it also makes magic much more like what I'd want it to look like. Keep it relatively low level, (E6) so that the magic doesn't get out of hand, and this would be a fascinating exercise in creative limiting being used to build a very different type of setting, tone and mood out of the same mechanical base. The image above was just a prompt to Nano Banana 2 to create a fantasy ensemble cast of psychic investigators like mediums, psychics, occultists, etc.; i.e., exactly what the Paizo stuff does, and that's what it came back with. That works for me.

So, I've already announced (although done very little with) EMPIRE OF THE MIND WIZARDS to create a subsetting based on psionics, but now I feel like I need another one based on psychic/occult magic.

UPDATE: I tried to get grok to give me an image, and Nano Banana 2. Grok shut me down entirely until this morning, and then gave me something that I didn't really love; way too "fantasy = 5e" vibe. The latter screwed around not following my instructions for one generation after another after another. I finally had to stop asking it to edit it's original one, and just start from scratch every time, and that's where I ended up with the image above, on the third or fourth "from scratch" generation on the same prompt. 

The more I look at that image, though, the more I find that I really like it. I think I'm going to take each of the characters there and turn them into "iconic" seeds. Not fully fleshed out iconic characters, but seeds of iconic characters, and then I'll figure out where to use them. I don't know that I can make them fit in the Old Night setting or not, but maybe I can. And if not, that's OK. I always like world-building, and while I prefer—generally—to stay more focused, having a few other worlds for occasional side show is still fun. And maybe this one would be a minor campaign seed rather than campaign setting; one based on E6 Pathfinder with limited access to character classes, using the "occult magic" to replace entirely the regular "D&D magic" that the game defaults to. I doubt I'll spend tons of time filling out that seed, but we'll see. Maybe it becomes so interesting to me that I end up doing more with it than I think right now that I will.