Basic Fantasy RPG Forums

One big question, Does anyone Know if that term "Psion", "Psionic", "Psionics" is trademarked?

I wanna do Psychic Powers for Basic Fantasy, Maybe, one day, be nice enough to be PDF'd. Still working on it. Before I go finding alternate names, are they in the OSR/OGL? I know very little in the legality area which is my worry.

If I can get past that, and actually learn to write well in Open Office(making it look good and proper), I've got an idea for a Psion and Psychic Warrior in Basic Fantasy.

Psionics isn't trademarked. You may want to look at my PBP game, Season of the Mist, here on this site. Just last week I introduced an experimental character race that uses Psionics. Look in the World thread for the class and the Character thread for an example (it'll be at the bottom).

They are used on a lot of games outside the OSR movement so I'm sure there is no copyright there.

The concept of Psionics couldn't be copyrighted any more than 'Magic'. You're fine.

One thing though - I hope you'll avoid the mistake made in 3.5 of having psionics that essentially just replicates magic. It should be totally different - otherwise why not just use magic for the mechanics, and give your wizard a different background flavor in role-play?

Clerical and Arcane spells are MAGIC, and Psionics should remain a separate thing, but I would not mind using the same system as for spells but with more than one or two mechanical twist.

I'm going to dab in it with a One shot in a Dark Sun setting.

The two starting to playtest things are the Psychic Fighter which I have a copy of the 3rd ed Psionics Handbook to sorta base it on, and I'm gonna Rework the Magic User a bit to have Power points, and just rework Spells a bit into Psychic powers.

Both will be a bit lower level in the one shot so attack and defense modes aren't going to be used(I may just not use them at all, they don't seem "basic"). I figure reworking spells, dropping the spellbook, and adding costs to The new "Spells" will add a lot of flavor and fluff without adding too much for rules to get in the way.

here is a nice OSR take on Psionics

http://hackslashmaster.blogspot.it/2010 ... onics.html