MINDSPEECH
Mental language rules for old school thinking adventures.
Telepathy. ESP. The Shining. Martian-Vision. Smoke. Mind-Speech.
All humans are connected. Every thought you have is someone else's. There is no such thing as a person in isolation. Why do people do the things they do?
Mindspeech requires sensory deprivation and consciousness expansion to learn it as a standard language1, all increasing in levels of restriction. After each period there is a Warding save. A failure causes overbearing psychic damage, permanently loosing 1HD per Level of Mindspeech from the backlash, as your brain boils itself from the inside.
Half-knowledge of Mindspeech visualizes as thoughts and memories lazily pouring out of people's heads: hazy smoke of a thousand pigmentations curling into words and feelings. Hungry, I am a good person, My father died two days ago, My first night with my husband. They may be impeded by mental blockage or physical barriers. One level of restriction requires a Warding Save to get past, two levels negate it entirely. You cannot lie when half-knowing the Mindspeech.
Fluency in Mindspeech causes places to start breaking down just as much as people do. Buildings warp into their primal associations: Prison doors become mouths lined with razor-wire, Homes open their embraces like bare-chested mothers, A palace becomes nothing more than a rug with a feast of human flesh around its owner. At this stage the mind-speaker may find themselves "slipping" through physical reality, with barriers becoming nothing more than suggestions. Ideas, too, may be held like objects, formed into their most basal shapes: The Idea of a Friend is a Shield, The Idea of a Lover is Cloak, The Idea of America is a Gun. Memories may be brought out of the Thoughtrealm and into the Physical Plane: Your first love, when your crew stormed Da Nang, the pain your sister felt when the dope caused her heart to pop. Yet still, you cannot lie when fluent in the mindspeech.
Literacy in Mindspeech ignores all restrictions: space and time are broken. Quantum leaps to black holes are done in single steps in directions we don't have names for yet. People’s thoughts are just as real as where they live. Humans melt away into thoughtforms with bizarre features: gillie suited men shambling in conga lines with lumps of clay, sharing a smoke with bundles of tesseracts eternally folding and unfolding and dancing with machine elves. You can grasp stars in your hand, pulling your body up to take a peek who lives there. Lightyears become inches, inches become light years. Your thoughts are other’s thoughts are animals’ thoughts are plants’ thoughts are the dead’s thoughts. The Dreaming becomes just a stone’s throw away, squish yourself as thin as you can and you can get there, it’s just like any other neighborhood. At this point, you may finally lie in mindspeech. All lies have a base in truth anyways, what difference does it make.
For CTrav, as Telepathy
1 month of study to half-know, 3 additional months to be fluent and 6 more months to become literate.↩