Near Death Experience
(Psychic)
There are many ways to gain psychic senses, and Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Occult Adventures, and Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Occult Origins do a good job of covering a wide variety of them, but there are a few popular psychic origins that have yet to be touched, and one of those is the near death experience, which just so happens to be the topic of today’s Best in Class.
New Psychic Discipline
Near-Death Experience
You suffered a traumatic experience that brought you close to death, or may even have died at some point and later been resurrected by some means. Upon returning to life, you found that you could sense things that you could not before, as though a veil had been lifted, allowing you to see beyond reality as most living creatures understand it.
Phrenic Pool Ability: Wisdom.
Bonus Spells: detect undead (1st), calm spiritOA,(4th), purge spiritOA(6th), deadman’s contingencyUI(8th), call spiritOA (10th), create undead (12th), phantasmal revengeAPG (14th), orb of the voidUM (16th), power word kill (18th)
Discipline Powers: Your brush with death and the afterlife has opened your mind to the occult realm.
Death is But a Doorway (Su): After having survived a near-death experience once, you have experience keeping your spirit from departing your body, no matter how bad things might get. You do not die from hit point damage until your negative hit point total equals or exceeds twice your Constitution score, instead of the normal amount, and you automatically stabilize if reduced to less than 0 hit points. Additionally, you gain a bonus equal to your Wisdom modifier on saving throws made to resist death effects.
Whenever you stabilize while dying, or succeed on a saving throw to resist a death effect, you regain 1 point in your phrenic pool. You cannot regain more points in this way in any one day than 1 + 1 per four class levels you possess.
Language of the Dead (Su): Your connection to death and the afterlife allows you greater control over undead creatures. You gain the will of the dead phrenic amplification, and can activate it by spending only 1 point from your phrenic pool, instead of 2 points. Additionally, you can activate it without expending any points from your phrenic pool a number of times each day equal to 1 + 1 per four class levels you possess.
Spirit Speaker (Sp): Beginning at 5th level, you gain the ability to speak with the recently deceased. This functions similarly to speak with dead, except that you speak to the spirit of the deceased creature before it departs to the afterlife, rather than causing its corpse to speak. This causes the ability to function differently from the spell in a few ways. First, you can speak only with creatures that have been dead for no more than 1 hour per class level. Second, the corpse does not need to be mostly intact or have a mouth, and the corpse itself does not actually speak: only you can see, hear, or interact with the spirit of the deceased, which you perceive as hovering near its body. Finally, the creature is always entitled to refuse to answer your questions or attempt to deceive you. You can use Diplomacy or Intimidate to improve the creature’s attitude towards you, however. Death changes a creature’s priorities, and if the creature’s attitude towards you was hostile or unfriendly in life, its attitude is increased to indifferent in death. You may use this ability to speak to up to 3 spirits per day, asking each spirit up to one question per class level.
Astral Projection (Su): Beginning at 13th level, you can free your mind from your body, allowing you to travel to other realms and worlds. You can cast astral projection as a spell-like ability once per day. By default, you can affect only yourself, although for each point you expend from your phrenic pool when you activate this ability, you can include one additional willing creature touched (the normal restriction on how many touched creatures you can include does not apply; you can affect as many creatures as you have points in your phrenic pool to expend). The maximum duration for your astral journey is one hour, at which point the effect ends automatically and your mind returns immediately to your body, regardless of what plane it was on at the time (the normal risks of having your silver cord severed or your physical body killed while you are away still apply).