#erinat

 Psychic archetypes are few and far between. In fact, it’s probably the class with the least number of archetypes for it.

That being said, the archetypes that do exist for it have proven to tap into many classic avenues of psychic power and the tropes surrounding them, and today is no different. I present to you the Amnesiac archetype!

As the name implies, this archetype focuses on the intersection between the “amnesiac protagonist” trope and raw psychic power. This makes for characters that have no memory of their pasts, but possess powers that they do not understand, instinctively activating mental pathways as they try to recover who they were.

The exact reason why they cannot remember varies greatly. Some may have been the victim of trauma that caused them to block out their own memories, while others may have been deliberately blocked, perhaps by others seeking to eliminate a threat or establish control, or by themselves to avoid some fate, be it the consequences of their actions, or some other factor.

 In addition to having no memory of their past, these psychics are somewhat fluid in their recollection of their spells. Essentially, they gain less spells known for each spell level (with the exception of their knacks and discipline spells). However, the spells they do know must be practiced regularly to avoid forgetting them. The spells known that they are missing out on comes into play with their next ability, however. As they grow in power, they begin to recall their power, effectively granting them full access to their previous psychic knowledge for a level of spells, which slowly grows as they master more spell levels.

By digging deep, these mystics can tap into glimpses of their old memories, briefly relearning a spell they might have known in the past, or seen used before, or perhaps spontaneously activating by random experimentation. This is not necessarily reliable, with a chance to fail, but also a minor chance to even surge with a power greater than what they were actually trying to do.

A simple archetype, but hard to master, the fact that your two highest levels of spells are limited and prone to being forgotten or otherwise changing from day to day means that you get the chance to fiddle with all manner of different psychic spells each day, adding them to your arsenal to be part of what they might recall tomorrow, while lower level spells slowly stabilize and form a more reliable arsenal. That being said, downtime doldrums are the biggest weakness of the archetype, since if you don’t practice your spells daily, you forget them and are forced to rely entirely on your spontaneous recollection to relearn them in the future. Conversely, the fact you can try to relearn spells every hour means it’s fairly easy to recover them on the long trip to the next dungeon, to say nothing of trying to sneak in a new one during low-stakes random encounters and the like.

 Amnesiac protagonists are nothing new, but this archetype is rare in that it actually integrate the mystery of no memories into the mechanics of the character. The truth of the character’s memories might be known to the player, or they might be left entirely up to the GM. Heck, the character might regret discovering the truth about themselves. It is a nice touch, however, that the character automatically gets to retrain into a normal psychic (or perhaps, another archetype) as soon as they fully regain their memories, their powers and spell list stabilizing.

  Found wandering the streets, babbling about “fairy lights”, the woman that the guard have taken to calling Fae seems to be being watched by erinats, gremlins that superficially resemble children. For her part, Fae’s memories are blurred, but she seems to manifest strange powers when stressed.

 The party wakes up with blurry memories, but few have it as bad as the fetchling woman among them, who seems to barely even remember the powers she has at her fingertips. They’ll have to work together to find a way out of the castle they are trapped in and discover what has happened to them… but the psychic is more than she seems.