Minor psychic powers

I have a story in the works set in a world in which large noble houses still run the world, largely because they all have psychic powers. There is a council of about thirty members, each representing a different house, that make whatever decisions are made in the group as a whole. Each house has its own, persistent, genetically-linked power. There are five 'Great Houses', who have powerful and versatile abilities, but the remainder have powers that are much less useful; not quite as useless as the 'spot-on-the-wall' magics from Xanth, but certainly one-trick ponies. To convey the general flavor of the abilities that I'm using, I will give the powers of the Great Houses.

• Philas: Limited area-of-effect emotional control, stronger control with eye contact with individual, limited Compelling Voice whose power is linked to the victim's perception of the user as sexually attractive (so mostly useless against same gender or incompatible orientation, but the emotional-control powers do not share that limitation)
• Haargen: Can apply mental pressure to people within a range, pressure applicable drops with range, effect stronger with eye contact, applied pressure is basically kinetic inside victim's brain and causes, as pressure increases, headache of increasing strength; unconsciousness without permanent damage; unconsciousness with increasing permanent mental damage; death; Your Head Asplode
• Andyrm: Can see minds around them within a range, and their basic emotional state; with close eye contact, can read minds to any depth and alter minds to any degree, but this takes time and close range
• Teleck: A weak but cumulatively increasing Compelling Voice oriented around making the victim believe what the user says; the effect is fairly weak at first but increases with repeated exposure; affects everyone in hearing range of the user
• Kandar: Ability to hold two-way psychic conversations with anyone they can uniquely mentally identify, within a given range (most users at least hundreds of miles); ability to read surface thoughts of others, within a much smaller range (most users at most 50 yards)

I need a unique power for each of the thirty-some Houses on the council, but these should be much weaker than the Great Houses' powers above. Does anyone have any interesting ideas for minor psychic powers?

Psychometry is always a good one: gaining psychic impressions (emotions, images, thoughts left by people or events that involved it) from touching an object.

Related to touch-telepathy as well.

I've also seen it done where touching a machine, contraption or object immediately lets the person know how to use it, even makes them an immediately expert at using it.

Other times touching a person lets them see inside someone's body or sense their health.

Clairvoyance/ Remote Viewing: can mentally see events that are happening far away.

Also related is being able to find a person or sense their location by holding something that belonged to them.

Truth-sensing: sense when characters are telling lies.

And a related ability, simply sensing intent, as in say someone being able to sense when they are in immediate danger.

Pyrokinesis: starting fire or controlling fire that is already around.

Or the opposite, making it very cold.

Telekinesis: levitating objects.

Then there's probability manipulation, for instance making yourself very lucky, or jinxing other people so they are unlucky.

edited 23rd Jun '11 11:07:58 PM by NoirGrimoir

Lots of those would be more powerful than those of the Great Houses.

Start by breaking apart some of the larger powers. Instead of being able to see minds, the emotional state, read them to any depth with eye contact, and even alter minds, you could break that apart into at least three separate powers.

• Hear surface thoughts
• Read basic emotional state
• Alter thoughts, or memories but with a strict limit(s) of some kind

Another psychic power is a type of ESP that I made to make my blind character's life a little easier. He can sort of feel the rough position of objects around him by sensing their magical signature ('cause magic is everywhere in my 'verse) in much the same way how Daredevil gets around with his radar-sense-thing. Something like that could be retooled for your own verse, if you want. Just a nice little idea I felt like sharing.

Thanks for these. It should be noted that the House powers I'm planning to have basically mind-to-mind; they can't really affect anything that's not another mind. There's an entirely separate and separately defined class of powers in the story which are externally trained and focus on some aspect of physics (the current ones I'm using are Time, which is Bullet Time, Charge, which is basically Shock and Awe, Magnetism, which is telekinesis over metal stuff, and Gravity, which is the (enormously more powerful) ability to generate gravitational field gradients). I suppose if anyone has a wonderfully clever idea for an external power I might use it, but those are pretty much set for the moment.

I do have one on the list that's like a kind of minor Philas, but I'd like them to be at least partly unique or there's no reason in-story for that House to have split off at all, rather than remaining a branch of the original.