Precognition
Description:
The discipline of Precognition relates to sensing the cascade of future events and reading the achronal chaos of the metadimensional energy that ripples in the psychic’s brain. Readings provided by Precognition tend to be focused on the psychic and what they find interesting or important. Matters irrelevant to the seer are unlikely to be noticed, even if they are of critical importance to those involved. More advanced techniques of Precognition can even influence the future, adjusting probabilities by changing or pruning certain metadimensional currents.
The future is not carved in stone. Oracles can be falsified by present action or sheer random chance. When a reading is ambiguous or the future seems uncertain, the GM should simply give the most probable reading for the power as their own judgment recommends.
Precognition is strictly future-oriented. For assorted complex reasons, the past is vastly more difficult to observe with psionic powers, and postcognition is generally considered impossible.
Precogs are generally viewed with considerable unease by the general population. They’re not as widely feared as telepaths, but the uncanny powers of foresight they possess can make them difficult company. They can earn very substantial sums of money from those desperate to learn of some future outcome, but the specificity of their visions makes it difficult for them to perceive large-scale future events.
A precog can see a city in flames or a stock market board showing a crash, but even the most powerful can’t tell if the conflagration is just a limited local disaster or a planet-consuming catastrophe, nor can they tell if the crash is a temporary pullback in the market or a harbinger of global depression. Many precogs have difficulty dealing with this ambiguity, and some become fixed on personal interpretations of their visions that may or may not play out as they have seen.
Bending the Future
Everything a precog sees is provisional. Some outcomes may be so likely as to be nigh-certain, but nothing is truly, absolutely destined. Vigorous activity or simple unexpected chance can skew future outcomes.
This effect is one reason why choirs of precogs have not been more widely exploited by planetary governments. The clearer and more detailed a future outcome becomes, the simpler it is to find the crucial events that can be changed to derail it. The more intense the precognitive focus toward a future event, the more fluid it becomes as fresh readings take into account the countermoves that others have made. Rumors persist of ancient pretech augmentation hardware that can “fix” future outcomes, but most governments lack the resources to even consider such extravagance.