The spell-less and shady athasian bard is probably my favorite veriant of the bard class, but it always botherd me that a non magical bard in a campaign in which magic is shunned by almost everyone has this unexplained Enchanted music and everyone is sort of okey with that.
I explained this to myself as a kind of psionics, as it was the more logical choice, and since I never really liked the idea of a bard popping a lute in the middle of a fight, I decided I want to replace the standard bardic music (and only it, no added powers) with the thoughtsinger’s thoughtsongs, and wanted to know if anyone ever done something similar, or if it would make him Op/up
Thanks in advance for any help on the subject!
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Assuming you mean this set of homebrew, it should be alright on a cursory look, though I don’t have a grand amount of experience with it (actually, zero). It just looks ok-ish!
If you want a safer approach, either of these works:
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It’s a widely-known fact that music touches the soul, the psyche, in special ways. the so-called ‘morale’ bonuses are psionic self-buffs you coax out of people (so basically music makes people self-psionify themselves). No further adaption required!
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Bardic music is directly psionics, that use music as a focus and emerge from their listeners, like an echo without an (audible) source sound. Give them a new class skill to represent this kinds of psionics (functionally identical to Perform), and stipulate they can pick a single ‘perform’ skill that gets the same ranks. Any bardic perform check is replaced by ‘the lower of your Psionics skill and the Perform skill of whatever Perform skill matches your focus’. In practice this just means the player must pick their ‘main’ Perform and keep it maxed, and it explains why musicians summoned by the oda are never seen again; they are recruited by her as psions! (Or psionic batteries).
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Simpler than the above, ‘bards are psions’. Give them the Psionics skill, remove Perform skills, and any mention of Perform in the bard’s entry is replaced by ‘Psionics’. Effects are still the same. You may want to impose some Psionic Focus tool requirement in place of the instrument. Turns the Athasian Bard into an Athasian Psirogue.