Illusion

Type: Sensory

Action: Standard (active)

Range: Perception

Duration: Concentration (see

description)

Saving Throw: Will

Cost: 1-4 points per rank

You can create false sensory impressions. This ranges from visual images to phantom sounds, smells, or even radar or mental images. For 1 point per rank, you can create an illusion affecting a single sense type. For 2 points per rank, you can affect two sense types. For three points per rank, you can affect three sense types. At 4 points per rank, you can affect all sense types. Visual senses count as two sense types. Your rank determines how convincing your illusion is, Including the DC for the Will save (10 + rank).

ILLUSION AREA

Your illusion occupies an area 5 feet in radius by default. To increase the size of the illusion you can create, apply the Progression power feat (see the Power Feats section of this power).

ILLUSIONARY EFFECTS

Illusions have no substance and cannot have any real-world effect. So illusions cannot provide illumination, nutrition, warmth, or the like (although they can provide the sensations of these things). Likewise, an illusory wall only prevents people from moving through an area so long as they believe it’s real, and an illusory bridge or floor is revealed as false as soon as someone tries to walk across it, and falls through it!

DISBELIEVING ILLUSIONS

Characters encountering an illusion do not receive saving throws to recognize it as illusory until they interact with it in some fashion. A successful Will save against an illusion reveals it as false. A failed saving throw means the character fails to notice anything amiss. A character faced with clear proof an illusion isn’t real needs no saving throw. Senses with the Counters Illusion trait (see Super-Senses) automatically detect illusions as well. If any viewer successfully uncovers an illusion and communicates this fact to others, they gain another saving throw with a +4 bonus. Circumstances may grant

additional modifiers to the Will save to uncover an illusion, depending on how convincing it is.

MAINTAINING ILLUSIONS

Maintaining an active illusion (such as a fighting creature) requires concentration, but maintaining a static illusion (one that doesn’t move or interact) is only a free action, effectively a sustained duration.

POWER FEATS

• Progression: Each time you apply this power feat, your Illusion’s area moves one step up the Progression Table (10-ft. radius, 25 feet, 50 feet, and so forth). You can create a smaller illusion than your maximum area, as usual.

• Subtle: Illusion is a Subtle effect by default, since it wouldn’t be much use otherwise. Therefore, Illusion doesn’t require—and cannot apply—this power feat.

EXTRAS

• Damaging (+3): Your Illusion is so realistic it can actually inflict psychosomatic harm on anyone fooled by it. Your illusions are capable of making attacks, which automatically hit (since your illusions are as “skilled” as you choose to imagine) and inflict damage up to your Illusion rank, or the damage normally inflicted by whatever you’re creating an illusion of, whichever is less. Anyone who successfully overcomes your illusion cannot be harmed by it and immediately recovers any damage inflicted by it. This extra is essentially the same as a Linked Damage effect with perception range, so the GM may allow you to apply other modifiers directly to the Damaging extra like an independent effect.

• Duration (+1): Reducing Illusion’s duration affects the type of action required to maintain an active illusion. Sustained Illusion allows you to maintain an active illusion as a free action each round. Continuous Illusion allows you to create illusions that continue to exist (even interacting) until you choose to dismiss them.

• Selective Attack (+1): With this extra, you choose who perceives your Illusion and who doesn’t.

FLAWS

• Feedback (–1): Although Illusion does not have a physical “manifestation” per se, it can apply this flaw, in which case a successful damaging attack on one of your illusions causes you to suffer damage, using the guidelines given in the description of the Feedback flaw.

• Limited to One Subject (–1): Only a single subject at a time can perceive your Illusion.

• Phantasms (–1): Only creatures with Int 1 or more can perceive your Illusions, making them a mental sensory effect. They are undetectable to machines like

cameras and microphones. This flaw is commonly combined with Selective Attack, making your phantasms detectable only to those intelligent beings you

choose.

• Range: It is left to the GM’s discretion whether or not Illusion’s range can be reduced at all, since being able to perceive the affected area is important in creating and directing the illusion. If Illusion is touch range, the character is only able to alter the appearance of subjects in physical contact. In order to solely alter your own appearance, see the Morph effect, possibly with the Phantasm and Saving Throw modifiers.

• Sense-Dependent: Illusion is already sense-dependent and so cannot have this flaw.

UNDER THE HOOD: ILLUSION

Illusion is a broad-ranging effect, usable for a number of different things. A few common considerations for Illusion include the following.

DAMAGING ILLUSIONS

For illusions capable of inflicting damage, apply the Damaging extra. At the GM’s discretion, this extra can even be made into a Linked Array with a variety of attack effects, such as Fatigue, Nauseate, and so forth, allowing your illusionist to inflict conditions other than damage on targets. See the Array power structure for details, keeping in mind the attack effects need to be perception range to match the range of Illusion and Linked to the Illusion effect. I

LLUSORY APPEARANCE

Illusion can alter a subject’s appearance, providing an essentially impenetrable disguise—at least until someone makes a successful save to see through the illusion. However, for just the ability to alter appearance, use the Morph effect, which is generally more effective than Illusion Limited to Appearance.

MENTAL ILLUSIONS

The default Illusion effect is perceptible to anyone or anything (including machines) as if it were real. Some illusions exist solely in the mind, like projected psychic hallucinations. This type of Illusion has the Phantasm flaw (perceived only by intelligent beings) and the Selective Attack extra, since the illusionist can choose whether or not to project the illusion into a particular subject’s mind, and therefore who can or cannot perceive the illusion. This is a net +0 modifier, for the same cost.

MY ALLY, MY ENEMY

A common Illusion trick is to switch the appearances of an enemy and an ally, causing a foe’s teammate to attack that enemy by mistake. You can generally handle this with an opposed check of Illusion and Notice; if you win, the target is unaware of the switch and attacks the wrong target.

I DISBELIEVE!

Keep in mind characters don’t get to make a saving throw to detect or overcome an illusion unless they have reason to believe the illusion is not real. Given the rather fantastic things that can happen in Mutants & Masterminds settings, an illusion generally has to provide some evidence of its true nature. Smart illusionists tend to keep the true nature of their powers secret, and smart Gamemasters require players to come up with something a bit more comprehensive than “I disbelieve!” to figure out when there are illusions at hand..