Variant Medium advantage for GURPS

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 Awhile back, I floated this suggestion for how to handle the Medium advantage in GURPS in the official GURPS Discord, and thought it might be worth preserving here:

You automatically know whether there are any "unbound" spirits within Per yards of you. For purposes of this advantage, "unbound" spirits are any spirits not bound to objects, currently possessing someone, etc. Furthermore, you count as a spirit for the sole purpose of communicating with spirits (not seeing them), if this would be helpful. This allows you to hear the voice of a spirit with Mute (Substantial Only, -10%), or be contacted telepathically by a spirit with Telesend (Spirits Only, -20%).

Relative to the text of GURPS Basic Set: Characters, this does a few things:
  • Ignores the bit about spirits of the dead, but incorporates some stuff about excluded categories of spirits in Powers and Template Toolkit 4.
  • Tries to make clearer how it differs from Detect (Spirits).
  • Replaces "nearby" with "within Per yards", which is admittedly nitpicky but is a difference.
  • Makes clear that it doesn't get rid of all non-linguistic communication barriers whatsoever—just ones that are due to the medium not being a spirit.
Also, it intentionally admits the bit about "You can also call spirits to you; there is no guarantee that they will answer your summons, but they will hear it." To me, that clause is pretty obviously a jokey Shakespeare reference (specifically to Henry IV), not something that's actually supposed to be a useful ability. In settings where spirits often have the Name Hearing perk, declaring that Medium includes a sort of reverse-name-hearing ability might make sense, but I'm personally not a fan of Name Hearing as a perk—I like the idea of spirits that inhabit particular places, which you usually have to travel to to make contact with them. So YMMV there.

An alternative to the "Per yards" rule is to simply say Medium lets  you sense spirits you could reasonably have a conversation with, if the spirit were willing. That would mean ability to sense a spirit could depend on whether a door or window is open or closed, amount of background noise, etc. Again, YMMV.

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