Great Stuff on the chapter! Notes, mostly on wording clarity, incoming, but I do want to say this looks really good and really dodges the 'stop playing my character' aspect of Psi and is really clever about encouraging you to lean into behaviors the infection causes to boot! Psi usage seems really menacing and potentially problematic without being thematically overwhelming, asyncs now can forgo unarmed if they need to but still are encouraged to try to touch folks for maximum effect, and the power level seems more evened out with no Gamma abilities feeling 'dead.' Good job! Psi Game Mechanics * Psi Sleights has excessive cross-references, referring to the summary of sleights twice and a detailed description of what they are starting on the same or next page. Unless there is a significant fiction insert between the types of sleights this will likely result in referencing the same block of information 3 times within 3 sentences. Infection rolls and Influence effects * It may be wise to make it explicit you are not required to replace influence effects with other effects of the same type, as that seems to be the intent of customized substrains but it is unclear if you can, for example, trade out 'unique' effects. I am still not sure if this is intended however, especially as the infection test superior success rolls seem to imply that the effect should get worse for high rolls, even though this seems to be inconsistent. * Frenzy removing all fray and mental skills in combat makes the beast strain ultimately a 'kill you character if a fight starts' strain. While this isn't as bad in EP as it is in other games, ultimately it makes the beast strain extremely unattractive to actually play in games that feature combat due to you spending a lot of time in combat out of control and post combat awaiting reinstatement, and has thematic dissonance where a beast async is the most likely one to gravitate towards combat but also is arguably the worst at it. This isn't terrible because it seems like you can just trade it out, if I understand correctly, but it is still an extremely harsh downside and as close to 'playing your character to self destruction' as the Influence effects get, dancing on the line of 'just not fun.' * Wording of Self Sabotage unclear and overly broad, and could stand to be narrowed down what sort of self sabotage you would engage in. Is it just 'mundane' self sabotage, the kind where you fall off a wagon as a recovering addict or spend all your cash on cheap mesh games, or is it over the top to the point you will take self harmful actions purely because they are the most efficient way to cause long term damage to your own life, such as going out of your way to tank your own rep and ensure your own arrest? Psi-Chi Sleights * Control Behavior seems to just represent you paying a cost to obtain a disadvantage that you can't ever remove, rather than serving any function, as neither quality offers any inherent benefit, and this doesn't have any utility the qualities don't as written. Is it intended to allow you to resist mental influences towards or away from certain behaviors? Can you change the nature of the behaviors, or remove them at will? Or is the Async essentially just giving themselves a disadvantage and paying for it? It is extremely unclear what the intended use of this ability is and why you would ever want it. * The differences between Eco-Empathy and Xeno-Empathy are unclear, as both only work on non-earth life to inform you about its place in its environment, with Xeno-Empathy also giving you information on its emotions and using SAV instead of COG. It seems like its intended for Eco-Empathy to grant more technical information than Xeno-Empathy, which grants more intuitive information, but a lot of the wording choices are so similar its hard to tell if they really are meant to be different. Are either of these rolls penalized for targeting less complex life forms? Psi-Gamma Sleights * Do you use the piloting skill to attack when 'jammed' in an animal using Animal Control? I assume the animal's own mental stats are treated as its 'AI' when running autonomously, for the purposes of it understanding commands. There is enough ambiguity in how much this is really like jamming to warrant a sentence or two of clarification. * Burst of Confidence/Clarity/Insight should note what happens to the points in the pool when the ability ends. If you are under your maximum pool when the ability was used, and don't use a point, do you keep the point, effectively 'healing' a point from the power? Is the temporary point used "first" or do you lose a point if you have one when this power is over no matter what? * Deep scan does not definite a 'piece of information' sufficiently to make this sleight easy for a GM to adjudicate. Is the target aware that the async is actively looking through their mind even if they don't know or understand what an Async is, or even that they are there? If the target isn't aware of the async at all and is unable to see or detect them in any way to they recognize the Async later, or do they just understand something entered their mind? How specific is the information about the Async the target recieives, and can it grant them a recognition of the async even in a new context, such as if they are resleeved? * Can Ego Sense be pushed to increase its range? Can Asyncs be detected at a longer range? Do you get a bonus to the psi test if you are closer than close range? * Is the implanted memory 'fresh' in the target's mind, will it be remembered as happening at the 'appropriate' time based on the memory, or can the async choose? If a fake memory is implanted, will the target suddenly realize they have a new memory, or not notice what is happening? * Does Mimic allow you to gain any useful information about the target's personality from the "ping," or is the information only available to the async to mimic the target, perhaps on an instinctual level? * Is the target of Pain fleeing the async, or just the area in general. If the former, if the target is not aware of the async, or furthermore not even able to detect them, what happens? * Sense Infection could have the GM note removed and instead provide that information from a player perspective as "Under no circumstances do you learn the name of the strain, only its nature."