FYI - Luke and the Force
Okay, the “normal” things first. Luke is a pilot. An exceptional one - though it should be noted that without the Force he’s only pretty good. With it, he has terrifying precognitive reflexes which give him a response time which is a negative number. If he’s in part of a ship which was never intended to land and is about to crash, he can land that thing.
He is an amazing duelist, both naturally and after training. To give you an idea - as an old man, Palpatine was able to outfight and kill the greatest Jedi Masters of the Old Republic, and when he put himself into a strong, young clone body and fought Luke… Luke won. When an extragalactic race of conquerors invaded the galaxy and Luke had to fight their absolute greatest warrior, who didn’t even show up in the Force, while poisoned… Luke won. He’s studied and mastered several combat styles. He’s not as stunning with other weapons or unarmed, but he’s no pushover either.
Of course, he’s more than competent at basic survival skills in the wild, so on. He can read lips. He’s not his father, but he’s got some not inconsiderable mechanical skills of his own, which really shine in emergencies. Give him the proper materials and conditions, and he can construct a new lightsaber in two days, or at least prepare it to the point where the components can be assembled into a working weapon within minutes. His prosthetic hand is immune to radiation, has a somewhat stronger grip than is standard, and can be taken apart so its components can be used for other things.
But you’re here to read about his abilities in the Force.
You’re sure I can’t just link this? No? *sigh* It doesn’t list everything, anyway.
All right. The first thing you have to understand is that Luke is one of the most powerful Force-Sensitives of all time. His father was the Chosen One, with outstanding potential that he never really lived up to, but did pass to his children. Basically, any Force ability that can be taught or picked up through study, Luke can learn alarmingly fast. And there have been a lot of those, and he has studied most of them over many years.
The second thing you have to understand is that he’s had a long list of writers. Some are like Zahn and rely on ingenuity. Others just make powers up as they go. Like Superman, often as not - but while most of Supes’ extra powers are various uses of strength and speed (super-weaving!), many of Luke’s are basically ones where he focuses on exactly-what-is-needed and can get it done. This is going to need to be longer and more organized than my usual Abilities section.
Of course he’s got all of the standard things inherent to Force-Sensitives trained or not: Danger sense. “Luck”. Telepathy in moments of extreme stress with people he’s bonded with previously. Unnaturally fast reaction times. Empathy. Any of those are made stronger by training, and they’re incorporated into the trained abilities. Not really a skill, but also: flashburns, which happen when something is so emotionally painful that a Force-Sensitive shuts down the related memories.
There are three basic categories to trained abilities in the Force, though you have to keep in mind that they are not spells or explicit powers, and they are much more intermingled than this would suggest.
First is Control, the starting point, the ability to control one’s own body, though it can be applied to others. Part of it is physical disciplines, different meditations and exercises.
Specific things falling under Control include breath control, detoxifying poisons (including alcohol and tranquilizers), ignoring limits like stamina, healing (through comas or otherwise), superspeed, enhanced strength, wildly enhancing short-term memory, putting themselves or others into a coma so deep that it looks like death (there are two versions of this, and the second can kill), absorbing energy (including making blaster bolts and lightsaber blades nonlethal), charging themselves so that lightning will not hit them, keeping warm in a cold environment, and keeping cool in a warm one (Luke is good enough at this to walk across lava).
Second is Sense, making the Force into a sixth sense and broadening the scope of Control.
Specific talents here include enhancing or diminishing physical senses, using the Force to “see” in the dark/through obstacles/while blinded, danger sense, a sense of the currents and state of the Force (empathy is part of this), telepathy, melding and working as one with other Force-Sensitives, combat precognition, and mild psychometry (touch an object, know the presence of the one who used it).
He can sense the presence of someone truly evil/steeped in the Dark Side, unless they’re able to conceal it. Doesn’t mean he can sense precisely who that is, unless they don’t care if someone knows. It feels like a tornado appearing on a sunny day, a cold draft in a warm room, a loved one dying.
Third, the flashy one most people think of, is Alter. This is where most of them tend to get lumped.
Specifics? Telekinesis (which can be performed without gestures, though those help psychologically). Creating an astral projection which can be seen and heard and can manipulate things via telekinesis. Wiping out droids by disrupting various internal workings. Lightning (there is a Light Side version). Create blinding flashes of light (one of which glitches out droid vision and cameras, temporarily). Making their voice into a weapon. Self-levitation (arguably to the point of flight). The Mind Trick family of powers. Stun. Suppress someone else’s Force abilities. Malacia (making someone ill and incapacitated without causing any lasting damage). Create a bubble of protection. Refreshing/revitalizing someone. Concealing his Force-presence.
Expanding on the Mind Trick family: This is actually a massive range of mental powers lumped into a single heading. First is communication/telepathy. All Jedi have communicatory powers, but non-Force-Sensitive minds and really alien ones are much harder. However… Luke can understand and be understood by anything he has ever tried to speak with ever. Humans who speak a language he’s never heard before; humans who are physically unable to speak. Bat-people. Long-dead spirits. Extremely non-sentient parasitic worms. Living crystals and rock creatures which have never before considered the concept of organic life. Droids. Respiratory tracts. Microbial single-celled life. The communication is generally limited to “I am/this is not food” in simpler things, but in conjunction with the other Mind Trick powers he can tame monsters, if they’re not too enraged or somehow resistant. He can speak long-range with someone he’s already contacted.
The gentlest power is the “not the droids you’re looking for” one. Quietly, briefly overwhelming someone’s will in a way that they don’t see as someone else’s will at all. It works best on the “weak minded”, the distracted, and/or the drugged. But “weak minded” is not the best way to put it. It all depends on circumstance. It’s easier to Mind Trick someone into paying you extra for a job you’ve done than it is to tell them to give you all their money for nothing. Putting more energy into either can get them to do more, but it’s also more likely to alert them to something being strange.
Luke can also make people think he looks different or have them notice things which aren’t there, and he can calm someone’s emotions. There are darker-tinged powers which he’s very reluctant to use - reading minds, stealing information from minds, destroying memories.
Past communication, he’s reluctant to use the other Mind Trick powers, because they violate free will, something he’s become increasingly enamored of. Oh, he’ll do them if he must, but the days when he would walk through a crowd tricking them all into seeing him with different features for no reason beyond “I can” is gone.
He has the power to “infuse love into the heart of an opponent”. This does not sound like much. It is much. When he is sincere and makes the effort to communicate that he believes in someone and will not harm them, they do not doubt it. Whether this actually has the effect he wants, though, depends. Someone can know he’s sincere while also believing that he’s deluded.
Concentration. No, I don’t know who named it that. The example most people would be familiar with is how Luke fired proton torpedoes into the Death Star’s thermal exhaust port. But it shows up in other situations, too; like being on a wildly bucking surface and firing a blaster at a bad angle and long range so that it hits a single crucial point. If he wants to throw a dart between the blades of a moving fan, he can. It’s closely interrelated to “luck”, but he does have to make more of an effort.
If Luke is fighting a major opponent and has no darker emotions present in his psyche, he can enter a state of Oneness with the Force. It pours into him and he moves much, much faster than even Jedi superspeed should allow, countering faster than thought or instinct, and using incredible feats of telekinesis without pause. This is, though, only possible when he is totally calm and his connection to the Force is entirely uninterrupted. Sith know how to keep him from Oneness. Oneness is also enough of a rush that it has him moving more sluggishly after he’s done, and he’s got to sleep for about twenty hours.
If he is killed when at peace, Luke’s physical body vanishes almost instantly, leaving his clothes and artificial hand. He survives as a Force Apparition, one with the Force but keeping his identity. As an apparition he can make people see him, move things with telekinesis, use various powers, and possess someone who is willing, but he restricts himself to advice if possible, and not a lot of that. Free will again. In a few days he’ll “move on” and fade away. He won’t be able to describe it well at all, and on being reborn he’ll be able to remember very little about being an Apparition. It’s outside of human experience.
Dark Side Powers: He is not going to use these. If he ever gets an evil twin, though, we can talk.
Dark Side lightning is more painful than Light Side lightning; the latter is uncomfortable and incapacitating while it’s flowing, but doesn’t do nearly as much damage. He can’t cast it from his mechanical hand. If he really wants to, he can generate a sphere of destructive energy and hurl it.
The Nasty Applications Of Telekinesis family: Choke is the obvious one, but it has kin like Crush (which the Jedi Master Mace Windu was able to use, but Windu’s a special case) and destroying a major artery to the brain. Can be done without killing someone.
Fun things like torture without leaving any physical signs. Putting “pressure” on someone, which isn’t too bad at first but ramps up into severe paranoia and delusions.
Bolts of hatred, destructive blasts, a touch that withers flesh.
Finally, if he dies on the Dark Side he explodes in a massive column of blue lightning/fire. Media that came out before the prequels have this happening to all Dark Side adepts, and have all lightsiders fading away. Either way, no body.
Locked Powers:
The ability to recover memories which have been obliterated, lost, or just forgotten. Obviously not something that would happen in ES, but I’d like it to be more complicated than just not working. When a Jedi flashburns, they forget something in order to protect themselves. If he tries to recover something flashburned, he “pokes them in a gaping psychic wound”. This hurts and immediately rouses fight-or-flight; he feels that pain and gets thrown back by their mental defenses. He might be able to take someone through a memory they’d previously received, though.
Setting things on fire, making things explode, keeping them from exploding. The “blood trail” power. Teleporting things.
Visions of the future are chaotic, random slivers of futures and possible futures, without context. These are kind of impossible to have in a game without being highly abstract and/or very very aware of what’s on the schedule. Mind, Luke might have, say, a bad feeling about something that will happen soon, but he won’t know what it is or how it’ll affect people. His actual precognition would be limited, nothing farther ahead than thirty seconds at the most.
Similarly, the various spontaneous knowledge powers are a no. Visions of the past are part of that, but so is randomly knowing things because the Force told him. The Force doing things like telling him where something he’s looking for is, someone’s name - not many authors give him this, so you could say that it doesn’t work reliably. But still, in ES that’s just begging for treeshanks. Also, no seeing and hearing things which aren’t happening anywhere near him, and no flow-walking. However, he’s keeping psychometry, the sense of pain or disaster happening somewhere, and the sense of unhappy things happening to people he knows well.
And the really trippy fights. He has one in “Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor”, where he sees all lives as stars, his extraordinarily powerful enemy as a black hole, and Luke defeats said enemy by realizing that he is not a star, he is a white hole, and in the real world this renders the enemy into constituent atoms. There’s mention that the space scene isn’t what’s happening at all, but it’s the closest his mind can come to understanding. Which is very cool, but also very confusing, and most authors don’t have him do this. It also means he can’t go Beyond Shadows, at least on his own.
Weather manipulation. A powerful Jedi focusing the right way can cause serious phenomena with minor effort - earthquakes, tides, storms. Luke could telekinetically make the effort to keep rain and so on from hitting him, and change the temperature very locally - say, within a few feet, with heat redirection - but not this power itself.
Battle Meditation. Touching the minds of many people and influencing the ones on his side to work together better, demoralizing the ones on the other side.
Several Dark Side powers an evil twin could otherwise have. You know Dark Side adepts can cause hyperspace wormholes that can tear apart fleets of ships and transport people across light years? That some of them can Mind Trick on such a scale that they control thousands of people and can shuffle through everything all of them know, completely ignoring their strength of will? That some can cause radical mutations in people and animals? That there’s a power where an adept can kill someone by looking into their eyes? That some can dismantle minds, either making people insane or into obedient servants? Yeah, evil!Luke won’t be able to do any of that.
Oneness at its most powerful. …Basically, becoming utterly one with the Force without dying. Someone who has done that is a maelstrom of intense energy pouring endlessly out of a perfectly calm center, loses all sense of self, is absolutely impossible to defeat, has no physical presence, never tires, moves too fast for even someone using superspeed to see or sense properly, speaks with the voice of the infinite, is the direct avatar of the universe, that kind of thing. This has to be locked partly because this ability is the ultimate in “I’ve written myself into a corner!”, partly because another component of it is total omniscience. The vast majority of knowledge is lost upon returning to normal, but there’s a short transition period in which he can choose to hold on to some parts of it.
He is an amazing duelist, both naturally and after training. To give you an idea - as an old man, Palpatine was able to outfight and kill the greatest Jedi Masters of the Old Republic, and when he put himself into a strong, young clone body and fought Luke… Luke won. When an extragalactic race of conquerors invaded the galaxy and Luke had to fight their absolute greatest warrior, who didn’t even show up in the Force, while poisoned… Luke won. He’s studied and mastered several combat styles. He’s not as stunning with other weapons or unarmed, but he’s no pushover either.
Of course, he’s more than competent at basic survival skills in the wild, so on. He can read lips. He’s not his father, but he’s got some not inconsiderable mechanical skills of his own, which really shine in emergencies. Give him the proper materials and conditions, and he can construct a new lightsaber in two days, or at least prepare it to the point where the components can be assembled into a working weapon within minutes. His prosthetic hand is immune to radiation, has a somewhat stronger grip than is standard, and can be taken apart so its components can be used for other things.
But you’re here to read about his abilities in the Force.
You’re sure I can’t just link this? No? *sigh* It doesn’t list everything, anyway.
All right. The first thing you have to understand is that Luke is one of the most powerful Force-Sensitives of all time. His father was the Chosen One, with outstanding potential that he never really lived up to, but did pass to his children. Basically, any Force ability that can be taught or picked up through study, Luke can learn alarmingly fast. And there have been a lot of those, and he has studied most of them over many years.
The second thing you have to understand is that he’s had a long list of writers. Some are like Zahn and rely on ingenuity. Others just make powers up as they go. Like Superman, often as not - but while most of Supes’ extra powers are various uses of strength and speed (super-weaving!), many of Luke’s are basically ones where he focuses on exactly-what-is-needed and can get it done. This is going to need to be longer and more organized than my usual Abilities section.
Of course he’s got all of the standard things inherent to Force-Sensitives trained or not: Danger sense. “Luck”. Telepathy in moments of extreme stress with people he’s bonded with previously. Unnaturally fast reaction times. Empathy. Any of those are made stronger by training, and they’re incorporated into the trained abilities. Not really a skill, but also: flashburns, which happen when something is so emotionally painful that a Force-Sensitive shuts down the related memories.
There are three basic categories to trained abilities in the Force, though you have to keep in mind that they are not spells or explicit powers, and they are much more intermingled than this would suggest.
First is Control, the starting point, the ability to control one’s own body, though it can be applied to others. Part of it is physical disciplines, different meditations and exercises.
Specific things falling under Control include breath control, detoxifying poisons (including alcohol and tranquilizers), ignoring limits like stamina, healing (through comas or otherwise), superspeed, enhanced strength, wildly enhancing short-term memory, putting themselves or others into a coma so deep that it looks like death (there are two versions of this, and the second can kill), absorbing energy (including making blaster bolts and lightsaber blades nonlethal), charging themselves so that lightning will not hit them, keeping warm in a cold environment, and keeping cool in a warm one (Luke is good enough at this to walk across lava).
Second is Sense, making the Force into a sixth sense and broadening the scope of Control.
Specific talents here include enhancing or diminishing physical senses, using the Force to “see” in the dark/through obstacles/while blinded, danger sense, a sense of the currents and state of the Force (empathy is part of this), telepathy, melding and working as one with other Force-Sensitives, combat precognition, and mild psychometry (touch an object, know the presence of the one who used it).
He can sense the presence of someone truly evil/steeped in the Dark Side, unless they’re able to conceal it. Doesn’t mean he can sense precisely who that is, unless they don’t care if someone knows. It feels like a tornado appearing on a sunny day, a cold draft in a warm room, a loved one dying.
Third, the flashy one most people think of, is Alter. This is where most of them tend to get lumped.
Specifics? Telekinesis (which can be performed without gestures, though those help psychologically). Creating an astral projection which can be seen and heard and can manipulate things via telekinesis. Wiping out droids by disrupting various internal workings. Lightning (there is a Light Side version). Create blinding flashes of light (one of which glitches out droid vision and cameras, temporarily). Making their voice into a weapon. Self-levitation (arguably to the point of flight). The Mind Trick family of powers. Stun. Suppress someone else’s Force abilities. Malacia (making someone ill and incapacitated without causing any lasting damage). Create a bubble of protection. Refreshing/revitalizing someone. Concealing his Force-presence.
Expanding on the Mind Trick family: This is actually a massive range of mental powers lumped into a single heading. First is communication/telepathy. All Jedi have communicatory powers, but non-Force-Sensitive minds and really alien ones are much harder. However… Luke can understand and be understood by anything he has ever tried to speak with ever. Humans who speak a language he’s never heard before; humans who are physically unable to speak. Bat-people. Long-dead spirits. Extremely non-sentient parasitic worms. Living crystals and rock creatures which have never before considered the concept of organic life. Droids. Respiratory tracts. Microbial single-celled life. The communication is generally limited to “I am/this is not food” in simpler things, but in conjunction with the other Mind Trick powers he can tame monsters, if they’re not too enraged or somehow resistant. He can speak long-range with someone he’s already contacted.
The gentlest power is the “not the droids you’re looking for” one. Quietly, briefly overwhelming someone’s will in a way that they don’t see as someone else’s will at all. It works best on the “weak minded”, the distracted, and/or the drugged. But “weak minded” is not the best way to put it. It all depends on circumstance. It’s easier to Mind Trick someone into paying you extra for a job you’ve done than it is to tell them to give you all their money for nothing. Putting more energy into either can get them to do more, but it’s also more likely to alert them to something being strange.
Luke can also make people think he looks different or have them notice things which aren’t there, and he can calm someone’s emotions. There are darker-tinged powers which he’s very reluctant to use - reading minds, stealing information from minds, destroying memories.
Past communication, he’s reluctant to use the other Mind Trick powers, because they violate free will, something he’s become increasingly enamored of. Oh, he’ll do them if he must, but the days when he would walk through a crowd tricking them all into seeing him with different features for no reason beyond “I can” is gone.
He has the power to “infuse love into the heart of an opponent”. This does not sound like much. It is much. When he is sincere and makes the effort to communicate that he believes in someone and will not harm them, they do not doubt it. Whether this actually has the effect he wants, though, depends. Someone can know he’s sincere while also believing that he’s deluded.
Concentration. No, I don’t know who named it that. The example most people would be familiar with is how Luke fired proton torpedoes into the Death Star’s thermal exhaust port. But it shows up in other situations, too; like being on a wildly bucking surface and firing a blaster at a bad angle and long range so that it hits a single crucial point. If he wants to throw a dart between the blades of a moving fan, he can. It’s closely interrelated to “luck”, but he does have to make more of an effort.
If Luke is fighting a major opponent and has no darker emotions present in his psyche, he can enter a state of Oneness with the Force. It pours into him and he moves much, much faster than even Jedi superspeed should allow, countering faster than thought or instinct, and using incredible feats of telekinesis without pause. This is, though, only possible when he is totally calm and his connection to the Force is entirely uninterrupted. Sith know how to keep him from Oneness. Oneness is also enough of a rush that it has him moving more sluggishly after he’s done, and he’s got to sleep for about twenty hours.
If he is killed when at peace, Luke’s physical body vanishes almost instantly, leaving his clothes and artificial hand. He survives as a Force Apparition, one with the Force but keeping his identity. As an apparition he can make people see him, move things with telekinesis, use various powers, and possess someone who is willing, but he restricts himself to advice if possible, and not a lot of that. Free will again. In a few days he’ll “move on” and fade away. He won’t be able to describe it well at all, and on being reborn he’ll be able to remember very little about being an Apparition. It’s outside of human experience.
Dark Side Powers: He is not going to use these. If he ever gets an evil twin, though, we can talk.
Dark Side lightning is more painful than Light Side lightning; the latter is uncomfortable and incapacitating while it’s flowing, but doesn’t do nearly as much damage. He can’t cast it from his mechanical hand. If he really wants to, he can generate a sphere of destructive energy and hurl it.
The Nasty Applications Of Telekinesis family: Choke is the obvious one, but it has kin like Crush (which the Jedi Master Mace Windu was able to use, but Windu’s a special case) and destroying a major artery to the brain. Can be done without killing someone.
Fun things like torture without leaving any physical signs. Putting “pressure” on someone, which isn’t too bad at first but ramps up into severe paranoia and delusions.
Bolts of hatred, destructive blasts, a touch that withers flesh.
Finally, if he dies on the Dark Side he explodes in a massive column of blue lightning/fire. Media that came out before the prequels have this happening to all Dark Side adepts, and have all lightsiders fading away. Either way, no body.
Locked Powers:
The ability to recover memories which have been obliterated, lost, or just forgotten. Obviously not something that would happen in ES, but I’d like it to be more complicated than just not working. When a Jedi flashburns, they forget something in order to protect themselves. If he tries to recover something flashburned, he “pokes them in a gaping psychic wound”. This hurts and immediately rouses fight-or-flight; he feels that pain and gets thrown back by their mental defenses. He might be able to take someone through a memory they’d previously received, though.
Setting things on fire, making things explode, keeping them from exploding. The “blood trail” power. Teleporting things.
Visions of the future are chaotic, random slivers of futures and possible futures, without context. These are kind of impossible to have in a game without being highly abstract and/or very very aware of what’s on the schedule. Mind, Luke might have, say, a bad feeling about something that will happen soon, but he won’t know what it is or how it’ll affect people. His actual precognition would be limited, nothing farther ahead than thirty seconds at the most.
Similarly, the various spontaneous knowledge powers are a no. Visions of the past are part of that, but so is randomly knowing things because the Force told him. The Force doing things like telling him where something he’s looking for is, someone’s name - not many authors give him this, so you could say that it doesn’t work reliably. But still, in ES that’s just begging for treeshanks. Also, no seeing and hearing things which aren’t happening anywhere near him, and no flow-walking. However, he’s keeping psychometry, the sense of pain or disaster happening somewhere, and the sense of unhappy things happening to people he knows well.
And the really trippy fights. He has one in “Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor”, where he sees all lives as stars, his extraordinarily powerful enemy as a black hole, and Luke defeats said enemy by realizing that he is not a star, he is a white hole, and in the real world this renders the enemy into constituent atoms. There’s mention that the space scene isn’t what’s happening at all, but it’s the closest his mind can come to understanding. Which is very cool, but also very confusing, and most authors don’t have him do this. It also means he can’t go Beyond Shadows, at least on his own.
Weather manipulation. A powerful Jedi focusing the right way can cause serious phenomena with minor effort - earthquakes, tides, storms. Luke could telekinetically make the effort to keep rain and so on from hitting him, and change the temperature very locally - say, within a few feet, with heat redirection - but not this power itself.
Battle Meditation. Touching the minds of many people and influencing the ones on his side to work together better, demoralizing the ones on the other side.
Several Dark Side powers an evil twin could otherwise have. You know Dark Side adepts can cause hyperspace wormholes that can tear apart fleets of ships and transport people across light years? That some of them can Mind Trick on such a scale that they control thousands of people and can shuffle through everything all of them know, completely ignoring their strength of will? That some can cause radical mutations in people and animals? That there’s a power where an adept can kill someone by looking into their eyes? That some can dismantle minds, either making people insane or into obedient servants? Yeah, evil!Luke won’t be able to do any of that.
Oneness at its most powerful. …Basically, becoming utterly one with the Force without dying. Someone who has done that is a maelstrom of intense energy pouring endlessly out of a perfectly calm center, loses all sense of self, is absolutely impossible to defeat, has no physical presence, never tires, moves too fast for even someone using superspeed to see or sense properly, speaks with the voice of the infinite, is the direct avatar of the universe, that kind of thing. This has to be locked partly because this ability is the ultimate in “I’ve written myself into a corner!”, partly because another component of it is total omniscience. The vast majority of knowledge is lost upon returning to normal, but there’s a short transition period in which he can choose to hold on to some parts of it.