Emotional mental skills include the way that the brain processes stimuli from its senses to make emotional sense of what is going on and to make emotional decisions based on that stimuli. Unlike emotional defenses, these are further broken down into actual skills associated with certain groupings of emotions. And even more, the character further has to specify a class of animals affected including humanoids, mammals, reptiles / amphibians, birds, fish, insects / arachnids / invertebrates, undead, and extraplanar (demons / devils / imps / angels).

It should be noted that some animal classes might not be affected by some emotions.

Unlike cognitive attacks, emotional attacks could be done mind to mind (through telepathy if the character has access to that), but are often done instead with words, gestures, or in other ways that “push the buttons” of the opponents being affected. If done with words and gestures, these can be performed as free actions, but a group cannot be affected by more than one of these emotional attacks successfully at a time with the first one being the one used when determining which is effective.

Unlike cognitive attacks which are generally maintained through mental control from round to round, emotional attacks are maintained automatically as long as the skill-user is close enough that they can be sensed and as long as nothing that the skill-user has done would affect the relationship they have fostered. The only exception to this is if the relationship is so counter to what the opponent would normally do as to make the opponent automatically question the emotion, the skill-user must renew the “attack” every round through a successful roll.

Attacks against morale, either through inspiring and rallying allies or demoralizing enemies, fall into this category, as do effects toward invoking fear or provoking anger. As these emotions are all very similar, a character with the fear/bravery/anger power over humanoids could rally their own companions and demoralize or provoke the enemy troops during the same round.

Emotional skills against joy and sadness are much less common, but they can often be used to encourage someone to do something just for the joy of doing it or for the sadness that would be caused by not doing it. Some of the results can be similar to those of fear, anger, or trust, but it actually stems from a totally separate reason for doing it.

Charming others into doing things they might not normally do, including putting away old fears, beliefs, and instincts can be powerful. Befriending animals and humans alike is a valuable skill that can add allies when allies are most needed, not by creating them out of thin air, but by charming those around you to change from neutral or enemy into an ally. Unlike cognitive domination, this plays on the emotions and the subtlety of it makes it much harder to fight against. Whereas forcing a player to attack a companion by taking control of their limbs would allot the defender an extra two dice of defense, instilling disgust toward one of their allies or trust toward the skill user would not.