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The path to mastery begins with a single skill.
Skill Attributes
All skills share these attributes:
- General Skill Check: A Major Action with a Base Cost of 1 AD and default DR 0. If a specific procedure applies, use its timing, cost, target, and other requirements instead. An Exchange Response occurs within its Exchange; it is not a separate Major Action.
- Skill Level: Sets the Skill’s Boost limit—the maximum number of extra AD you may commit when Boosting a check. During your activation, it also sets the Skill’s proactive-use limit: Skill Level + 1 (minimum 1).
- Linked Vital: The Linked Vital sets the Skill’s maximum level.
Available Skills
Applications are illustrative, not exhaustive. A Skill can apply beyond these examples when its trained competence clearly fits.
Acrobatics
Precise, agile movements requiring balance, reflexes, and coordination. Covers tumbling, leaping, evasive manoeuvres, and traversing difficult terrain. Essential for overcoming physical obstacles with speed and grace.
Linked Vital: Agility.
Applications:
- Tumbling & Evasion: General rolling, diving, flips, and fluid evasive movements.
- Aerial Movement: Generating momentum, leaping across distances, and swinging from ropes or ledges.
- Balance & Recovery: Maintaining stability on narrow, unstable, or precarious surfaces.
- Ranged Full Guard: When using Full Guard against a Ranged Exchange, roll Acrobatics with Advantage. Acrobatics is the required Skill for this response; Athletics and Ranged cannot be substituted.
Combat Note: A character with Acrobatics SL 0 may still commit the required 1 AD to Ranged Full Guard and roll with Advantage, but cannot Boost the response.
Alchemy
The creation of transformative substances through chemical or mystical means. Covers potion-brewing, poisoncraft, and reactive mixtures. Essential for manipulating matter and producing potent consumables or effects.
Linked Vital: Cognition.
Applications:
- Designing & Identification: Designing or identifying potions, poisons, substances and predicting their effects.
- Brewing & Handling: Brewing potions, poisons, or antidotes. Creating explosives, incendiaries, or acidic compounds.
Artifice
The construction, modification, and repair of physical devices and structures. Covers smithing, mechanical design, tradecraft, and fabrication. Essential for crafting and maintaining tools, traps, weapons, and gear.
Linked Vital: Cognition.
Applications:
- Design & Diagnosis: Diagnosing mechanical faults, engineering complex devices, designing traps, appraising structural integrity.
- Crafting & Assembly: Assembling delicate mechanisms, repairing fine instruments, crafting precision components, and setting intricate traps.
- Forging & Shaping: Forging and shaping heavy metalwork, reinforcing structures, assembling large mechanical constructs.
Athletics
Physical power, endurance, and bodily control in high-exertion activities. Covers lifting, climbing, swimming, and sustained movement. Essential for overcoming challenges that demand raw Strength or stamina.
Linked Vital: Strength.
Applications:
- Climbing & Load Bearing: Scaling surfaces, carrying heavy loads, supporting collapsing structures.
- Breaking & Overcoming Resistance: Smashing barriers, forcing doors open, overpowering opponents physically.
- Jumping & Leaping: Long-distance jumps, high leaps, vaulting obstacles through sheer physical power.
- Endurance: Sustaining prolonged effort, resisting fatigue, and enduring harsh physical conditions.
Beastcraft
Interaction with beast type creatures. Covers training, calming, provoking, and interpreting instinctual behaviour. Essential for surviving and thriving alongside or against wild creatures.
Linked Vital: Presence.
Applications:
- Taming & Handling: Calming frightened or aggressive animals, asserting gentle authority, or teaching a beast new skills or tricks.
- Instinctual Insight: Assessing emotional states, interpreting intentions, and predicting instinctual responses of beast type creatures, including supernatural or monstrous beasts.
- Provocation & Control: Drawing attention, asserting primal dominance, directing aggression or calming.
- Intimidation: Physically intimidating or dominating creatures through sheer physical presence.
Finesse
Delicate manual dexterity and precise manipulation of small objects. Covers pickpocketing, sleight of hand, escape artistry, and intricate handiwork. Essential for subtle tasks requiring control and speed.
Linked Vital: Agility.
Applications:
- Pickpocketing & Concealment: Stealing or discreetly hiding small objects without detection.
- Delicate Precision Tasks: Handling fragile or intricate items, carefully disarming traps, precise cutting or repairing.
- Misdirection & Trickery: Executing sleight-of-hand manoeuvres, quick item swaps, and subtle manipulations.
- Escape & Manipulation: Slipping out of bindings, undoing complex knots, and operating intricate mechanisms swiftly.
Influence
Verbal and nonverbal techniques of persuasion, manipulation, and leadership. Covers negotiation, deception, intimidation, and rhetoric. Essential for shaping social interactions and steering outcomes.
Linked Vital: Presence.
Applications:
- Negotiation & Diplomacy: Bargaining, convincing through reason or emotional appeal, and achieving compromise.
- Deception & Misdirection: Effectively lying, misleading, or subtly manipulating perceptions.
- Leadership & Authority: Rallying groups, issuing authoritative commands, and establishing dominance.
- Intimidation & Coercion: Threatening or coercing through verbal pressure, imposing demeanour, or direct physical intimidation.
Insight
Emotional perception and psychological awareness. Covers detecting lies, reading motives, and interpreting nonverbal cues. Essential for navigating complex social dynamics and resisting manipulation.
Linked Vital: Cognition.
Applications:
- Detecting Lies & Manipulation: Recognizing inconsistencies in speech, behaviour, or intent.
- Assessing Emotional States: Interpreting emotional cues, facial expressions, vocal tone, and subtle body language.
- Understanding Power Dynamics: Identifying hidden rivalries, influence, tensions, or relationships within groups or individuals.
- Resisting Mental Fatigue & Manipulation: Withstanding extended deception, intense interrogation, psychological stress, or psychic pressure.
Languages
Fluency and comprehension across spoken and written tongues. Covers translation, interpretation, composition, and decoding of foreign or ancient languages. Essential for communication across cultural and linguistic boundaries.
Linked Vital: Cognition.
Applications:
- Multilingual Fluency: Communicating across multiple known tongues. Gain 1 extra language per level.
- Translation and Deciphering: Translating ancient texts, unfamiliar scripts, coded language, or cryptic writings.
- Linguistic Composition: Producing idiomatic, culturally plausible, and linguistically convincing speech or writing, including false letters or decrees.
Boundary Note: Languages governs what a document says and whether its language is convincing. Handwriting, seals, or physical document imitation rely on Finesse.
Medicine
Diagnosis, stabilization, and treatment of injuries and afflictions. Covers field care, long-term healing, and knowledge of physical and magical pathology. Essential for preserving life and restoring function.
Linked Vital: Cognition.
Applications:
- Stabilizing the Wounded: Stopping bleeding, immobilizing fractures, bracing limbs, applying pressure, or administering immediate treatments.
- Performing Medical Treatment: Setting bones, stitching wounds, preparing antidotes, applying poultices, realigning limbs, or removing embedded objects.
- Diagnosing Conditions: Identifying symptoms, magical effects, toxins, infections, or underlying causes.
- Treating Afflictions: Designing cures for poisons and countering disease progression.
Melee
Close-quarters combat using weapons or unarmed techniques. Covers strikes, blocks, grapples, and tactical movement. Essential for engaging enemies in direct physical confrontation.
Linked Vital: Agility.
Applications:
- Weapon Exchanges and Deflection: Delivering accurate slashes, stabs, pressure, parries, and close-combat responses with melee weapons.
- Grappling and Disarming: Controlling opponents through holds, throws, or joint locks.
- Melee Exchange Responses: In combat, an aware responder may spend AD to Clash or use Full Guard in a Melee Exchange. The responder may Boost the roll within the usual Melee Skill Level limit. Full Guard rolls with Advantage to stop the exchange but cannot deal damage back.
Guard Note: In combat, Guard is the name for Melee Readiness when a fixed or passive defensive value is needed. Preferred Melee Exchange normally uses active response rolls instead of a fixed Guard value.
Damage Note: Melee determines your accuracy when making close combat attacks. When calculating damage, use the attack's active Damage Vital, capped by the weapon's Damage Vital Cap.
Observation
The ability to perceive, search, and interpret immediate physical evidence and environmental details. Covers scanning for threats, examining scenes, and finding concealed or anomalous features. Essential for awareness, investigation, and tactical attention.
Linked Vital: Cognition.
Applications:
- Situational Awareness: Spotting hidden enemies, detecting ambushes, or recognizing immediate environmental threats.
- Searching and Discovery: Finding concealed objects, hidden doors, traps, and other deliberately obscured features.
- Examining Scenes and Evidence: Identifying physical clues, reconstructing spatial relationships, and recognizing relevant patterns.
- Physical Anomalies: Noticing that an object, surface, document, or environment has been altered, disturbed, or arranged inconsistently.
Boundary Note: Observation reads the immediate environment. Reading emotions or motives uses Insight; following a trail across terrain or time uses Survival; translating or deciphering linguistic content uses Languages.
Occult
Knowledge of magical, mystical, and divine phenomena. Covers arcane theory, religious doctrine, supernatural entities, and forbidden rituals. Essential for understanding and engaging with the unseen forces of the world.
Linked Vital: Cognition.
Applications:
- Arcane Theory: Understanding spells, magical effects, and arcane constructs.
- Divine Lore: Identifying religious rites, pantheons, and sacred artifacts.
- Forbidden Knowledge: Interpreting occult symbols, summoning rituals, and supernatural phenomena.
Performance
Expressive and artistic craft used to entertain, move, or hold an audience. Covers music, storytelling, acting, dance, spectacle, and ceremonial expression. Essential for creating a deliberate artistic or audience effect.
Linked Vital: Presence.
Applications:
- Storytelling and Dramatic Speech: Holding an audience through narration, recitation, character, timing, or formal presentation.
- Music and Theatre: Performing music, song, acting, mime, puppetry, or staged spectacle through expressive and technical control.
- Dance and Choreography: Performing precise, rhythmic, or physically demanding movement as an artistic display.
- Ritualistic or Ceremonial Expression: Leading religious rites, symbolic performances, or dramatic invocations.
Boundary Note: Performance creates an artistic or audience effect. Changing a decision through argument, leverage, deception, intimidation, or command uses Influence.
Piloting
The trained operation and manoeuvring of vehicles and vessels. Covers controlling speed, momentum, position, stability, docking, landing, pursuit, and evasion. Essential when a conveyance becomes part of the challenge rather than merely the means of travel.
Linked Vital: Cognition.
Applications:
- Operation & Manoeuvring: Managing speed, momentum, balance, turning, braking, docking, landing, or the immediate line of movement through trained judgement.
- Precision & Evasion: Reacting to sudden hazards, threading narrow passages, avoiding collisions, or executing close pursuit and escape manoeuvres.
- Crew Coordination: Directing a trained crew through time-critical operational commands.
- Sustained Control: Maintaining effective control through long pursuits, storms, turbulence, exhaustion, or damaged conditions.
Boundary Note: Survival governs route-finding, Beastcraft governs animals and mounts, and Artifice governs construction and repair. Piloting governs the movement and control of the vehicle itself.
Ranged
Precision and control when attacking from a distance. Covers use of bows, firearms, thrown weapons, and environmental targeting. Essential for striking effectively while avoiding close combat.
Linked Vital: Agility.
Applications:
- Aiming and Shooting: Firing arrows, bolts, or bullets with accuracy using bows, crossbows, or firearms.
- Throwing Weapons and Objects: Calculating arcs, force, and target impact.
- Adjusting for Environmental Factors: Accounting for wind, motion, distance, or cover to improve accuracy during ranged engagements.
- Ranged Exchange Responses: An aware responder with a legal, ready ranged attack may choose Ranged Clash, commit the response weapon's Base Attack Cost, and Boost within Ranged Skill Level. Both combatants roll Ranged; only the winner may deal damage.
Combat Note: Ranged Clash represents exchanged fire: Ranged versus Ranged. Ranged is not used for Full Guard; Ranged Full Guard always uses Acrobatics.
Damage Note: Ranged determines your accuracy when making ranged combat attacks. When calculating damage, use the attack's active Damage Vital, capped by the weapon's Damage Vital Cap.
Society
Knowledge of peoples, communities, and institutions, including customs, laws, politics, trade, factions, and the historical events that shaped them. Essential for understanding how societies work, how they came to be, and where a character fits within them.
Linked Vital: Cognition.
Applications:
- History and Context: Recalling major events, rulers, eras, notable figures, and the origins of present circumstances.
- Customs and Communities: Understanding traditions, ceremonies, etiquette, folklore, and local ways of life.
- Law, Politics, and Factions: Recognizing laws, authorities, alliances, rivalries, and institutional power.
- Trade and Urban Life: Navigating guilds, markets, professions, neighbourhoods, and the practical workings of settlements.
Stealth
Concealment, quiet movement, and avoiding detection. Covers infiltration, ambushes, and escaping notice in various environments. Essential for operating unnoticed or setting up tactical advantages.
Linked Vital: Agility.
Applications:
- Hiding and Camouflage: Blending into surroundings, using terrain, shadows, or cover to avoid detection.
- Silent Movement: Navigating terrain quietly, avoiding sound, and slipping past notice.
- Ambush and Surprise Attacks: Launching attacks from hiding, exploiting surprise for tactical advantage.
Survival
Wilderness expertise, resource gathering, and environmental adaptation. Covers tracking, shelter-building, foraging, and navigating dangerous terrain. Essential for enduring harsh conditions and thriving off the land.
Linked Vital: Cognition.
Applications:
- Tracking and Scouting: Reading tracks, identifying movement patterns, and analysing terrain.
- Navigation and Orientation: Finding paths, understanding landmarks, and avoiding natural hazards.
- Foraging and Resource Gathering: Identifying edible plants, water sources, usable materials, and carefully extracting fragile resources.
- Shelter and Environmental Protection: Identifying natural shelter or safe refuge, constructing basic shelters, and weatherproofing gear.
- Enduring Harsh Conditions: Surviving extreme temperatures, hunger, thirst, or physical exhaustion.