Some skills (denoted by an asterisk) require a declared familiarity. Details regarding what that familiarity should be will be listed with the given skill.
Skill Level | Total Cost | Incremental Cost |
---|
1 | 1 | 1 |
2 | 3 | 2 |
3 | 6 | 3 |
4 | 10 | 4 |
5 | 15 | 5 |
6 | 21 | 6 |
7 | 28 | 7 |
8 | 36 | 8 |
9 | 45 | 9 |
10 | 55 | 10 |
Vehicle Skills
These skills will allow a character to operate different types of motorized vehicles and also man the weapons that are mounted in some militarized vehicles. The ability to manage animals (which may also, in some cases, be used for transport) is also included here.
Hell Bent for Leather *
Allows for the operation of mechanical conveyances. Familiarity advantages are required and confer the ability to operate specific types of vehicles effectively. Familiarities include boats and ships, airships, automobiles, velocipedes, undersea vehicles, walkers/exoskeletons (these also require a good tech background)
Tests pair this skill with Agility
The Big Guns
Allows for the operation and repair of a large vehicle-mounted or crew-served weapon systems. Familiarities include mortars, artillery, torpedoes, heavy automatic/Gatling weapons, and flamethrowers.
Tests pair this skill with Agility
Beast Wrangling
Allows for the care, feeding, and handling of domesticated animals (and the wrangling of some fierce wild creatures, as appropriate). Familiarity with types of animals confers bonuses, and familiarities include common varieties such as horses, elephants, camels, dogs, and birds.
Tests combine this skill with Willpower
Combat Skills
Combat skills come into play whenever a character would like to do another harm, or to avoid being harmed.
Bash and Stab
This skill indicates proficiency with medium-large cutting, slashing, smashing, and stabbing weapons. It is used both to attack with these weapons and to parry with them. Familiarity confers bonuses. Familiarities include swords, maces, axes, spears/bayonets, fencing blades, and pole weapons.
Tests combine this skill with Agility
Up Close and Personal
This skill indicates proficiency with both unarmed combat and with small weapons, such as knives, brass knuckles, and the like. This skill is used to attack and parry/block with these weapons. Familiarity confers bonuses. Some example familiarities: knives, blackjacks, ninja arm claws, punching aids, fisticuffs, wrestling.
Tests combine this skill with Agility
Duck and Cover
This skill allows character to get out of the way of bullets, arrows, grenades, and the like. It is more effective in areas where there is cover to get behind. Situations where this skill may be used include things such as gunfights, melee attacks, fires, artillery and explosions.
Tests combine this skill with Agility.
Bows and Bombs
This skill allows characters to use muscle-powered ranged weapons. Familiarity with weapon types confers a bonus. Odd weapons like bolas or lassos must have a familiarity to be used effectively. Examples of common weapons include: firebombs, grenades, throwing knives, spears, bows, atl-atls.
Tests combine this skill with Agility
Barking Irons
This skill allows characters to employ ranged weapons that do not rely on muscle power. Familiarity confers a bonus. Some familiarities include rifles, pistols, crossbows, and automatic weapons. Aetherspark pistols and Aetherspark rifles each require a separate familiarity as the weapons behave differently compared to their more pedestrian cousins.
Tests combine this skill with Agility
Sergeant's Eye
This skill allows a character to make the most of a combat environment, confers advantages when possessed by a leader and can aid in ambushes, escapes, and the like. Some familiarities include ambushes, small unit tactics, fortifications, and trench warfare.
Tests combine this skill with Wit
Social Skills
Social skills come into play when characters wish to obtain some advantage for themselves in social interactions with others.
False Promises
This skill allows characters to effectively mislead others. Familiarites include romantic encounters, first impressions, spotting lies, and empathy.
Tests combine this skill with Wit
Huckster's Eye
This skill allows characters to read subtle social cues. It can detect falsehoods told by an unpracticed liar, and can be used to gauge another's character's mental or emotional state. This skill may be tested to counter False Promises. Familiarities include romantic encounters, first impressions, spotting lies, and empathy.
Tests combine this skill with Wit
Buy Low Sell High
This skill governs social interactions that involve negotiation. It is often used when dealing with financial matters. It governs any social interaction that involves the exchange of goods and services that do not have fixed prices. Familiarities include haggling, merchanting, banking, investments, and bribery.
Tests combine this skill with Wit
At Home with Strangers
This skill governs general social interaction, and confers the ability to move smoothly in and out of different social settings, avoid faux pas, and generally fit in. Familiarity confers bonuses. Familiarities include military, high society, bohemians, criminals, rural folk, and workers.
Tests combine this skill with Wit
Leadership and Intimidation
Two sides of the same coin, this skill involves persuading others to do something they would rather not do. While it can be used to interrogate, Huckster's Eye would be needed to verify that the interrogated person is telling the truth. Familiarities include oratory, battlefield inspiration, interrogation, and intimidation.
Tests combine this skill with Wit
Adventuring Skills
Adventuring skills provide a mixed bag of capabilities, generally useful to characters who spend their time running around in the wild getting into trouble in pursuit of grand adventure or personal gain. These skills may be paired with Might, Vitality, or Agility depending on the specific situation.
Olympian Spirit
This skill allows characters to run, swim, climb things, and lift kettle bells with great skill and panache. Familiarities include specific types of athletic activity including climbing, running, swimming, and so forth.
Stealth and Camouflage
This skill allows characters to blend in with their surroundings, move silently, and conceal objects, people, and installations from view. Familiarities include shadowing, urban camouflage, outdoor camouflage, and stealth.
Devious Devices
This skill allows characters to pick locks, open safes, and jimmy doors; it also allows them to detect, analyze and disarm most types of traps. Familiarities include safecracking, lockpicking, and mechanical traps.
Skullduggery
This skill covers many different nefarious activities, including the ability to pick pockets, skill at gambling, crude forgeries, bribery, and begging. Nefarious skills that require technical skills or mechanical devices are covered by the Devious Devices skill. Familiarities include games of chance and pickpocketing.
Call of the Wild
This skill allows characters to travel and survive in the wilderness. It includes the ability to navigate and create and read maps and charts, track, and the like. Familiarities associated with this skill include orienteering, arctic training, desert training, and hunting
Heroic Vigor
This skill represents intensive physical training and toughening. It aids in the resistance of many physical and environmental hardships and also adds to rolls to resist death or unconsciousness from injury. Familiarities include resisting coercion and enduring fatigue and other such.
Intellectual Skills
These skills provide characters with the capabilities which generally require some sort of formal training or, at a minimum, careful mental focus. Intellectual skills are most commonly paired with Reason in tests, although Willpower may be appropriate in some cases; Investigator's Eye is paired with Wit.
Natural Philosophy *
This skill governs expertise within a particular scientific discipline, as well as giving the character the ability to do theoretical research if they want to do so for some reason. This skill requires at least one familiarity be taken, suggestions: astronomy, physics, optics, biology, chemistry. Other familiarities are possible, of course.
Artifice *
This skill allows for the construction, design, and repair of machines, devices, and gadgets. Used to build and maintain vehicles. Familiarity for particular disciplines is required. Skill in Natural Philosophy is often helpful when using this skill. Sample familiarities include: metallurgy, small devices, gunsmithy, boats and ships, automobiles, velocipedes, and airships
Investigator's Eye
This extremely useful skill allows a character to carefully observe their surroundings. It allows adventurers to spot small but crucial clues. Familiarities include crime scenes, observing people, research, and searches
Liberal Arts
This skill represents a character's broad familiarity with the entire range of humanities and social sciences, most notably history and anthropology. Familiarities include history, anthropology, classical studies, and sociology
Law *
This skill covers legal matters. Familiarity is required, and familiarities include English law, French law, any other specific country's law, as well as academic subjects such as Roman law or international law
Medicine
This skill governs the healing arts. This skill deals mostly with conventional medicine, which includes the use of such specialized healing tools as elixirs and Physicane, as well as more conventional medical and surgical knowledge. Familiarities include pharmacology, surgery, battlefield medicine, and infectious diseases
Craft Skills
Each craft or profession can have a skill of its own, which offers access to some specialized knowledge particular to the craft or profession not otherwise detailed. Much of the utility can be duplicated with other less-specific skills. The test would involve combinations of skills and attributes according to the specific task and what is meant to be accomplished. Some examples are listed below; additional crafts will be considered if truly unlike the listed skills (in all categories).
Airship Crewman
This skill represents the mastery of the myriad skills needed to perform the duties of an airship crewman
Soldiering
This skill represents the myriad skills needed to perform the duties of an enlisted soldier
Forgery
This skill represents the many sub-skills and extensive knowledge needed to be a professional forger capable of producing high quality forgeries of complicated documents. Crude forgeries of simple documents or signatures can be performed with the Skullduggery skill.
Still Mastery
This skill covers all the things that one needs in order to produce spirituous beverages of the highest quality. Still construction and operation, the use of herbs and other adjunct compounds to produce flavor, and different techniques for aging and bottling are included
Monasticism
This skill gives knowledge of the many daily rites and rituals that are part of the life of a typical monk. It includes knowledge of prayer, philosophy, and various crafts and tasks associated with this life.
Arcane Skills
These skills are specifically used by those who wish to use arcane power to manipulate the world. Any human can learn these skills, but they are far more effective for the arcanists who have been inoculated with Alchemical Salts, as they are much better able to wield arcane energy. This is detailed separately (available only to arcanists). Reason is used for tests which invoke free form effects and for most tests involving Arcane Memory. Willpower is used for invoking Charms and Patterns. Arcanist's Eye is tested with Wit.
Channeling
This skill measures and limits the amount of raw power that an arcanist can employ in their works, and is used in tests involving raw power.
Precision
This skill measures an arcanist's ability to balance and direct the power that they summon. It is employed in invoking arcane effects where the careful application of power is important.
Focus
This skill measures the ability of an arcanist to establish and maintain arcane concentration. It is used in tests to avoid distraction or interruption, and it also determines the number and power of arcane effects that an arcanist can maintain at any given time. Every effect that can be maintained requires a certain number of focus points – although some very minor effects do not require constant upkeep, they do still count as a single point against the overall effect limit for an arcanist. This skill also improves an inoculated arcanist's ability to replenish their reserve of power.
Arcanist's Eye
This skill governs an arcanist's ability to sense arcane energies and manifestations in the world, as well as their ability to use arcane power to perceive and study the world. It is used in the invocation of arcane effects that are designed to give information.
Arcane Memory
This skill determines how quickly an arcanist can learn new patterns, and also determines the maximum number of patterns that an arcanist can retain in active memory at any given time. (Other patterns, once learned, are not forgotten, but an arcanist must take some time to meditate and re-configure their mental library to swap patterns out of deep memory.
Dream Skills
These skills deal with the manipulation of the dream realms and of Ephemera (images and impressions brought from the dream realms into the waking world). Any character may learn these skills, but they prove to be of limited use to characters who do not focus on dreaming as a specialty. Dream skills use Wits, Reason, or Willpower (details available separately to the Lucid Dreamers). Perception tests in the dreamscape are generally made using Wit + Dreamer's Eye, but there are other specializes uses.
Dreamer's Eye
This skill is used to see and understand the underlying nature of dreams. This skill makes navigation through the dream realms possible. It is also used to detect hidden entities or objects in the dream realms. The skill also allows a dreamer to attempt to remain unnoticed in the dreaming, and so is particularly important when trying to blend into another person's Reverie. Skill in Dreamer's Eye may also aid a character in detecting Ephemera that have been manifested in the waking world, and may be useful to characters with no real interest in other aspects of Dreaming.
Lucid Dreaming
This skill allows the dreamer to exert their will over the dream realms. This serves both to shape the background imagery of the dream realms and as an attack skill, since an attack in the dreaming is basically an attempt to transform parts of someone else's dream-self. This skill does not make lasting changes to the dreaming – that is covered by Morphean Artifice.
Clarity of the Mind
This is a skill that allows a dreamer to preserve their own form while traveling through the dream realm. This skill provides for environmental resistace against whatever strange fires, storms and other terrors a dreamer might encounter, and also serves as a defensive skill while dreaming, by allowing the dreamer to protect their form and substance against people or entities seeking to destroy or manipulate them.
Languages of the Spirit
This skill allows a dreamer to interpret the images that they encounter in the dream realms. It is used to analyze and understand the parts of the dream realm that relate to the real world. If a Dreamer is attempting to make sense of images from someone else's Reverie, they use this skill to do so. This skill also allows Dreamers to understand how best to modify dreams in such a way as to shape the emotions or thoughts of people in the waking world.
Morphean Artifice
This skill allows the creation of “artifacts” within the dream realm. Normally, ony things directly associated with the Dreamer's form have any kind of permanence in the dreaming – this skill allows a Dreamer to imbue dream creations with a portion of their will, enabling them to enddure for a limited time on their own. Creating anything lasting within the dream realm requires the expenditure of a point of Stamina. Items persist for a number of evenings equal to twice the degree of success on this roll. A Dreamer may create permanent changes to their own Reverie using this skill. These changes require only periodic pruning and upkeep. This skill also allows Dreamers to capture Ephemera within the dream realms, which may then be released in the waking world as illusions of a sort.