Create (Action)

Heroic Action Role-Play

You can build, repair or design almost anything. If you are good, you are an inventor that can build or improve almost any machine or gizmo. If you are a beginner, you need blueprints and tools to work your "magic". What you can do depends on what design principles you are familiar with; an Egyptian engineer, Space Corps engineer, and a mage-smith of the Elven Empire work with very different principles, but they all create things.

Unskilled Use

The Create skill defaults to Mind. You can make minor repairs or basic construction work if you have an instructor or manual. You can maintain gear you are familiar with.

Use in Action

You can repair almost any object, given enough time and the right equipment. You can jury-rig from scrounged parts devices whose basic design is familiar to you. You can design and build new inventions, as long as you can convince the GM that such a device is possible. These tasks are detailed under Tinkering, below.

Knowledge

You can recognize any technological device, and give an estimate of what it does and how well it does it.

Contacts

Grease monkeys gather in garages and greasy bars, and you fit right in among them. Other creators have their own social spots and networks, often inaccessible to those with less savvy. You also know suppliers for parts and customers who want to buy the finished product. In fact, some of these customers are probably adventurers, spies, and soldiers, who could give you a hand in any number of situations.

Stunts

The most important Create stunt is Tinkering, a whole complex of rules covering almost any build or repair situation.

Tinkering

In Action adventures, gadgets are built with frenzied effort and leaps of genius in very short time. These rules give a framework for tinkering; how to repair and redesign crafted items by creative genius. The following table gives benchmarks for calculating the difficulty of tinkering tasks. There are many schticks and powers that use or modify the tinkering rules.

Decide what you want to do. Sum the difficulty modifiers from each column to get the final difficulty. You can choose to keep one of the factors open and dependent upon your outcome. So, for example, you can decide upon what you want to do, and then see how long it takes (keeping Time open) or you can decide how long you want to spend and make it as well-designed as you can (keeping Construction open).

Tinkering Table

Difficulty Modifier	Time	Size	Construction	Complexity	Power	Resources	Difficulty Modifier
+0	Month	Personal	Haphazard	Established	One	Factory	+0
+3	Day	Car	Functional	Cutting Edge	Two	Lab	+3
+6	Hour (Limit Break)	Truck	Artwork	New Design	Three	Field kit	+6
+9	Minute	Building	Benchmark	Conceivable	Four	Basic tools	+9
+12	Basic Action	Town	Miniaturized	Inconceivable	Five	Scrounge	+12

Time: This is how long you spend on the project. Tinkering is possible in action rounds; the inspiration of stress allows you to treat a Limit Break as a full hour of normal work.

Size: Larger installations take longer to build. This is the size of a normal, functional item of its kind, not including miniaturization. Want to make it smaller? See Construction, below.

Construction: How well-made and well-designed the item to be.

• Haphazard: The device is frail, with exposed wiring and mechanics. It cannot stand normal wear and tear, and looks very odd. It will break down on any snakeyes roll. Most gadgets that techies make during scenarios will be of this category, if nothing else so as to avoid the hassle of the item hanging around and costing xp in the future.
• Functional: The gizmo looks like what it is, revealing its function in its design. It is not pretty, but neither is it frail. In some cases, functionality can have its own aesthetics, tough it usually takes a while for this to become generally acknowledged.
• Artwork: Going beyond the basic design, the item now attracts positive attention and can be considered a fashion accessory. It can look harmless and conceals its main function if you like, or it is merely cool enough to pass as an art object rather than what it is.
• Benchmark: At this level, the item becomes normative, it shapes what people perceive as normal. It is suitable for mass production, the basic principles can be imitated and nudges the technological envelope. The GM is the final arbiter on when this is possible and what effect it has on the setting.
• Miniaturized: The item is made smaller than such an item could normally be, which will mislead even those who know what they are looking for. It is simply not conceivable that an item this size could do what this one does, which makes it almost impossible to recognize for what it is.

Complexity: A measure of how much the device twists technological sensibilities. GMs should veto anything beyond cutting edge if it disrupts their campaign world.

• Established: Run-of-the-mill technology of the day. Why don’t you simply go to the store and bye one?
• Cutting Edge: This is everyday technology that is fine-tuned and adapted with great skill and care, pushing the envelope slightly. An expensive racing car.
• New Design: A brand new item, possible under the tech level but not yet invented. Artificial intelligence.
• Conceivable: This is something that people of the day can conceive how it would work, but which has never been done and is not normally possible under the local tech level. It may push the technology level by one step, or it might be something people in the past believed to be right around the corner, but we today know that it was not. Allowing this into a campaign gives it a distinct pulp feeling. Clockwork automatons.
• Inconceivable: This is something that would cause the everyday observer to be flabbergasted, and which pushes the local technological level more than one step. The GM should only allow this in weird science campaigns. Aircraft in blacksmith technology.

Power: This is the number of experience points the item would have cost if paid for as a power, and thus a measure of its utility. If you have actually paid the xp, ignore this category. It is mainly applicable to jury-rigged, one-time desperation efforts.

Resources: This is what you have to work with. It is harder to improvise something out of rubber bands in the field than it is to order your ten thousand mooks to build it using state-of-the-art tools.

• Factory: A full set of equipment, plentiful supplies, and a willing and able workforce.
• Lab: Plentiful equipment and more supplies than you can carry. A truck full of gear or access to a large trash heap.
• Field kit A man-portable tinkering kit, plus suitable pieces to work with.
• Basic tools: A small toolkit and some junk. A Swiss army knife and what you can loot from a wreck.
• Scrounge: Something to work with, but none of it suitable.

Repairs & Tuning

Tuning or rebuilding an item takes less time, because you don’t have to work from the ground up. The difficulty is the same as for building it, only you get to ignore the Construction column. Tuning up an existing invention of your own allows you to ignore the Complexity column; to you it is now established tech.

Power Gadgets

Tinkering generally applies to technology, but in a supernatural world, a creator can also tinker with magic items. In order to produce an item that uses a power, you generally need to know the form of the power involved. This is an open field in the rules, you have to work with your GM to determine what works for a particular campaign.

Permanent Gadgets

The results of tinkering are always temporary, lasting at most until the end of the story. If you want a permanent item, you have to purchase it using character points. But tinkering gives you an excellent means of procuring all kinds of odd and wonderful devices your GM might otherwise feel are too odd for his world as well as providing an easy way to change exactly what gadgets and power items you have.