Know Schticks (Action)
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| Heroic Action Role-Play |
Adopted People
Inherent
You have very good relations with a people or subculture other than your own, to the point that you are considered a native, as honorable as a worthy member of this people, accepted as one of their own. You speak their language fully and fluently and have overcome any prejudice, reverse prejudice, or xenophobia. You can generally
Archeologist
Basic Action
You are an experienced archeologist, able to explore and analyze ancient sites. You have an instinctive sense for the use of each item and location, can sense which pile of earth contains a treasure and which is just rubble, and where to look for secret doors, traps, and other fantastic remains. You also have a good grasp of history and can understand where your excavations fit in the grand scheme of things. Tasks related to archeology that would be Limit Breaks for others, such as Search and Research, are Basic Actions to you.
Art Appreciation
Limit Break
You understand a person or culture trough observing its art, reading developments in its history and sociology as well as making predictions about where it is headed. You can use art as if it was a reference work with Research, making deductions about any topic by studying art related to it.
You can use art to impress and create a mood for a setting; make an opposed Know roll to set the emotion for a scene. Make a single roll and compare it against each of your guest's Know skill to see who you can affect. Interaction rolls that go along with the emotion you set become Routine against someone so influenced.
You can evaluate and give insightful and charming commentary on art of all kinds. In a setting where art is prominent (exhibition, performance and so on) you can engage another in commentary on the art and make an opposed Know check. If you succeed, your Charm checks this scene are Routine .
If you fail an art appreciation check, you cannot try again this scene.
Deduction
Limit Break
When you are speculating as to the best course of action or about the motivations of a given character, you can make an opposed Know roll against any opposing mastermind to have the GM tell straight out you whether your speculation is correct or incorrect. You must pose your question so that it can be answered very simply; yes, no, maybe, and irrelevant are typical GM responses. Deduction is not supernatural, the GM might refuse to answer if he thinks you have too little information to go on.
You can try to correlate what clues you have and test a theory of what really happened. As a player you must make a description of events as you think they are. The GM rolls your Know against the highest Know among the opposition. On a success, the GM gives a general assessment of your case, rating it as entirely false, mostly false, somewhat true, or mostly true. The GM may deem the clues you have to weak to try, weak (Stymied), strong, or complete (Confident).
Doomsayer
Basic Action
You can Refute Action as a Basic Action. Commonly linked to the Bard's Tongue Limitation.
Expert
Trigger Action (Combo)
Young man, I must mention that the coolant conductors in the thermonuclear reactor are not really suitable for climbing; their structural integrity is just 346 over 9. If you must use this delicate piece of machinery for ascension, use the illumination ducts. Those are the green cables, not the yellow ones.
Define a field of study; it must be fairly narrow. You are the very best in your field of knowledge. Butterflies and ancient languages are both good examples of narrow fields of knowledge. Within this narrow field, you are an absolute expert. You are an established master of your field, and your words should weight much more heavily in the academic world than those of anyone else, but due to academic infighting this is usually not so.
You automatically succeed at any Knowledge checks in your field of expertise. If you can convince the game master that your area of expertise is applicable to an action you or an ally is taking, (fairly spoofy reasons are acceptable), you can spend a trigger action to make the check Routine.
This schtick also lets you design new schticks and powers. In genres where a type of designs are very important, such as air fighter or mecha campaigns, this schtick lets you to create new designs and to push the envelope on technology, tough this is of course a lot of work.
Note that this schtick is not limited to the humanities, but can also apply to technological and supernatural fields. Great scientist need at least a basic understanding of the humanities (the Know skill) as well.find solutions acceptable to either your own or your adopted people. Those outside of either of your two cultures react to you based on the culture they would most favor.
Find Weakness
Basic Action
You can Analyze Weakness as a Basic Action.
Focused Mind
Inherent
When you make a Mental Push stunt, the Know roll is Confident.
Forensic Medicine
Limit Break
The not-so-glamorous skill of examining bodies (mainly of the dead) to determine their medical history. Most often used in grim settings to determinethe cause of death and to investigate murder.
If you take the time to perform an autopsy, you can automatically identify the source of death and tell a lot about the dead person's last hours - level of activity, things he ate, if any violence was made upon him, if he had sex, things like that.
Identifying strange and/or unknown things may require a Know roll, even a poor result will generally give you good clues while a good roll gives odd and disquieting insights into the patient's last hours. If some mastermind is behind the event, this is an opposed Know roll.
Investigator
Limit Break
You are a forensics expert, able to analyze clues and physical remains and create a coherent image of what happened at a scene you are investigating and clues to what kind of people were involved. As more information is added from witnesses and technical reports, you can flesh out your image of what happened. If some mastermind is behind the event, this is an opposed Know roll.
You can put all of this down into reports that other investigators can read and understand, and you can quickly skim such reports to find similar cases which can offer additional insights.
Cosmopolite
Limit Break
You are at home in all cultures, able to understand and adopt to strange manners and customs. Negate any penalties on Charm or Impress rolls related to alien cultures. You know the common languages of your world. Add your Charm to the number of Languages you can learn. You have an amazing ability to piece together bits of other languages, sign language and other means of communication. As a limit Break you can learn to communicate in any one unknown language. At first, this will be at a pidgin level, it takes you a few weeks to become fluent. If you use this ability to learn more Languages than allowed, you need to trim the list down at the end of the Story. You might have to use this schtick again (another Limit Break) to understand arcane subjects, archaic versions, or dialects of the same language.
Logical Detachment
Inherent
You are not easily swayed by emotional arguments. You can use your Know skill in place of both the Charm and Impress skills when defending against stunts; any stunt having one of these skills as a difficulty lets you use Know instead. However, you become sensitive to reasoning and logical arguments; other people can use their Know skill in lieu of the Charm and Impress skills when interacting with you. You can also end up with a knife in your guts if you don't respond appropriately to intimidation; unlike normal interaction skill your learned arguments in no way impress those who fail to sway you. Logical detachment does not work against Spurious Logic.
Loophole
Basic Action
You have a knack for finding the wrinkles and exceptions in formal sets of rules, be it a computer program, the the directive of the metropolitan police, an infernal contract, or a code of honor. Against people and organizations that have a formal code that you know of, you can cause them to hesitate with an opposed Know roll. A successful stunt reduces the opponent's shot counter by three. If the Outcome matches your opponent's Mind they suffer a Setback, often making it impossible for them to achieve their objective honorably.
Material Link
Limit Break
By investigating a place were a creature bled, slept, or performed some significant activity, you can secure a sample of their blood, hair or other tissue sufficient to give you a clue to their True Name (a DNA sample in technological settings), or at least secure an advantage against them.
Make a Know check against their Recon, on a success you gain an Advantage against them that lasts until used or to the end of the session. On an Outcome matching their Reflexes you learn their True Name.
Medic
Basic Action
You can administer medical procedures and generally function as a qualified doctor. You can save lives and help natural recovery. This can be used to do First Aid as a Routine action. You can also substitute the patient's Body with your Know skill, for as long as the patient remains still. This can soak damage and help fight infections, poison, pathogens, and other dangers. You can use this as a prophylactic, but must know what specific problem you are preventing.
Poisoneer
Basic Action/Limit Break
You know and can administer poisons. When applied to a weapon doing Cutting or Piercing damage, a poison does Infection or Neurotoxin Dual Damage.
When used in food or as a contact poison, you must first apply the poison (which might be as stunt on some other skill) and close observers get an opposed Know to discover the poison at the last minute. If the poisoning is successful, you do Infection or Neurotoxin damage equal to your Know.
You can also use this schtick as a Limit Break to design pathogens that affect specific types of creatures, such as insects, mammals, plants, or alien life forms. This requires a blood sample and a Know check against a difficulty depending on your knowledge of these creatures' biology. 12 for everyday creatures, 15 for creatures from an unfamiliar environment like deeps sea or another known planet, and even higher for entirely new forms of life. You need to use this to affect strange creatures at all, and it is also useful to create specific patogens that only affect select targets, for avoiding friendly fire and such.
Popper the Bubble
Basic Action
You can Refute Action as a Basic Action.
Power Domination
Trigger Action
You must use Power Suppression (a Know stunt) on your victim before you can use this schtick. As long as your victim remains power suppressed you can turn on and off his powers at will. This is a Trigger Action you can use anytime, and specifically when he is about to use a power. If you do not change Power Domination his powers remain as they were, either suppressed or not.
Profiling
Limit Break, One attempt per scene
A method of suspect identification which seeks to identify a person's mental, emotional, and personality characteristics. You can analyze the habits and behavioral patterns and find common traits. This lets you construct a profile from very flimsy information; you can make educated guesses about someone's personality, abilities and motivations just by analyzing clues. You do this by analyzing evidence left at a scene where the person you are seeking has been active. You do not need to know who you are looking for, looking instead for the perpetrator of a crime or the instigator of an event.
You can use this once per appearance of the person sough; this is usually one scene in the game. Make a Know roll against the target's highest skill value. On a success, you gain a limited insight about the target; the GM can hand out appropriate clues and people using your profile to investigate the case get a bonus equal to your Insight. You also get a cumulative +3 bonus on later profiling attempts. On an Outcome matching the target's Mind you get a complete profile; if the target is on file you can identify him, and you know his basic personality, skill set, and motivation.
It is possible for the target to interact with you through clues intentionally left for you to find, using normal interaction rules.
Psychology
Finisher
You work with people to modify their mental state; to either cure or create psychological disorders. This requires a cooperative or restrained patient. Such disorders are generally considered Curses, and you can work with any purely mental or behavior-related curse. You can also substitute the patients Mind attribute with your Know skill while under your direct care; this can help against mental trials and assaults.
Sense Lineage
Basic Action and Inherent
You know a lot about lineage and tradition, and you know all the great families. You can use this to roll Know against Charm to tell that persons social standing, family and lineage if it is at all noteworthy. You can only use this once per session against a particular person. A person with Blue Blood is positively radiant to you; you automatically succeed against them. In cases where others try to fool you concerning their lineage or social status, you can use your Know as both the difficulty of the stunt and as your Mind for resisting a Setback.
Speed Reader
Basic Action
You can read at incredible speeds, reading and digesting text much faster than a normal person. You can do Research as a basic action as long as you are checking one particular book.
When doing research in a library, Know rolls are Routine.
Surgeon
Limit Break
You can heal wounds and remove physiological afflictions through surgery. This is powerful in that it can actually remove a physiological Curse. Normally, this requires a complete surgical crew, specialized equipment and so on. In Action, you often have to work under much more primitive circumstances.
After successful surgery, the patient has zero Hits and will need some bed rest, but is cured of physiological ailments. The GM is the final arbiter of whether Surgery can help but is encouraged to be generous; vampirism or a transformation into a mermaid is probably curable, especially in its early stages. Being turned into stone, ghost, or parrot might not be reversible this way, depending on the technology you have access to.
The difficulty of Surgery is the damage value of the attack that caused the damage or the skill value of who or whatever caused the problem. If the surgery is performed with adequate tools and assistance, the roll is Routine, and assistants can also assist.
Torturer
Limit Break
Inflicting pain on others as punishment or to induce cooperation, most commonly to extract information. Torture can be of many kinds, but this schtick is focused on physical torture. The victim must be unable to resist and you must have means of inflicting pain. Each attempt inflicts a [[Hit (Action]|Hit]] on the target. Mage a Know check against the victim's Body + Mind. On a success, the target loses a Fortune point. On an Outcome matching the target's Mind, he loses 2 Fortune points. If the victim has no Fortune remaining, torture is successful and the target cooperates, at least until the end of the scene and potentially longer, as determined by the GM. Extracting information through torture is unreliable, as the victim is likely to say whatever he feels the torturer wants him to say, true or not. For each piece of information make a Mind check against the patient's Body or Mind, on a failure the information is corrupted by your expectations. It is possible to do torture without this schtick, use your Mind instead of Know.
Total Recall
Limit Break
You have perfect recall; years afterwards, you can call up the precise words of a conversation or recall details of a room seen only at a glance. This allows you to analyze as scene from memory as though you were actually present there now. You can retroactively notice things you didn't think of looking for when you were actually there, which in turn might give more information from Know or other skills. The game master can play up a small flashback from the time you learned the information recalled, which will often give some additional insight into your problem or your character's background.
The Limit Break refers to the act of remembering, it is not something you have to do to record the memory in the first place.