Skills

Skills are broad capabilities acquired through training and experience. They answer what a hero is practiced at doing; the Attribute answers how the hero is doing it.

Making a Skill Roll

Skill roll = 3d6 + Skill Modifier + relevant Attribute

Skills are not completely granular. Each Skill has one of four competency levels and uses only the modifier associated with that level:

Level	Modifier	Meaning
Untrained	+0	Natural ability without dependable instruction
Trained	+2	Reliable professional or adventuring competence
Expert	+4	Exceptional ability recognized by capable peers
Master	+6	Rare command worthy of renown

A Skill cannot have an intermediate level or modifier: there is no Awareness +1, Combat +3, or Lore +5. Improving a Skill advances it to the next competency level and replaces its modifier with the one shown above. Some specialized tasks require at least Trained competency before they can reasonably be attempted.

Choosing the Attribute

Skills do not have permanently assigned Attributes. Choose the Attribute that best represents the approach taken. The player may suggest an approach, but the Narrator decides which combination applies. Some examples:

Athletics + Brawn to haul oneself onto a high parapet.
Athletics + Vigor to swim for hours through cold water.
Influence + Presence to win over a suspicious crowd.
Influence + Intellect to argue a point of law before a tribunal.
Technics + Intellect to diagnose an ancient mechanism.
Technics + Presence to coax cooperation from an ensouled bridge nursing an old grievance.

The Skill List

Skill	Scope
Athletics	Movement, strength, and endurance
Awareness	Noticing, searching, and recognizing disturbances
Combat	Armed and unarmed attacks, parrying, and trained fighting
Command	Leadership, intimidation, discipline, and coordinated action
Craft	Making and repairing ordinary comprehensible objects
Finesse	Balance, bodily control, escape, and delicate manipulation
Guile	Deception, disguise, misdirection, and feinting
Influence	Persuasion, negotiation, performance, and social inquiry
Insight	Reading people, motives, loyalties, and moods
Lore	Learned knowledge about peoples, histories, creatures, and phenomena
Medicine	Diagnosis, treatment, stabilization, and living bodies
Stealth	Concealment, silent movement, shadowing, and infiltration
Technics	Operating, diagnosing, coaxing, and restoring devices
Wayfaring	Travel, navigation, tracking, survival, mounts, and journeys

Athletics

Athletics covers climbing, jumping, swimming, lifting, running, and sustained physical exertion.

Common Attributes. Brawn for force or explosive movement; Vigor for endurance; Agility for a movement whose chief challenge is timing.

Common uses. Scaling a wall during pursuit, leaping a gap, swimming a violent current, forcing open a heavy obstruction, or enduring a long climb.

Limits. Routine movement requires no roll. Distance and speed are judged from the circumstances rather than separate tables of measurements.

Awareness

Awareness covers alertness, deliberate searches, and the recognition that something is absent, altered, concealed, or wrong.

Common Attributes. Spirit for immediate perception; Intellect for methodical examination; Vigor for maintaining vigilance over a long watch.

Common uses. Spotting an ambush, searching a chamber, hearing a change in a mechanism’s voice, finding tampering, or noticing that a familiar ritual has been performed incorrectly.

Limits. Do not roll to discover information the adventure requires the heroes to possess. Give them the essential clue; a successful roll may reveal it early, safely, or with additional context.

Combat

Combat covers deliberate fighting with weapons, unarmed attacks, parrying, and the practiced use of violence under pressure.

Common Attributes. Brawn for forceful melee; Agility for Finesse, ranged, or precision attacks.

Common uses. Striking with a weapon, firing a ranged weapon, wrestling an armed opponent, parrying, or judging position in a fight.

Limits. Its competency rating improves like any other Skill, using only the four competency levels given above.

Command

Command covers leadership, intimidation, discipline, morale, and the coordination of people under pressure.

Common Attributes. Presence for authority; Intellect for organization; Spirit for judgment; Brawn for an immediately threatening physical presence.

Common uses. Rallying frightened companions, giving clear orders during disaster, cowing an uncertain opponent, organizing an evacuation, or restoring order among competing retainers.

Limits. Command can secure immediate compliance without producing loyalty. Coercion creates consequences even when the roll succeeds.

Craft

Craft covers making, repairing, and evaluating ordinary objects produced by comprehensible means.

Common Attributes. Intellect for design; Agility for fine work; Brawn for heavy work; Spirit for traditional methods learned through practice.

Common uses. Repairing clothing or armor, shaping wood or metal, preparing pigments, evaluating workmanship, improvising a useful tool, or supervising ordinary construction.

Limits. Training and established history determine which crafts the hero actually knows. Craft never permits the construction of an artifact.

Finesse

Finesse covers balance, tumbling, escaping restraints, sleight of hand, and other acts of precise bodily or manual control.

Common Attributes. Agility for speed and precision; Intellect for intricate manipulation; Brawn when escape depends upon leverage.

Common uses. Crossing unstable footing, slipping bonds, concealing a small object, moving through a press of bodies, or performing a delicate manual trick.

Guile

Guile covers lies, disguise, misdirection, false identities, concealed intentions, and combat feints.

Common Attributes. Presence for performance; Intellect for constructing a deception; Agility for a deception dependent on timing or physical trickery.

Common uses. Passing under a false name, disguising one’s purpose, planting a misleading clue, creating a diversion, or drawing an opponent into a mistaken response.

Influence

Influence covers persuasion, negotiation, diplomacy, performance, and learning what people know by speaking with them.

Common Attributes. Presence for personal force; Intellect for argument; Spirit for patient mediation; Brawn only where physical stature genuinely matters.

Common uses. Changing an attitude, negotiating passage, calming an angry crowd, collecting rumors, performing before an audience, or persuading a proud machine that cooperation preserves its dignity.

Limits. Influence cannot compel an impossible betrayal of nature, loyalty, or immediate self-preservation. Success changes the conversation; it does not remove another character’s agency.

Insight

Insight covers the reading of people and other intelligences: motives, moods, loyalties, hesitation, and deception.

Common Attributes. Spirit for intuition; Intellect for analysis; Presence for understanding through direct engagement.

Common uses. Sensing concealed hostility, recognizing divided loyalty, judging whether a promise is sincere, reading a room, or understanding the emotional condition of an ensouled artifact.

Limits. Insight reveals impressions and inconsistencies, not a transcript of another being’s thoughts.

Lore

Lore covers formal learning, remembered tradition, scholarship, and systematic knowledge. Training represents a broad education; a stated field establishes deeper expertise.

Common Attributes. Intellect for recall and analysis; Spirit for tradition and interpretation; Presence for knowledge preserved through recitation and social memory.

Common uses. Identifying a polity’s customs, recalling an old war, understanding phasmic theory, recognizing a creature, interpreting Monitor doctrine, or comparing contradictory accounts.

Limits. Lore does not require purchasing every subject separately. When highly specialized knowledge matters, consider the hero’s Path, lineage, and established history.

Medicine

Medicine covers diagnosis, stabilization, treatment, surgery, and practical knowledge of living bodies.

Common Attributes. Intellect for diagnosis and procedure; Spirit for observation and care; Agility for delicate treatment.

Common uses. Stabilizing the dying, treating injury or disease, recognizing poison, determining a cause of death, or understanding an unfamiliar body well enough to provide aid.

Limits. Advanced treatment requires training and appropriate facilities. Medicine does not reproduce the effects of Phasmic Formulae.

Stealth

Stealth covers concealment, silent movement, tailing another person, and entering or leaving a place without notice.

Common Attributes. Agility for movement; Intellect for planning an approach; Spirit for patient concealment.

Common uses. Passing a sentry, hiding in a crowded court, shadowing a traveler, masking signs of passage, or choosing an unseen route.

Limits. A character cannot become unseen merely by making a roll. The fiction must provide darkness, distraction, concealment, confusion, or some other opportunity.

Technics

Technics covers the operation, diagnosis, coaxing, and restoration of devices whose workings can be approached through inherited practice.

Common Attributes. Intellect for diagnosis; Spirit for recognizing behavior and precedent; Presence for negotiating with an intelligent or ensouled device; Agility for careful intervention.

Common uses. Operating unfamiliar machinery, identifying a malfunction, following an ancient maintenance rite, bypassing a mechanism, awakening a dormant device, or persuading an artifact to resume an old duty.

Limits. Technics cannot create artifacts. At most, a practitioner convinces surviving technology to continue working, restores a function its makers intended, or finds a new use the device itself can sustain.

Wayfaring

Wayfaring covers journeys through unfamiliar places: navigation, tracking, finding shelter and provisions, handling mounts, and recognizing travel hazards.

Common Attributes. Spirit for direction and signs; Intellect for planning; Vigor for hard travel; Agility for controlling a mount or conveyance in danger.

Common uses. Finding a route across broken country, following a trail, preparing a safe camp, predicting dangerous weather, calming a mount, or guiding a company through a strange city.

Limits. Wayfaring does not turn travel into a sequence of compulsory rolls. Roll when the journey presents a meaningful danger, decision, or cost.

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