Skill Specialisation

One of the ways you can distinguish your character is by specialising a skill. This will allow the skill to do something it couldn't before, with some sort of drawback. On balance this will usually be a small upgrade.

If someone frequently uses a particular skill in play, they can receive an opportunity to upgrade it in the form of an Incipience card. Doing experiments with a skill during interactives especially increases the chances of this. An Incipience will be offered by refs if we think your character has met the conditions, and you can use a minor downtime action to ask if you qualify for one. The card will specify what’s needed to upgrade it, which will have either a roleplaying challenge OR a material cost including rares, either of which will fulfill it.

For example, a player is using the Hearts and Minds skill extensively, and clearly considers it a big part of their play, so they are offered an Incipience that will allow them to improve it.

The Incipience has a condition of either:

• Defuse a conflict between two groups by using Hearts and Minds on both in the same encounter.
• Find a rare pharmaceutical with high resonance with Intuition and perform an experiment with it with the assistance of a Pharmacist.

It has the effect of 1/encounter when you perform the Hearts and Minds you can call a MASS version of the effect. You cannot use Hearts and Minds to cause “negative” emotion effects such as Anger or Fear.

It’s very rare for someone to be struck with such inspiration multiple times. Completing an Incipience will likely mean not getting another for some time - it is very unlikely to complete more than one per term. You can decline an Incipience or return it uncompleted with no penalty; in this case you may be struck by a different Incipience later.