Cross-Skills and Specialisation Guide

This is a companion guide to extend the Skills Guide.

In skills and learning and the application of knowledge and abilities, there are areas of expertise that cross over with each other to create something new or more specialised. Enter Cross-Skills and Specialisation.

Cross Skills do not sit on the same sliding number scale that ordinary Skills do. They are a binary check-box, in that you have the cross-skill or specialisation, or do not. These do not supplant existing skills, they attach to them as bullet points.

Since Cross Skills sit on a large axis, we'll break them down by area.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of Cross Skills.

Originally a way of breaking rocks apart for mining with powered tools. It takes a certain sort of maniac to put an explosive at the end of a hammer and bring it to a fight, but to everyone’s shock – you’ve mastered it.

You can safely handle weapons that create explosions in melee, in practice this means not having to think too hard about your explosives splashing back on you. Items include blast-picks, rocket-hammers, pile bunkers, and rocket punches.

With some determination and patience, you can safely handle archaic firearms that use black powder and shot. Such weapons are considered museum pieces in cosmopolitan space, but can be spotted in pre-industrial societies.

No misfires or powder fouling when handling black-powder firearms such as duelling pistols, pepperboxes, blunderbusses, and muskets. This skill is very helpful for people operating across different technology periods or pre-industrial gunmen.

Remembering the basics of close quarters combat, you have little trouble handling a pistol and a knife in tandem in a gunfight.

Your character can handle one-handed firearm (usually a pistol) and engage in hand-to-hand combat with a bare fist or knife without penalty. Wielding a one-handed firearm does not impede your character's ability to grab targets with both hands.

With sword in hand and thrusters behind you, you can wield swords and other medieval weapons in tandem with powered armour, fulfilling at least two childhood fantasies at once.

While wearing powered armour, you are not considered encumbered for the purposes of melee weapon combat. You can lean into your armour's strength

When you see an oversized sword or similar, you are simply drawn to it - just as you are oversized. The fact you swing it so easily is terrifying.

You can wield oversized melee weapons without penalties to your mobility. Such weapons include Wyrm Slayers, Dire Pikes, the Flamberge, Tower Shields, and Nebula Mauls. You will need two hands to wield them effectively, and a lot of core strength and momentum to get the most out of them.

You know how to build firearms out of wood, plastic, metal, and bullets. Sometimes, you wonder why stop there when you can push into new, dangerous designs?

The cumulation of practices necessary for safely creating reusable firearms and ammunition. With other specialisations and cross skills, branch out into different specialisations.

You can build the individual limbs and components that assemble to become a suit of powered armour in the relative comfort of your own workshop and armour hoist.

Build limbs and body parts for powered armour suits. Specialisations and cross-skills in various powered armour related skills will broaden your machining patterns. Research, development, and trial is necessary to transgress from the readily available patterns.

By subtracting from a block of fixed metal with a rotating element or vice versa, you can create components and complex mechanisms from the comfort of your abode.

Broadens recipes available with the construction of fine metal components, circuitry and complex mechanical objects like engines. Can set up and later automate a machining bench which includes a laser-guided rotating element and a lathe.

The difference between cutting corners on maintenance and keeping your shortcuts cost effective is experience, trial, and error. Your armour is no different.

You can cut the costs repairing damaged components on powered armour you own down to 80% of their normal costs in fuel, panel repair/replacement and salvage.

For all this new-fangled technology, it’s going to break and misbehave eventually. Thankfully you know how to diagnose, repair, and solve these problems.

When dealing with hardware or software trouble on a personal scale, you can easily fix common problems without issue. In an organisational context when leading a team, it takes half the time and resources to diagnose and repair/remediate systems.

You’re a veritable handy-person, effortlessly dealing with the little problems around the house and working space.

Cuts down on time and resources needed to solve structure-related Home, Base, or Workplace problems, and helps with building times too. Minor problems don’t appear at all.

You know how to develop the land and water for the mass cultivation of animal and vegetable products. This is no ordinary garden patch or bathtub pond operation!

Allows for creation and management of Farms/Farming and the use of Aquaculture.

You can utilise biological components like artificial brains, neuron soup, picora and structol into information processes.

Allows for the usage of organic components (whether it’s standalone organs or appropriated people) when building a network.

Ciphers, hashes, codes, and handshakes. All so you can talk without being perceived.

A prerequisite for creating security related software and hardware that'll stand up to hacking attacks. People in control of an organisation's technology with this cross-skill can take an active role in counter-attacking a hack.

Brawling is all well and fun, but you’ve decided to slow down, meditate, and study the ebb and flow of hand-to-hand combat.

Can study hand to hand combat as a science, and deconstruct a target's anticipated movements with observation.

Anything that does not arise from nature is a product of Design. Therefore, you sought to master the art of design.

Streamlines how long it takes for new crafts, engineering, and technology projects to go from start to finish.

While every session of cooking is its own experiment, you’ve remembered to write down your best recipes so as to be repeatable.

When cooking regularly (1/day) for a week, you can have a jolt of inspiration and create a new dish, based off something you've made before with an additional twist.

You’ve been around Weirds for so long that you’ve become relaxed around their presence, even the monstrous ones. In turn, this makes them relaxed around you. It's great to make weird friends.

You do not have to take fear or etiquette checks around non-hostile Weirds. For bound weirds, you can be casually conversational without violating a contract by accident.

You are skilled at searching areas for clues, signs of secret doors, hidden traps and other interesting details. If not skilled, you are persistent at least.

You can automatically uncover basic details relating to an investigation you're undertaking, or safely rule out areas irrelevant to it.

You can recognise the signs and symbols of local occult outfits. They can be everywhere and nowhere, all at once if you know how to look…

With some experience and common ground or cross-pollination between cults, you can recognise the signs and traces of cults operating in the area passively.

You realised the best way not to be detected or intruded on mentally is to simply not be there either.

You can avoid detection and coercion mentally by pretending not to have a mind or an identity that someone can detect and therefore grab onto.

You can keep an atlas of parcels of the Weald that you can always return to with relative safety and ease.

You do not run the risk of losing your hermetic bearings when travelling through the Weald and becoming discombobulated in space-time.

Share your hallucinations with the world! Originally a therapy technique or social ritual developed among magic-users and psionics, Mushing is the recreational sharing of intense hallucinations from a professional hallucinator.

You can Mush! People you have connected to telepathically can have intense images and sensations placed in their psyche, distracting and disarming them.

When you’re out in the wilderness, you don’t have the luxury of fresh meat wrapped in plastic. Fortunately, you’ve mastered the art of grabbing the freshest meat in the world, and fast.

You can process/butcher animals you have caught or hunted out in the wilderness without the appropriate tools.

Lift! Push! Crunch that stomach! Feel the burn! Focus your energy…! Hype aside, you're capable of whipping people into shape.

Characters can train others in fitness and make a decent income doing so. The exercises they run through can target cardio or muscle, or dip between the two for a targeted workout.

With so many megastructures and spacecraft just drifting through space and waiting to be picked, there’s not enough time in the world to just take it all apart at your leisure…

Salvage space wrecks more efficiently and with less fuss - basic complications are no big deal. Find rare/expensive loot and intact spacecraft components more often.

This isn’t about taking a deep breath. This is about holding onto your gut and drifting through space responsibly.

You are acclimatised to moving in Zero G and keeping your balance and orientation stable according to visual landmarks. If knocked off-kilter, it doesn’t take you long to re-anchor.

You move cat-like, scaling and sauntering the world around you with aplomb. You’re difficult to sneak up on too.

Move swiftly across uneven and obstacle-heavy terrain. Vault fences, leap between rooftops, shimmy and slide, run through traffic, and make it look effortless.

Whether you’re lining your shot up or casting a line, you can find fresh meat from the wilderness.

Your character can spend a day hunting, trapping, or fishing for meat, leather, and other animal products. With the right combination of other culinary and survival skills, they can live off the land.

Besides reassuring your patient and being courteous to them, you’re able to able to break bad news as softly as possible, and keep a straight face when confronted with death or gore in a medical context.

You can keep an unflappable composure around medical events or topics with patients that can cause fear or challenge etiquette.

With telepathy a going thing, you decided to 'talk' to animals to amuse yourself and before long, you found something who could answer back. That got strange real fast.

You can talk to animals with your mind. Domesticated animals are the most social and organised to speak to, and wild animals can glean information from a couple of days ago with a food bribe.

Conjure forth the untrue to distort the world and mislead its thousands of watching eyes.

You can conjure programmed illusions that stimulate all of the basic senses, allowing it to stand up to prolonged mundane scrutiny.

You can stage a convincing fight with trained actors, without risking life or limb. The audience demands fake blood.

You can produce violent media without risking injury to your actors. In more practical terms outside of media production, people who 'know the steps' and rehearse together coordinate better when moving as a group.

You enjoy eating out and learning more about the world. You are what you eat, and if you eat everything…

You are adept at connecting with cultures and people through food and dining. Whether you shoot for street food or fine dining is up to you though.

You passed a Bar for Aleph Null’s set of laws and codes (and there's a lot of them), and got photographed with a local judge. Congratulations!

Depending on your jurisdiction and area, you can operate as a legal representative on behalf of an organisation.

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