Skills
Below is the list of skills. Pick your favorite. Most of the skills are explained at https://fate-srd.com/fate-core/skills But the ones in Italics are special to this game only and are explained more below.
| Athletics | Empathy | Pilot |
| Burglary | Influence | Science |
| Combat | Nature | Stealth |
| Culture | Notice | Tech |
| Deceive | Physique | Will |
The Combat skill is a combination of the normal Fate skills Fight and Shoot.
The Influence skill is a combination of the normal Fate skills Rapport and Provoke
The Pilot skill covers both ground and air vehicles and operates just like the Fate skill Drive
The Culture, Nature, and Science skills replace Investigate and Lore, and explained more below.
New Skills Explained
Culture
The culture skill represents an understanding of Earth Culture and the ability to teach and help enforce it. This might be laws, or languages, or how cultural norms are established on Earth. As Earth is alone in the universe, it was not anticipated that the culture skill can be used to understand alien cultures, but the background can lend itself that way. Who knew that a deeper understanding of your own society, art, language, and philosophy could help you understand others?
Actions:
Overcome: Use Culture to deduce a society’s motives or to understand their symbols and languages. Why did they construct this fortress? What does this inscription say? Why was this statue important?
Create an Advantage: You can create aspects to represent the benefits of your investigation into specific facets of an alien society. If you have Studied Their Myths, it might be easier for you to interpret some of their murals later. If you construct a Timeline of Their History, you might be able to explain what event left a crater in their largest city.
Attack: You don’t attack with Culture.
Defend: You don’t defend with Culture.
Nature
The Nature skill encompasses your knowledge of the natural world, including climate, biology, and geology. This is the skill of doctors and medical technicians. This skill helps with overcoming obstacles and creating advantages in dealing with the natural world. Actions:
Overcome: Use Nature to produce important environmental information, such as predicting the path of a storm, tracking a creature through the wilderness, or determining whether an alien plant is poisonous.
Create an Advantage: This skill allows you to manipulate natural environments to your benefit. You could harvest vegetation to prepare a Potent Natural Remedy, or construct a Camouflaged Trap to capture a native creature.
Attack: You don’t attack with Nature.
Defend: The GM may allow you to use this skill to defend against environmental attacks, such as heat exposure or frostbite.
Science
The Science skill measures your knowledge of physics, atomic principles, and inorganic chemistry. The actions are:
Overcome: You may use Science to determine a scientific fact, such as the minimum safe distance a ship must maintain from a black hole, or the chemical composition of a fluid found in a sealed vat.
Create an Advantage: Some of the information you learn using Science might help you solve other problems. You might find the Fracture Point that lets you split an asteroid in half. It might be easier to penetrate a force field after you’ve Measured Its Energy Frequency.
Attack: You don’t normally attack with Science, though the GM may permit it if you’re employing advanced scientific theories to defeat a foe.
Defend: You don’t defend with Science.
Tech
The Crafts skill is now Tech, which allows you to work with both human and alien machines, including computers. Actions are:
Overcome: With Tech, you can build, repair, or alter machinery, or analyze the function of existing machinery. Tech also helps you to bypass computer security systems.
Create an Advantage: You could build a Flare Bomb to blind a hostile creature, or design a Software Virus to cripple a spaceship’s navigation systems. You might find that a machine has Unreliable Servo Motors or is Rigged to Explode.
Attack: If you have access to a computer through its physical controls or a remote connection, you can attack it using Tech. This is a mental conflict, and the computer defends with its Tech. Similarly, you can use Tech to attack the computer systems within a robot or vehicle.
Defend: While you have access to a computer, you can use Tech to defend it from software attacks.
Skill Distribution
For Session 0, you might only know your best skill. As part of Session 0, you'll create your skill pyramid. That's explained below
Pick ten skills. Give them the following scores
- One Great (+4) skill
- Two Good (+3) skills
- Three Fair (+2) skills
- Four Average (+1) skills
Skill "Packs"
These are examples of skills that you might have for a given focus. If you picked three, and one from another pack, you would have close to the ten skills you need.
- Scientist: Culture, Science, Tech
- Colonist: Athletics, Pilot, Nature
- Field Scientist: Physique, Tech, Science
- Negotiator: Empathy, Influence, Will
- Infiltration: Burglary, Deceive, Stealth
- Security: Combat, Notice, Physique