The Analyst
When confronted with the confusion and chaos of the universe, you find solace in numbers. There isn’t a riddle you can’t solve with the correct equations or computer simulations.
Method: You gather data about your research subject and apply thorough mathematical analysis.
Mishaps: Your immersion in the world of pure data causes you to overlook an important practical detail. This mistake causes something unexpected and unfortunate to happen as soon as someone acts on the information you provided.
Compel: You pay more attention to your equations than to what’s happening around you, so you might not notice that there’s an urgent signal coming in on your wristcomp, or that something with huge fangs is looming over your shoulder.
The Empath
You are a member of the tiny fraction of the human population able to benefit from twenty-fourth-century techniques used to develop extrasensory perception. You can, sometimes, if you maintain perfect concentration, detect mental energies from minds other than your own. You experience these foreign thoughts as if they had originated in your own mind, which can be enlightening as well as disturbing. Echoes of mental energy may remain in a location for millions or billions of years, which allows you to perceive the thoughts of the people who once lived on the deserted planets you explore. While Researching, you are performing a series of meditation sessions to draw ambient psychic energy into your mind.
Method: You open your mind to lingering memories and emotions in your environment. Use your Empathy skill to determine the outcome.
Mishaps: The memories you are channeling overwhelm you. A minor mishap may cause you to suffer only momentary delusions or hallucinations. If you suffer a major mishap, an alien memory or personality becomes fixed in your mind, severely affecting your behavior.
Compel: Even when you are not researching, you may involuntarily receive memories or emotions that drive you to seemingly irrational behavior.
The Experimenter
You like to see how things work up close. Whether it’s a mysterious machine or a bizarre life form, you can understand it more easily when you watch it respond to your presence and your actions.
Method: You operate, manipulate, disassemble, or otherwise interact with a research subject.
Mishap: Your experiment has catastrophic results.
Compel: You meddle with something any sane person would leave undisturbed.
The Explorer
Venturing into the unknown awakens your senses and your scientific instincts. You’re never more alive than when you’ve set foot in a cave or a catacomb no human being has ever seen.
Method: You enter and study a new location before the rest of your team.
Mishap: You encounter danger in the area you’re exploring.
Compel: If there’s an ominous tunnel labeled with warnings in the local language, you need to find out what’s at the end of it. If there’s a deep, dark pit with the sound of something enormous stirring at the bottom of it, you need to abseil into it.
The Sleuth
In your experience, even the most brilliant minds in the galaxy can overlook what’s right in front of them. By gathering the right facts from the right people and applying a little deductive reasoning, you can produce the answers that straightforward scientific procedure can’t. While you are Researching, you are not performing scientific experiments. Rather, you’re considering what you’ve been told and comparing it to everything else you’ve seen and learned recently.
Method: You interview others and use their opinions and testimony to find the truth. You might collect theories from your teammates, or rumors from colonists, or incoherent ravings from the unfortunate scientist who was marooned on this planet ten years ago.
Mishap: You learn the truth the hard way, through ambush or accident or some similar consequence of your incessant snooping.
Compel: You ask questions about a topic you ought to avoid, and you suffer the consequences of prying into someone’s affairs.
The Visionary
You understand that true scientific progress involves limitless speculation, leaps of intuition, and, sometimes, personal risk. To your peers, your theories may seem outlandish, and your methods alarming, but no one can deny that you get results.
Method: You provide an entertaining, scientific-sounding explanation for the outlandish device or experiment you’re constructing to perform your research.
Mishap: Your defiance of the commonly accepted laws of physics causes disastrous side effects.
Compel: You can’t pass up an opportunity to venture beyond the limits of known science, even if you can’t control or predict the results.
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