Innate Abilities: Senses, Movements and Special Abilities

The following are common Senses, Movement types and Special Abilities. This list is by no means exhaustive.

Senses

• Normal: the normal senses that humans have; vision, smell, taste, touch, and hearing.

• Blind-Sight: you have the ability to sense your surroundings, even when you cannot see; this might be a result of the heightening of your other sense, it might be a mechanism like a bat’s sonar, or it might be a magical ability. Even in conditions of total darkness, you can perceive your environment, including any object larger than a human fist, out to a distance of 30m. You cannot see color, markings or fine detail (and so, for example, you could detect the presence of a page, but not perceive anything written on it in ink). Perception tests made with Blind-Sight suffer a -20 penalty.

• Echo Sight: you can use a series of short high-pitched sounds to perceive your surroundings.

  • Echo sight has a relatively short range; it only works out to a distance of 30m in air.
    • It carries further through denser mediums, like water or solid objects.
  • Echo sight can perceive any solid object down to the size of an insect.
  • Some items are more difficult to detect with echo-sight; solid, hard objects are easy to detect, for example, but small, rounded, or "muffled" objects are harder to detect.
  • Echo sight cannot be used to perceive markings, coloration or texture.
  • Using echo-sight requires you to emit sounds, which anyone with acute hearing (or echo-sight) can detect; you can choose not to emit these sounds, in which case echo-site functions like blind-sight.

• Infra-red: you can see in infra-red.

  • This has several advantages:
    • you have a limited ability to see at night,
    • you can easily pick out objects at a very different temperature than their environment (like very hot objects in a cold room, or very cold objects in a hot room), and
    • you can very clearly see changes in blood-flow and skin temperature, which makes it easy to pick up on emotional queues that are invisible to many other races (which is represented as a +20 to Read checks against warm-blooded races).
  • However, this does have some drawbacks:
    • The resolution of infrared vision is poor, making it impossible to pick out fine detail.
    • Some materials (like glass) that are transparent in visible light are opaque in infrared, while some other materials that are opaque in visible light are transparent in infrared.

• Life-Sense: the creature can perceive the muscle impulses that cause living creatures to move.

  • This sense has a short range — only a few strides (around 3m).

• Low-Light: creature can see clearly in low-light conditions (but not total darkness).

  • Essentially, this negates penalties for low light levels (like late evening), and reduces for penalties for near-darkness (like a moon-lit night).

• Mage-Sight: you can perceive magical energy.

  • This works much like normal vision, where magic appear much like a luminous substance.
    • The more magic is being gathered, the more obvious it is; a power might be as visible to someone with mage-sight as a camp-fire is to everyone else, while larger, more powerful spells might be shine like brilliant signal-fires, or stir up currents of magic that reach of hundreds of paces (making them obvious even at great distance).
    • But note that many inert substances are opaque to mage-sight, much like they are to visible light — that is, essentially, mage sight can't see through brick walls.
  • This has many effects:
    • A character with Mage Sight can clearly see powers, spells, and other magical effects.
    • This allows them to analyse a magical effect simply by examining it; this is a 10 minutes Task Action and requires a successful Spellcraft or Knowledge: Magic check.
    • Creatures with the supernatural have incorporated magical energy into their life-processes; this magical energy can be perceived with Mage Sight, making it obvious that those creatures are partly magical.
    • Spirits (creatures with the Spirit tag) are beings of magic, and thus are plainly evident when viewed with Mage Sight. However, their nature may appear strange, chaotic, or confusing — powerful spirits especially may be entirely overwhelming or incomprehensible.
  • Some rare creatures and powers can partially mask their magical nature; in these cases, an opposed test is required to detect the creature or power's magical nature (the details of this test will be specified by the creature or power's description).

• Motion: you have a particularly good sense for balance and motion.

  • This provides you with a +10 bonus to many Athletics checks, and may be useful in other circumstances as well.
  • This sense is very common in races with whiskers.

• Scent: you have an extremely keen sense of smell.

  • This allows you to reliably detect many creatures despite their best efforts at stealth, and to identify many substances by smell alone.
  • However, it does have some drawbacks: scent is not precise as to location, and it would be difficult or (practically) impossible to place an attack (for example) at range by scent alone.
  • Also, powerful odors may overwhelm a character with scent; in the most harmless case, this might make it difficult to detect other scents, but in the worst case, it might stun, disorient, or even incapacitate the character (like a blinding flash or deafening boom might incapacitate any other character).
  • Finally, particularly clever hunters may deliberately mask their scent.

• Vibration: when in contact with a solid object, you can sense vibrations propagating through it.

  • This allows you to sense approaching footfalls through the ground, for example.

Movement

Creatures can have several different movement modes. Most movement modes list a base and full movement rates; these correspond to how far a character can move during a turn, and are mainly used in Combat (see Combat). Some movement modes also list a maximum speed; this is the is the maximum speed (normally) possible using that movement mode. Reaching maximum speed usually requires more than one turn; characters attempting to reach their maximum speed can usually increase their current speed by their Full rate each turn. (Of course, favorable conditions — such as rolling down hill, being in a current or having a tailwind — can help.) So, for example, a character with Walking 5/15/25 as their movement has a base rate of 5, a full rate of 15, and a maximum of 25; it'll take them two turns to reach their maximum

Each movement mode has a linked movement skill; checks related to that movement are made using that movement skill. For the vast majority of movement modes, the linked movement skill is Athletics; some exotic movement modes use the Exotic Movement skill, while checks related to mounted movement use the Ride skill.

Checks aren't required for most basic uses of a movement modes; a character that with a Fly movement mode can take off, fly around and land without requiring a check. Normally, checks are only called for when a character is

• attempting a difficult maneuvers (such as running across a slick surface), or
• when one character is chasing another character.

Movement Modes

• Burrowing: you can burrow through the ground. You can choose whether or not to leave a tunnel behind you. Some soil, such as hard or rocky soil, cannot be burrowed through. If you have Burrowing as a movement mode, you can be assumed to breath while burrowing.
• Foot: bipedal, walking movement.
• Climbing: you can climb as easily as humans can walk. Note that some creatures can’t climb some surfaces (a creature that climbs with claws, like a cat, cannot climb on glass or metal, for example).
• Flying: you can fly.
• Leaping: you move in a series of hops, like a kangaroo or frog. Leaping movement is well suited to pouncing on opponents from a run, and is less hindered by broken or fractured ground; however, slow, precise or lateral movement is more difficult with leaping movement.
• Slither: you can slither along the ground. Slithering movement can be useful when one is attempting to keep low or move stealthily, and it can also be useful on slick or slippery surfaces (where the greater contact area improves grip).
• Swimming: you can swim as easily as humans can walk. If you have a Swim movement mode, you can be assumed to breath while underwater (if you need to breath).

Abilities

• Fast Healing: when you have Fast Healing k, you reduce your Damage by k each turn — normally healing by 20×k a minute. Every day, you may recover from one wound (what it might look like half-way through this process is best not thought about).
• Motion-Sensitive: your senses are particularly sensitive to motion. You receive a +10 bonus to Perception checks made against moving targets.

Sizes

• The affects of being a different size are generally not represented mechanically (i.e. there is no “size modifier table”).
• Being small or large might confer bonuses in some situations, such as making it easier (if small) or harder (if large) to use Stealth; these are at the GM’s discretion.
• See also Sizes in Combat.