Essence Skills
Essence
Bravery
This skill may be known by many names: cool, courage, guts. What it boils down to is one’s ability to face the unknown in the blackness of space and not back down. Wherever you go, you were likely not meant to be there. You have to surround yourself with a spaceship to survive the harshness of space that got you to some forsaken rock where man has never set foot. Taking that step off the dropship—and facing whatever horrors may be waiting—takes bravery. As your character travels the stars, he gets “hardened.” Hardness is added to bravery checks, which means that which did not kill you has made you stronger. Fear can be a powerful survival mechanism, though, and tales abound of battle-weary marines or grizzled astronauts looking some cosmic terror square in the eye and shrugging before squaring off for their last match when flight might have saved their hides…
Psionic Focus (Telepathy, Telekinesis, Clairvoyance, Self-Awareness)
To start the game with or learn a psionic focus, the Hero must be a psionic adept or latent (see chapter 2: Building a Hero for more information on this). Each point in a psionic focus opens up a new level of talent(s) in the focus. These points in each level are purchased or learned like skills. Telepathy deals with getting into the heads of others. Telekinesis allows the adept to move matter and create psionic shields. Clairvoyants learn several kinds of extrasensory perception, while masters of self-awareness can condition their minds and bodies to an incredible degree. Only characters who started as Adepts can learn the self-awareness focus. Each Focus has more than 5 levels (remember that you can only start the game with a max of 5 points in any skill), so the higher levels of any focus must be learned with experience. See Chapter XX: Psionics for a complete description of the psionic skill trees and rules governing its use.
