Secondary Talents
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Talents are matters of innate aptitude, requiring no training to develop, and they improve primarily or exclusively through experience. Characters get better at them only by doing them regularly. It's possible to attempt actions related to Talents that a character doesn't possess. Everyone (or nearly everyone) possesses a rudimentary grasp of each Talent, even without the minimal competence required for one dot's worth.
Acting
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You are practiced at feigning emotions, beliefs or frames of mind. Even if you have never been on stage before, you could do an adequate job if you were ever thrust upon it. Howeve, simply because you have this Ability does not mean you use it unethically. Many honorable politicians have used it to lend power and depth to their speeches (notably Churchill and Roosevelt). You are able to feign tears, anger, friendliness and virtue.
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Artistic Expression
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You have the talent to produce works of art in various media. You can produce saleable works of two- or threedimensional art, and understand something of the technical aspects of paintings and sketches. You are able to sketch a reasonably accurate rendition of a place or person.
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Biorhythms
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You have the ability to make changes in your metabolism and other bodily functions. These alterations may consist of small tweaks to such aspects of your physiology as body temperature, or large-scale system shutdowns that allow you to survive catastrophic circumstances. While ursine Gurahl must take two dots in the Talent to reflect their basic bear heritage, human-born werebears may find this Ability incredibly useful in many circumstances. Advanced levels enable you to fine-tune your metabolism so that nearly every part of your body comes under conscious control. Practical applications include control of respiratory functions, pain management, fertility, and blood circulation.
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Blatancy
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You specialize in doing vulgar magick in plain sight and having Sleepers accept it. You may be a stage magician with a large following or a faith healer who prepares the faithful to accept miracles. Or you may just appear to be so weird and outlandish that compared to yourself, the things you do are mundane. This Talent can be combined with Manipulation to make Sleepers view vulgar magick as coincidental. Note that this Talent only works under the right circumstances; throwing fireballs down Main Street would be considered vulgar no matter what the cover might be.
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Carousing
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This is the ability to have a good time at a party or other social occasion, and to make sure others around you also have a good time. Normally, it involves a mixture of eating, drinking and good cheer. On a successful roll of Manipulation + Carousing, the character can make a lasting good impression on everyone around him; this can be helpful for trying to make friends, garner information or distract the attendees while a partner rifles the coat room. Vampire: Carousing also includes the ability to appear to eat and drink, normally, without actually doing so. Using this Ability, one of the Kindred could attend an opening-night cast party without arousing any suspicion. On a successful roll of Manipulation + Carousing, no one notices that the character neither eats nor drinks. The difficulty of the roll depends on the social event: three or less for a house party with a buffet, seven or more for a sitdown dinner. This Ability can also be used to determine how entertaining and popular the character is at a party or event.
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Diplomacy
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You have the ability to deal with people of all types and creeds. Even when handling touchy subjects, you are able to get results without ruffling too many feathers.
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Dreamcraft (talent)
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You are the master of your own dreams and visions. At lower levels, you can exercise a bit of dream recall and initiation; at greater levels, you can attempt to gain conscious awareness during a dream (Manipulation + Dreaming, difficulty 6), consciously control your own actions within the dream (difficulty 7), and even try to alter your surroundings (difficulty 8). Used during trances or meditations, this Talent can be a useful tool for puzzling through riddles, or understanding visions. A successful Wits + Dreamcraft roll might help you reduce the difficulty of Enigmas or Occult contest. Some magical traditions teach Dreamcraft techniques, and consider it an almost megical talent. Contemporary dream researchers and psychotherapists call this ability "lucid dreaming," and study it as if they could really learn something by quantifying dreams.
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Fast Draw
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This Skill allows you to ready a weapon almost instantly. You can draw a weapon and have it ready for use just as if it had been in your hand all along.
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Flight
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Alone among the Changing Breeds, Corax can fly. More than that, the wereravens love to fly, taking every opportunity to spread their wings and get some altitude. A Corax who doesn't excel at Flight is likely to take a lot of flak — of the verbal kind — from his cousins until he gets good at it. While all Corax have the ability to flyfrom Point A to Point B without crash-landing along the way, Flight demonstrates a wereraven's knack for serious aerial agility. Corax with Flight can navigate more accurately, squeeze through smaller spaces while airborne and perform more and more complicated acrobatic maneuvers. The talent also covers such related acts as pulling out of falls, landing on precarious surfaces, and picking things up without landing first.
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Fortune-telling
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You may or may not have the gift to tell accurate fortunes, but you can make people believe you do. Changeling: While this Talent confers no magic in and of itself, it may add to your successes. For each 2 successes, reduce the difficulty of the Soothsay cantrip by 1. Mage/Sorcerer/Psychic: While this Talent confers no magick in and of itself, it may add to your successes. For each 2 successes, reduce the difficutly of divination magick by 1.
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Grace
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This is the ability to function "smoothly" in a social setting. Gossiping, cutting deals, making a good first impression on a visiting dignitary, and handling yourself in a salon of elders are all aspects of Grace. Graceless characters may be boorish, introverted or under-socialized. Those with higher Grace get along with people in any crowd and often have many contacts.
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Guile
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One with the Guile talent has a knack for cunning, craftiness, and artful duplicity. Acting like you have a job on Wall Street when you're actually unemployed would take a lot of guile. While it generally has a negative connotation, people who have guile are also thought of as being wily, clever, and shrewd. Those who are free of guile are pure and upstanding.
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Haggling
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You are skilled at bargaining and can reduce another’s price, or get some other concession, under most circumstances.
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Helldiving
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Helldivers Helldive. This is practical knowledge of the Labryinth's ways. Veterans learn to recognize on a subconscious level when they are approaching a dead end, what sorts of formations are most likely to conceal ambushes, how to distinguish dangerous Plasmics from harmless ones and so on. On the first dot's worth of Helldiving can be acquired through instruction. Further dots must be earned through experience.
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Homiletics
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You can give persuasive homilies, and inspirational sermons. You manage to turn almost any daily event into a life-enriching experience with many lessons to learn. This can be used from the pulpit, a street corner, or even the local bar.
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Instruction
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You have a knack for imparting information and skills to others. You can explain things and demonstrate techniques in such a way that anyone who listens to you can easily learn. You can teach any of your Skills or Knowledges to another character, but you can never raise a student’s score above your own. See +rules Instruction for mechanics on how this works to teach abilities to other PC for an XP discount.
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Interrogation
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We want information... and you know how to get it. Your methods range from fast talk to threats and psychological warfare. In game terms, you roll your Manipulation + Interrogation to break a subject. Some methods work better than others with certain subjects, so define what you're doing and how before making the roll. The difficulty is usually equal to the subject's current Willpower rating, although subtle methods (simply talking rings around your subject until he accidentally lets the information drop) may require a simple difficulty 7 roll. Why break bones if you don't have to? (For raw force techniques, see "Torture.")
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Intrigue
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You know the finer points of plotting and deal-making in the halls of power. You understand the practical use of power (in sometimes threatening but always nonconfrontational ways) to achieve your own ends. This Talent also allows you to glean important facts about others in your social circle, and to separate truth from endless amounts of false and useless gossip.
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Intuition
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Unquantifiable and indefinable, Intuition is the quality that lets some individuals sort clues from a sea of flase information and feel with perfect clarity when something is right. It covers a wide array of minor yet critical tasks, from sensing when someone's lying to you to realizing that your opponent is bluffing his way through his hand to putting clues together when the sum of the parts doesn't quite equal the whole. It is a seixth sense, gut feelings, and hunches.
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Juggling
Note: Juggling is listed in some books as a specialty for Athletics and Acrobatics. COH has it in the database as a full secondary talent. Book references being used are for the Hobby Talent stat. References: | ||||||||||||
Lucid Dreaming
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Dreams are something that happen to most people, and few are lucky to even remember. You have some degree of control over what happens and what it is about in your dreams. Achieving insight into your own subconscious and gaining many details for stories. Dreams gain special meaning and power within the Maya Realms, this talent is useful for building status and reputation amongst the Oneira lords and dream-spirits, and weaving new dreams and realities to populate the dream world. Without magic that lets you explore the Dream Realms, you will never know whether your dreams were merely self-restricted hallucination or epic fantasies envied by the mightiest of Oneira. At lower levels, you have some control of dream recall and initiation. At greater skill levels, you can attempt to gain conscious awareness during any of your dreams with a roll of Perception + Lucid Dreaming vs 9. Success allows you to consciously control your own actions; you can even try to manipulat your immediate dream surrounds (difficulty 6+). This Talent can also be used while in trances or while meditating. It allows you to enter the borderlands between waking and dreaming, where reality and phantasm intermingle. This is a useful tool in puzzling through riddles which you're trying to solve, understanding visions, etc.
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Malkavian Time
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This Malkavian specific Trait represents a Lunatic's particular connection to her clan's shared sub-consciousness. It allows the Malkavian to "plug into" the floodwaters of the Madness Network and filter out messages, impulses, shared visions and knowledge of upcoming clan gatherings. The Storyteller is usually the one making any Malkavian Time rolls, at least with regards to clan gatherings. The Storyteller rolls the character's Wits + Malkavian Time in secret, usually about a week before a significant gathering.
of the meeting's purpose. Five successes give the Malkavian warning a week early, and a very clear vision of the meeting's focus.
It's theoretically possible to actually, consciously send messages along the Network, but that doesn't mean that the Network is any sort of replacement (or even poor substitute) for a cell phone. For the most part, "sent" messages that manage to make it farther than a few feet are unconscious screams that channel a Malkavian's extreme emotion or pain. For this reason, Malkavians with more than three dots in Malkavian Time can often hear a clanmate's death-scream, so long as it's in the same city. Despite the difficulty, it is possible to send deliberate, personalized messages from one person to the next along the Network, even without Dementation. It's tough as hell, but a Malkavian can always try. To make the attempt, the player rolls Wits + Malkavian Time vs 9. Success allows the Malkavian to transmit a message to one person within city limits (longer ranges are possible, but only at the Storyteller's discretion); the message can consist of up to two words per success. Note that a Malkavian needn't have any dots at all in Malkavian Time to receive those hideous little broadcasts along the clan's frayed neural network. In fact, it often drives newly Embraced clan members... well, madder than usual when the messages start filtering into their brains without any hint as to their origins.
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Masquerade
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Masquerade is the ability to falsely reproduce the frailites and subtle clues of mortality: breaking, a pulse, flushed skin, sneezing, mortal reflexes, etc. Masquerade may be rolled with a Social Attribute to determine how well the vampire fools the mortals around him. Any Vampire can pretend to breathe, but not every vampire can do it well.
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Might
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Might is meant for moving mass with muscle. You haver trained as a body builder and are in a state of advanced buffitude. Or you have do so much manual labor that muscle has developed naturally. This Talent will not improve your damage rolls, or Brawl or Melee attacks, or really any good in combat unless you are lifting something heavy or trying to break something. Might can be used to increase Strength when used for Encumbrance, Jumping, Lifting/Breaking, Opening/Closing, or Throwing rules. In that case, you can add dots of Might to Strength (and maybe even your Strength + Athletic pool when approved by the ST), but only when performing such static feats of brawn. You cannot have more dots in Might than you have dots in Strength.
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Mimicry
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You have a very versatile voice, and can imitate accents, people and sometimes other sounds.
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Negotiation
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You know the art of the deal. Whether you're fixing a sticky labor dispute, striking a pact with a vampire or convincing some blue-painted retropagan to join the 21st century, you can get what you want while making your "partners" feel as though they've gotten the best of you. There's more to a good deal than just making an offer: You know how to approach a "partner," how to appeal to her wants or needs, how to play up to her vanity without coming off like a sap and when and how to put the screws on. If you're brokering a deal for other parties, you understand how to make them both happy while getting what you want. That, ultimately, is the bottom line.
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Newspeak
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WW4014 Guide to the Technocracy 145+ A new age demands new words. You specialize in coining them. Hyphens do not exist in youor world; you spread disinformatin, deimprotantize malefactors, create credibility gaps and declare coprosperity. When the need arises, you specialize in B-52ing buzwords and positroning sundbites for media conspicuscomp. Confusing! Not as cnofusing as you can be once you get going! A Social Trait-based Newspeak roll can excite or incite (Charisma + Newspeak); impress, intimidate or confuse (Manipulation + Newspeak) and even sucker skeptics by playing beauty and brains against them (Appearance + Newspeak). All hail neocom!
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Panhandling
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You are a skilled beggar. You are able to get people to give you money just by asking for it. You know whom to ask, how to approach them, what to say and how to avoid the police. This Talent is useful for picking up quick cash or creating a cover.
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Persuasion
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This Talent represents your character's ability to win others over to her way of thinking. The method used may involve subtle mental and emotional seduction or even outright begging, pleading, and cajoling. People with high Persuasion ratings tend to be natural leaders and advocates.
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Poetic Expression
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You are able to craft words in ways that evoke thoughts, emotions and reactions from those who read them. It is rare for one person to be skilled at more than one specialty at one time, so choose carefully.
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Public Speaking
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You are able to mold the emotions of a crowd by making a speech. This might be at a political rally, in a courtroom, at a lecture or even at the barricades once the revolution is underway.
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Scan
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You are practiced at noticing small details and changes in the environment when you purposely look at or listen to what is going on around you. This ability can only be used when you specifically say you are attempting to notice if anything is amiss—if you aren’t concentrating, this ability will do you no good.
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Scrounging
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You have a knack for finding almost anything, under almost any circumstances. The masters of your craft can find a hot spring at the North Pole, or a mainframe computer in the heart of the Amazon Jungle, if necessary.
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Search
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You know how best to go about looking for someone or something in a small area, where you can concentrate your perceptions. You can search for anything from a lost ring in your bedroom to the assassin who is hiding in the garden.
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Seduction
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You know how to lure, attract and command the attention of others in a sexual manner. By the way you hold yourself, how you look at someone and even by the tone of your voice, you are able to arouse and excite those upon whom you practice your wiles. Once you have fully seduced someone, he will be willing to do nearly anything for you.
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Sense Deception
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Over the years, you have developed the ability to know instinctively when people are not telling you the truth or not telling you the whole truth. There is a way they look, a tone of voice, a movement of the eyes.
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Style
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You may not have been born good-looking, or possessed of a natural charm, but you know how to dress and make the most of your appearance. Note that this Talent only applies to people’s reactions to your appearance; once you get closer, it’s up to you.
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Swimming
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You are able to swim at least enough to keep yourself afloat, and maybe a little more. Note that vampires, unlike mortals, do not float naturally; if they do not swim, they sink. Without the Swimming Talent, normal swimming speed is 8 yards + your Dexterity. The Swimming Skill increases your speed to 12 years + your Dexterity provided that is your only action during a turn. To swim faster than normal, roll Swimming + Stamina vs 7. Each success adds three yards to your speed. You may roll every turn until you get no successes, in which you must maintain or decrease your speed or risk exhaustion.
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Throwing
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You know how to throw things in general, and how to use various types of thrown weapons — anything from spears to hatchets to knives to baseballs (yes, if thrown hard enough, they make fine weapons).
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Ventriloquism
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You have the ability to throw your voice, making to appear to come from somewhere else. This Talent can be used for entertainment — or deception.
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