Extremely simple and kinda dumb question. I get a Multikey as an Explorator, but never get the Security skill, and since it is an Advanced skill the key doesn't do me much good. Am I missing something painfully obvious, or did they just hand me a pretty new lapel pin to show to people who don't know any better? Yes I know I can try and scrape it up as an Elite Advance, but let us pretend our DM is a tightwad with those kind of hand outs.

Well, let's assume that if you don't gain security, then perhaps no one in the Mechanicus does either. So in the whole priesthood, no one knows how to work a multikey, and presumably they have warehouses of these things sitting around, not getting used. So I imagine they're kinda given out like party favours, or like you said, lapel pins, just to get rid of the stupid things, because some dork is still out there making them, and no one can find him in the great big far flung imperium to tell him to stop.

Curse this mentality of doing it because we've always done it even if we don't know why we do it anymore. Thank you for you insight into the organization my PC is in and why he's glad he's tooling around the fringes of space instead of sitting in a foundry stamping out multikeys.

Hey pal, "the mentality of doing it because we've always done it, even if we don't know why we do it anymore" is pretty much the mechanicus and most of the imperium in a nutshell. Welcome to the 41st , where superstition is your shield, and ignorance your armor!

Vyacheslav said:

Techpriests get Security in Dark Heresy, so obviously a large majority of the Mechanicus do get that skill. I'd chalk this up to a simple case of the FFG writers forgetting to include the skill in the Explorator career path...

Well, if you wanted to play with semantics and **** some rules a little bit: since security isn't a basic skill (unless it is for the character) they would have 0 chance of performing an action involving that skill. However, 0+30=30, so with a multi-key, they would have a 30% to open an electronic lock using it. Might not be strictly adhering to the RAW (I need to check on that) but it makes a bit of sense (after all, you can't use it as good as someone who knows their way around security devices, but maybe you could get some use out of it with the help of it's machine spirit though you'll still bork it all up 70% of the time on most decent locks never mind the highly complex ones...) and would make that multi-key a bit more useful to the exploritor.

Just a random thought...

Yeah, it's a thought but it's the kind of thing that makes me want to hit a player as a DM, let alone trying to pull it as a player. I was just wondering in general if other people had noticed/cared about the discrepancy, though I get the feeling the kind of game we run isn't what most people here seem to be involved in, so I'm not sure what kind of answers I am hoping to get. Thanks for the idea though, but it opens up cans of worms that I am sure when supplement books come out will make seem less innocuous.

Graver said:

Or just add the Security skill to the Explorators career path at either rank 1 or rank 2 for a cost of 100 or 200 experience points. Im sure it's gonna show up in an errata soon enough anyway.

And as for reasons why it should be there, aside from the fact that Explorators always start out witha multikey that would otherwise be completely useless. Well, we can divide locks into two types. One would be mechanical locks (you know, padlocks, bolt and tumbler locks etc. etc.) in other words, a rather primitive mechanism, something that such a high ranking Techpriest as an Explorator would have certain insights into how to manipulate it.

The other would be an electronic lock, using some sort of simple (or advanced depending on the sophistication of the lock) cogitator to enforce door codes of different kinds. Once again, this would certainly be within an Explorators realm of knowledge.

Quite simply, there's no reason why an Explorator shouldn't have access to Security somewhere between rank 1 and rank 3. I think FFG just forgot to include it...