Seeing as they’ve been such a popular topic since Ross’s designer diary mentioned them, and there are a lot of different ideas about what people are expecting of, and thinking about them, Ross has given the playtesters permission to talk in a bit more detail about Mastered Skills and Paragon Talents.

When work was beginning on developing Ascension, the folk at FFG created a pile of rank 8 characters, to get a better idea of what characters would be like when they were at the stage from where the Ascension rules would take over.

One of the obvious problems with such characters was the sheer number of skills and talents that were listed on the character record. Finding a way to streamline these lists was the philosophy behind Mastered Skills and Paragon Talents.

I’ll discuss one example of each to illustrate how they work.

The Mastered Skill that has already been mentioned is Athletic Mastery, so let’s stick with that one. Athletic Mastery covers the skills Acrobatics, Climb, Contortionist, Dodge and Swim. The Mastered Skill appears on the career advance tables, and if you spend XP to buy this advance, the character then counts as not only having all of the associated skills, but also having all of them at +20. You can then remove all of those skills from your character’s skill list, and replace them with the single entry ‘Athletic Mastery’.

If a character already has all of the associated skills at +20, from buying them individually through their career, then you just assume that the character has Athletic Mastery, remove all of the individual skills and replace them with the Mastery skill.

You don’t get any extra benefits for having a Mastered Skill over and above what the skills themselves allow you to do; it is basically a means to streamline and condense the information on your character sheet.

Yes, it does allow characters to become proficient with a whole whack of skills all at the same time, with a single advance purchase. But each Mastered skill occurs on the advance tables only for careers to which they are suitable, and you can therefore assume that the character will already have some talent in or inclination for the skills that the Mastered skill covers, so it’s not like the character overnight develops ability with skills they have never had any interest in before.

Paragon Talents are similar. Each includes a number of Talents, which the Paragon Talent replaces in order to save space on the character sheet. You can also gain a Paragon Talent either by buying it from the advance tables, or by simply having the associated Talents already then replacing them with the Paragon Talent.

A lot of the Paragon Talents though, offer an extra ability or advantage over and above what the Talents it is composed of provide individually.

For example, one of my favourite Paragon Talents is Storm of Blows. This Paragon Talent includes the Talents Ambidextrous, Dual Strike, Lightning Attack, Swift Attack and Two-Weapon Wielder (Melee).

Taken as the RAW presents them in Dark Heresy, having all of these Talents will allow you to wield two melee weapons, getting three attacks with one of them and a single attack with the other, with a –10 WS penalty for doing so. Alternatively, you can make a Dual Strike, combining two attacks into a single strike: as Dual Strike uses a full action, you cannot get your extra hits from Lightning Attack in the same round.

There are a few extra bonuses you get from having the Paragon Talent. Firstly, you suffer no WS penalty for two-weapon wielding. Your two extra attacks for Lightning Attack while also two-weapon wielding aren’t for one weapon only; you may divide your four attacks between your two weapons as you please, making two attack with each weapon if you want. The other big advantage offered is that you can use two of your attacks to make a Dual Strike, and still get the other two individual attacks on the same round; you can even use your four attacks to make two Dual Strike attacks on the same round!

There are several other Paragon talents that offer a similar ‘greater than the sum of its parts’ effect.

Hope that helped to clear up the mystery a bit, and shows that Mastered Skills and Paragon Talents are a worthwhile feature of the Ascension rules.