As much as I have a low personal oppinion of the "skill mastery" bundles in Ascention there is really not that much broken about them from a game mechanics standpoint. They homogenize character skill lists in annoying ways, but for the most part it doesn't really kill the theme of the game. I would have been much happier with adding a +30 skill tier and it would have been IMO much cleaner to do so, but the book is written already...

That said, "Forbidden Lore Mastery" just makes me jump up and down in a tantrum and scream "OH HELL NO! Not in my game you don't!"

So your characters wake up one day and they are now rank 9. Suddenly every secret of the 40K universe is wide open to them. Every deep dark forbidden secret of the Ordo Malleus, yeah it is right here in the brochure! Every throne agent suddenly has Eldar Harlequins following after them to collect overdue fees from the Black Library! The most sacred secrets of the Adeptus Mechanicus? Hacked them with a dataslate this moring while having breakfast....

For obvious story and game universe continuity reasons I am disallowing this particular Skill Mastery bundle in my game. But now I need to come up with some sort of compensation for the brainy character careers that are losing a big cookie... The plan is to allow characters to buy individual Forbidden Lore skills in the usual trained/+10/+20/specialist progression when this Skill Mastery shows up in their career listings as long as they can justify the newfound learning in-game.

This leads to the part I am seeking help on. PRICING the individual skills in a way that is fair to the affected careers. Forbidden Lore Mastery seems to weigh in somewhere between 500-800xp so obviously it would be punitive to charge 100xp per step (as was my original thought). Perhaps 100 to learn the trained level of skill and then 50 per step, concluding with the usual 100 for specialization (the effective +30 level)? This first idea makes a single skill from unknown to +20 for effectively 200xp, which seems pretty attractive. Maybe a flat 75 per step prior to specialization? The idea is to keep the darn skills SEPARATE while not penalizing the characters who would make use of such knowledge with excessive XP costs in comparison to other career options.

Have any of you come up with anything for this on your own? Have any thoughts, ideas, useful rants?

Glad to know that I'm not the only one who saw a problem with this.

My first impulse was to drastically increase the XP cost of Forbidden Lore Mastery. But then I thought that might be unnecessarily harsh. Then, I thought that I might simply require insanely-extended amounts of in-game time poring through cloistered and secured libraries and archives, justified only by events in-game, etc., etc. For example, requiring the individual wishing to purchase said advance to "sit out" several sessions. But then I thought that might be too harsh as well.

So truth be told, I have not come to an equitable solution, or at least not one I find palatable. So I apologize that I am not more help here.

I am honestly beginning to come to the conclusion that this particular advance is just too "goofy" to be allowed. And that is not something I say often.

So ...

I was thinking of only including the FL the characters know already in the Mastery. Then, when they learn even the first tier of a new FL, it gets included in the Mastery skill as well.

This way, they only 'know' what is accessible to them and still have an advantage from the Mastery.

revak said:

Hmmm ... now this seems like a reasonable idea, at least on the surface. I just still see many areas where this could be abused in terms of the overall cost. No offense, but I GM a group of terminal min-maxers, so I tend to be sceptical of such things. Granted, my players being who they are, I doubt they will survive to reach Ascended levels of play, so I guess it really doesn't matter.

I am of the mindset to this Skill set completely. It isn't like this is something that can be practiced and unless they find THE Black Library then I am pretty sure that a single source with all these FL skills in one place to study from is a bit of stretch. Even the Ordos don't share every thing.

-Cynr

Glad I am not the only one who had a gag reaction with this particular Skill Mastery. Gaining Mastery over every single published canon Forbidden Lore in the game ( over a dozen by my last count! ) for a measly 500+ XP is, to put it PC, ludicrous.

I have not decided what course of action to take. One idea was to simply ditch the "space saving" and force to simply choose a fixed number ( maybe 3-4 ) of the Lores they know to qualify for the Mastery.

Since I have a character that is one of the brainy types I do have a suggestion. Here's my two cents. My adepts best forbidden lores are Cult, Heresy, and Warp. I'm planning on having her go Ordos Hereticus to hunt down forbidden tomes and root out witches. When I take the Forbidden Lore Master skill I plan on specializing. Basically taking Forbidden Lore mastery (Heretical) which would encompass the Cult, Heresy, and Daemonology Lores. If you allow the Forbidden Lore Mastery skill, specialize the Lores and make the mastery relate to two or three lores that could work together.

Shibby1431 said:

I think this is the best solution. Maybe any additional FL's would be 100XP to add them to the Mastery fold. But you really shouldn't get every single secret in one fell swoop. Ordo-specific is a pretty neat idea too.

Without touching the rules, I'd leave the skill as it is. However, the character could only know a number of ranks equal to its intelligence bonus, one has to be Inquisition, other the Ordos he works for (heretics, daemons, and Xenos), and the third would go depending of the career (officio assasinorum, Mechanicus, Psykers/Warp, etc...). The rest of the Forbidden Lore skills would be accesible ONLY while having access to Inquisitorial Libraries/databases (like the Tricorn installations in the Calixis Sector), representing access to databases instead of having a wide array of knowledge.

6Kilgs said:

Okay, now this is a solution that I would at least consider allowing. Limit it to two or three, or max four, related FL's. Then let them add new ones, as the opportunity presents itself in-game, for a minimal cost.

But I am curious if anyone has come up with alternate ideas.

For me, it's not that big of an issue, but then I changed a wee little bit on how Forbidden Lores work. For my game, a Forbidden Lore (or Scholastic Lore for that matter) only provides a very general overview of the subject-matter (such as FL (xenos) lets you know Eldar exist, are highly psychic, and come in several flavors). Using the skill to get any kind of specific knowledge (what flavor of Eldar you are dealing with, what that glyph means, what is Wraith Bone, what is a soul stone, etc) requires actual research which, in turn, requires tracking down heretical sources of information to do said research. For the most part, having the Lore simply allows the character to know where to look and what to look for to get a reliable answer to their question but they still have to do the looking. Someone without the right Lore Skill simply wouldn't even know where to begin in hunting up information regarding the subject matter nor would they be able to recognize the answer if Tzeench himself pointed the character's eye-balls at it.

Kind of like in the real world. An American Workman's Comp Attorney knows a lot about workman's comp laws in his or her state. However, he or she rarely ever can prepare to argue a case, mediate a dispute, or conduct a decent deposition of an expert without doing a hell of a lot of legal research. The difference between one of them (or a legal assistant) researching the particulars of a workman's comp case and me doing it would be they would actually know where to look, what to look for, and understand what it is that they are reading. I wouldn't have the first clue about where I would need to look for the answers (except maybe google ) and then, once I started looking, I wouldn't be able to filter out the noise for the information because it would be all noise to me, and finally, even if I did manage to come up with something out of all the confusing mess I would be sifting through, there'd be no guarantee that what I found even relates to the case now, or how accurate, truthful, and in depth that information was. In short, I'd need to be familiar with the law and legal research to be able to reliably do any kind of in depth research about the law.

When used in this manner, not only do Librariums and hoarding massive collections of blasphemous lore become more tantalizing for the Lore-Hound, but the large umbrella Lore Masteries aren't that hard of a pill to swallow. This way, it means the character doesn't know EVERYTHING, it just means that the character is so familiar with the nasty secrets of the universe that, if he were so inclined, he would know where and how to dig up the answer to most any conundrum or mystery out there... but he'd still have to get his hands on the right research material (if he hasn't hoarded it by then) and actually do the digging for the answer.

Personally I agree,

But the GM (ME ) determines if they ,may roll, if it suits my plot.
And I can always give penalties... -60 or so on given topics like:

The Black Library
Adaptus Mechanicus
etc.

But on topics like:
Mutants
Warp
Psykers
Inquisition
Cults
Heresy

and on occasion...

Daemonology I don't see the problem, by the time they reach that level of experience they would probably encountered enough of those....and on those subject that rare, if they don't come up who cares...

But here is how I handle obscure Forbidden Lore rolls.

Example of play:
Player: I want to find out the Daemon this cult worships so that we can bind it and dispose of it.
GM: Okay, make a roll Forbidden Lore Mastery -30
Player: My Adept has Unnatural Intelligence x2 so it will be -20, and an Intelligence of 56, +20 for mastery so 56 or lower and I succeed right?
GM: Right you are
Player: YESSSS, 12, 5 degrees of success....
GM: Well you have heard of a tome that will most probably contain it, you heard Inquisitor Marr mention it once, but it was suposed to be lost.
Though the private library of the Lord of Dusk might contain a partial copy of the tome.
Player: Hmmmm, well our first step might be going to Dusk then, I don't think a request by Astropath Choir will have the same impact as a personal yet humble request.
That Chartist Captain still owes us a favour, I heard he was in in orbit, I'll send a courier to his House with the request.
The courier carries a hand written letter with my personal seal, not the rosette, to pressing.
GM: Make an influence test +10 (-10 for being Rare, +20 for the favour).

Hi all!

I stick with graver here. It is not that bad. Zilla wrote alot about the "background breaking" in his opening post, like "suddenly, one morning" the pc would change completely.

This point of view can easly transfered to all kind "new achievements" of this game system (or RPGs in general), since besides raising of Attributes and raising of base-level-skill it is all like: one day a player spend point and "suddenly" the character he plays knows how to drive a tank (and a mundane hovercraft and a race car and...) or has contacts with the Administratum or anything like that.
In all fairness, I think this should be more viewed as something that was opened up to the pc by the =I= through access to a high security liberary like the one described in this on FFG pamphlet that was used to give us infos of "up-and-coming" (cough-cough) products a lon-long while ago. How much "background breaking" this is depends on what afford the GM undergoes to tie the changes of the pc stats into his game& the world (no offense intended, Zilla!)

Gregorius21778 said:

Well, to be fair, Graver did mention that he has changed the way how Lores work in his game . Those of us who still use the default setting for them are faced with the "suddenly, one morning"- effect.

As a GM I have a few options on how to deal with this question. 1) leave it as is, 2) limit the number of Lores you can group under Mastery, 3) tweak how Lores work in general and 4) some combination of these. Personally I probably will go with number 2 just to keep things simple ( and sane ). YMMV.