Mortal Stunts

What Are Stunts?
Just enumerating a person’s skills doesn’t quite give you the full picture of what he’s capable of. Most people have little tricks, advantages, or knacks that they pull out when they need a bit of something extra. Ramirez finds new and exciting ways to get wounded without going down. Marcone can shake a man twice his size to his core just by saying “Good morning.” Harry can do more than just eavesdrop—he can Listen. We call these little knacks stunts.



What Stunts Do
Stunts exist to provide guaranteed situational benefits. These benefits might be the result of special training, unique (but non-supernatural) abilities, or something that’s just innately cool about your character. A stunt may grant a character the ability to use a skill under unusual circumstances, using it in a broader array of situations than normal, substituting it for another skill, or using it in a complementary fashion to another skill. A stunt might allow a character to gain an effect roughly equal to two shifts used in a specific way or to otherwise grant other small effects. Put more simply, stunts allow the usual rules about skills to be bent—or even broken. We’ll get into how to build your own stunts shortly.

  Some stunts may have prerequisites (other stunts or even aspects). Particularly potent stunts may also require the use of a fate point to be activated. In general, a character should not take a stunt tied to a skill he does not have at least at Average level.



Mortal Stunts vs. Supernatural Powers
The stunts in this chapter are called mortal stunts because they’re available to everyone— supernatural and mundane characters alike— and have both feet firmly planted in the realm of what’s possible for a normal (mortal) human to do. Each mortal stunt that a character takes reduces his refresh by 1.

Supernatural powers are very much the same as stunts, although they tend to pack more of a wallop. However, they often have more requirements before they can be taken—usually, at the very least, a high concept aspect indicating that the abilities represented by the supernatural powers are appropriate to the character.

<span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:12pt;">To remain a PC, no character may take a combination of stunts and/or powers that would reduce his refresh to zero or below. Characters that have gone beyond this limit have, for all practical purposes, lost their freedom of action, thus becoming tools of the game’s story (i.e., NPCs) rather than protagonists (i.e., PCs). In the case of mortal stunts, the character is constrained by what he’s made of himself; for supernatural powers, he’s lost access to the mortal gift of free will. In general, it’s recommended that non-supernatural characters spend about half their refresh on stunts, but this is just a recommendation.

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<span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:12pt;">Also See:
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal;">       List of Mortal Stunts