Skills

Skills in Blood & Fire use the normal Mind’s Eye Theatre rules for Skills, but our list of skills is somewhat different due to the differences between the 15th and 21st centuries. Please see below for the Blood & Fire skill list, including details of any changes

Academics
- Limited to 15th Century-appropriate (or earlier!) academic fields, plus Enigmas, Hearth Wisdom, Mortal Politics, and Theology
- If you have at least one dot of Academics, you may be literate in as many or as few of your known languages as you wish
- If you do not have Academics, you are not literate
Animal Ken
Archery
Athletics
Awareness
Brawl
Crafts
Dodge
Empathy
- A character trained in Empathy tends to be skilled in human interaction and culture. Such characters are sensitive to the moods, emotions, and motives of other people, and can identify when someone is struggling with their Beast.
- By speaking brieﬂy with a subject, your character learns how many Beast traits the character currently has. By spending at least 10 minutes in discussion, you can cause a character’s Beast traits to reduce by 2, provided they give you an honest account of what they did to incur them. No character can be targeted with more than one successful application of Empathy per game, but it is compatible and cumulative with Animal Ken.
Intimidation
Investigation
Leadership
Legerdemain
Linguistics
- Everyone starts out able to speak their native language and the Mediterranean Lingua Franca
- You don’t normally need to make a Linguistics challenge to speak a language you are fluent in, but may need to test to translate documents in a timely fashion, understand niche or complex jargon, or comprehend obscure dialects
Lore
- Without the Lore skill, your knowledge of vampiric culture and history is very limited:
  - You probably don’t know much of your own Clan’s history, as laid out in their brief
  - You only know the first bullet point or two from each Clan’s brief aside from your own
  - You probably don’t know anything about any Bloodlines
  - You don’t know any vampiric history from before you were Embraced (and maybe not even that much about stuff that’s happened since then!)
- Example categories for specialisation include:
  - A specific Clan or Bloodline (e.g. Gangrel or Gargoyle)
  - A specific major Domain (e.g. Paris or Sarajevo), including historical (e.g. Carthage)
  - A specific type of Cainite esoterica (e.g. Noddism, Infernalism, or the Cainite Heresy)
  - A specific type of other supernatural creature (e.g. Lupines, Shining Ones, Mages, Ghosts, Demons)
Medicine
- Our game is set before the start of the Medical Renaissance
- Be mindful of the differences in medieval medicine between Western Europe and the Islamic world
- If you have Western European training, the wild card bonus for having proper equipment to treat a mortal patient’s injuries is capped at +1
- If you have Islamic world training, the wild card bonus for having proper equipment to treat a mortal patient’s injuries is capped at +2
Melee
Occult
Performance
Ride
- You may not have more points in Ride than you do in Animal Ken
Science
- Limited to 15th Century-appropriate (or earlier!) scientific fields, plus Enigmas, Hearth Wisdom, Mortal Politics, and Theology
- A character with Science receives 1 additional downtime action, which can only be spent on a downtime action somehow relevant to one of their fields of study. For example, a character with Science: Enigmas might be able to spend this additional downtime action to solve a riddle, or a character with Science: Theology might be able to write a scathing critique of a heretical text. However, neither skill would generate an additional downtime action to investigate a spooky house. For every additional field of study that the character possesses at a rating of 3 or more dots, they gain another bonus downtime action, which can only be spent on a task relevant to one of their fields of study.
Stealth
Streetwise
Subterfuge
Survival