Unknown Armies:Mind skills

Your basic book learning, plus logic and reason. If a skill requires alertness, perception, quick wits, and generally being-on-the-ball, it may be a Mind skill.

Free Mind skill: Conceal

Conceal 15%. You can hide physical objects, including yourself or another person. This covers hiding a gun inside a chair, not hiding money in an offshore bank account. If you're hiding a person, Conceal only works as long as you're not moving.

Free Mind skill: General Education

General Education 15%. It is difficult to get through life without learning something in school. 15% is the low end of average. 25% would be enough to put you on the honor roll, while 50% probably represents a college degree and some postgraduate work. If you do have a skill indicating a college degree or substantial professional training, you can change General Education to Philosophy, Medicine, Eastern European History, or whatever other academic or professional knowledge you specialize in; it's penumbra still serves for general knowledge checks.

Free Mind skill: Notice

Notice 15%. See that? Probably not. Most people live in a haze of self-absorbtion, but sometimes we pick up on things that stand out: a cute puppy, a brand new car in a bad neighborhood, the glint of a telescopic sight moments before the sniper plants a bullet in your brain, that sort of thing. Some people notice more than others. Police detectives tend to have a Notice skill of 40% or higher.

Mind skill examples

Authority. For whatever reason, you are in a position to tell people to do things and have them get done. This is the requisite skill for people who want to play cops, mob bosses, bishops and other people who have a power structure backing them up. A police officer has an Authority score of about 15%, while a federal agent would have a score more like 30%. You can use this skill to wow the yokels, call for backup, obtain the skills of specialists—it's a very broad-based skill. Just make sure you and your GM agree on what kind of authority you are. You can also lose this skill by failing to uphold the responsibilities and expected duties of your station, so be warned.

Doublethink. This is a weird skill—the skill of briefly convincing yourself of things you really know aren't true. "I don't know what you're talking about! I didn't shoot nobody!" It's a short-term and intense form of method acting that involves suppressing your memories under waves of intense emotion—usually an intense wish that what you're saing was true. When you make a successful Doublethink roll, the next time someone asks you about something, you can give them a brief answer that appears true; you don't have to make a Lie roll because you believe it. The downside of Doublethink is that using aobut minor stuff is a rank-2 Self mental-stress challenge, and using it on anything important ("Of course I love you!") is a rank-5 Self challenge.

Hypnotherapist. This isn't any kind of mind-control shtick. It just means you can put a willing subject into a trance state. You can use this to recover lost memories, reinforce suggestions, and get them to quack like a duck or gibber like a mandrill. You're more than just a sideshow entertainer, however; you're also trained in helping people deal with repressed, distorted, or just plain painful memorie. Note that it is possible to hypnotize an unsuspecting suspect, but it's hard—you have to roll at least a 40% and still get under your skill. It is impossible to hypnotize an unwilling suspect who knows what you're doing.

Photographic Memory. This is the ability to rapidly memorize everything in your visual field. You have to do it deliberately and it takes one action. Write down what you've mentally "photographed" when you do it; later you can roll to pull discrete details out of your "picture." (This means you can do that trick where you glance at a page in a phone book and can later recite it back.) A variation is eidetic memory or "total recall" where you can roll to recall anything you paid attention to; this does not allow you to do the phone book trick, but you can remember any page of any book you've ever read.

Do-it-yourself Mind skills

Automotive Repair, Biology, Locksmithing, Medicine, Strategy, Physics, Psychotherapy, Occult.

Paradigm Mind skillls

A Paradigm skill is a deeply held philosophy. It's how you relate to the world. This might be military training, religious faith, or deep skepticism about the unnatural. Taking a paradigm skill helps you with some mental stresses, but leaves you more vulnerable to others. You can only have one paradigm skill, and it must be consistent with your obsession, passions, and personality. (Adepts cannot have a paragon skill at all, because their philosophy is rooted in their school of magick.)

If you decide to take a paradigm skill-you don't have to-then you link it to two types of mental stresses. One is a stress that your paradigm skill protects you against. The other is a stress to which your paradigm skill is vulnerable. Mental stresses are defined in the Unknown Armies:Madness chapter. If it's appropriate, you can use the same stress for both slots.

Once you create the skill, you must take a failed notch on the vulnerable stress you chose. This failed notch is [i]permanent[/i]-it cannot be erased. It is the weak link in your mental armor. Having it does not affect your madness rolls, but it means you are always that one notch closer to suffering a permanent mental affliction. Mark this notch in with a pen so you don't lose track of it.