The Campaign Builder's Guild

In building the skill system for Asura, I've been focusing mostly on the "mundane" skills for now, which are here. Being good at fighting, acrobatics, politics, engineering, and so on. So far, so good. The next step will be the "magical" skills: Elemental Sorcery, the Black Arts used by Demons, Faerie Glamour, and so on.

However, for the Progenitor faction, there is a problem. While they do have some psychic abilities, their signature skill (Scientia) is basically "knowing lots of stuff." That is, a great deal of their talents are simply mundane skills, albeit in a rather "super powered" way. A Progenitor character can't shoot magic missiles from her fingertips, but she can understand a language she's never heard before, build a fully functional digital computer with only parts that were readily available in 1903, and stuff like that.

I'm trying to think of the best way to model this in the system, though. Some possibilities:
- Maybe the various sub-skills of Scientia embody certain groups of normal skills. The problem is that this kind of makes normal skills worthless for Progenitors. On the other hand, maybe that's the point.
- An alternate approach would be to make Scientia have fairly minor powers in itself, but make it very easy to learn various related skills.
- Relatedly, Scientia lets you use normal skills in a "super powered" way. I kind of like this, but I don't like how it's basically powerless without the base skill, whereas all of the other Asuras have neat powers they can use right away. What can Scientia do without Engineering, for example? Though if it gave benefits to learning Engineering... maybe it's not as big of a deal? I'm not sure.

Any comments or ideas? :)
 

I like the last one. I don't think the drawback is really an issue, though I haven't read anything else on the mechanics. But it seems to me that in any game system a character is likely to have at least some skills, and "magic" that can boost them is fine. A progenitor knows their powers are skill-based, so I'm sure they'd try to learn as many different skills as possible.