Knowledge skills are often overlooked during character creation, but they are a critical and useful element of the game. Knowledge skills represent the character’s familiarity with crucial parts of the setting including their education background, their professional training, their hobbies and pastimes, and their outlets for creative expression. These skills can often be quite useful during scenarios in terms of solving clues, understanding what’s going on, or even being aware that something is wrong in the ﬁrst place. On a metagame level, Knowledge skills also represent information the character knows that the player may not, which is particularly useful in a science-ﬁction game where players may not always be familiar with the technology and social practices.
All characters are required to spend at least 300 CP on Knowledge skills. While Knowledge skills are a way to make a character more complete and well-rounded, they also help enhance existing Active skills (see [[Skills#Using%20Skills-Complementary%20Skills|Complementary Skills]]) or partially ﬁll skill gaps. A character with a supporting Knowledge skill may also sometimes count towards a Teamwork bonus. For these reasons, characters normally will take Knowledge skills that directly support their specialties; for example the hacker may take Academics: Computer Science and Academics: Cryptography to support Infosec rolls.
Most facts are immediately available to any character in almost any setting. Characters should not be required to roll to ﬁnd details that would be available via a normal search engine. While Knowledge skills do include memorization of facts, more importantly they provide context and background to interpret and apply those facts effectively and also represent a character’s capacity to think critically on a given area of knowledge. Knowledge skills may be added to Research Tests, to better reﬁne and explain results, or to investigations so the character can realize what they are looking for in order to begin researching in the ﬁrst place.
==Getting the Most Out of Knowledge Skills==
In addition to the Knowledge skills characters normally take to support their role in the party, below is a list of skills that frequently assist adventurers in negotiating the dangerous and fast-paced world that is 10 AF. This is just a small sampling of some of the possibilities. 
===Academics: Cognitive Science===
Cognitive science is the study of intelligence and behavior in transhumans, animals, AIs, exsurgents, extraterrestrials, and any other thinking entities. It focuses on how these entities perceive the world, reason, and experience emotions. This skillset provides characters a groundwork to attempt rudimentary communication with any entity capable of language and to crudely predict motivations and behaviors for any thinking entity. The nature of this skill is broad, but shallow, and is very sensitive to the accuracy and completeness of the information available to the character about the entity in question.
===Academics: Memetics===
The transhuman world is awash in blatant and concealed memetic traps. Disregarding the marketing messages intended to sway political views, reputations, or shopping choices, characters frequently seek or are the targets of specialized memes. Memes may be used to transmit messages in plain sight to selected individuals, spread diseases, cause harmful behavior, attack factions, or sidestep censorship.
Academics: Memetics allows a character to spot memes and, with sufﬁcient knowledge of the intended audience, identify, dissect, and interpret the memetic payload. Normally a full memetic mapping requires tools of the same level used by the author of the message, however a character may establish the general meaning of the meme based only on knowledge of the intended target. Limited-target memes may require complex personality modeling to establish even this basic understanding.
More critically, an understanding of how memes work confers a degree of resistance to their effect. Academics: Memetics confers a bonus to tests to resist memetic attacks or inﬂuences.
===Academics: Microbiology and Academics: Nanotechnology===
Characters, especially sentinels, tend to encounter a broad range of threats. Frequently x-threats include communicable diseases, nanotechnology, and/or alien micro-organisms. Academics: Microbiology includes the identiﬁcation of diseases, the collection, testing, and identiﬁcation of micro-organisms, and the appropriate techniques for safely handling contaminants or operating in a contaminated environment. Nanotechnology includes the sampling and identiﬁcation of hostile nanomachines, protective measures against malicious nanobots and even femtobots, the functional capabilities of nanofabrication, as well as how to effectively use and control nanomachines and nanotechnology. These two ﬁelds permit characters to identify and contain a range of insidious threats and to report their ﬁndings to the authorities for action.
===Academics: Physics===
Academics: Physics is critical for its handling of the classical physics issues such as motion, gravity, force, electromagnetism, and so on. Characters frequently subject themselves to environments where old standbys such as gravity and air pressure suddenly aren’t so dependable. An understanding of physics will permit characters to predict things such as the orbital trajectory of an incoming asteroid, whether a fall is survivable, and if a torus can survive an abrupt counter-spin thrust. Physics also applies to astronavigation and calculating the destructive force of collisions. Combined with the near-instantaneous calculating power of a muse or math implant, a physicist has a distinct edge in handling or predicting abrupt changes to the local environment. 
Less frequently, characters may apply more theoretical aspects of physics, such as quantum mechanics, field theory, relativity, high-energy physics, and astronomy. Characters often encounter the cutting-edge applications of physics, so an appreciation of how they work and how they break may give characters an advantage in the ﬁeld.
===Academics: Psychology and Profession: Psychotherapy===
Along with Medicine: Psychiatry, these are the skills used to diagnose and heal egos afﬂicted with stress, trauma, and mental disorders. Both skills provide insight into a character’s motivations, fears, thought processes, and expected behaviors. These are not mind-reading skills, however, and cannot automatically be used to ascertain deception or intent. They can, however, be used as complementary skills for social skill tests, assuming the character has had time to interact with or at least observe and analyze the target for an appropriate period. A modiﬁer may be applied (–10 to –20) when using these skills against non-human characters such as uplifts, with an even stronger modiﬁer against non-mammalian minds such as AGIs, neo-avians, and neo-octopi (–30), unless the character has an appropriate specialization. At the gamemaster’s discretion, this skill may be useless against those who have shed their human neural architecture or have never aspired towards it, such as exhumans, exsurgents, extraterrestrials, AGIs with extremely alien architectures, and non-uplifted animals.
===Art: Digital Art===
This skill focuses on visual designs, though it also incorporates other sensory elements. Art: Digital Art is used to illustrate and animate, and is especially useful for crafting simulspaces and creating augmented reality skins and illusions. This is the artistic style of choice for many AGIs and infomorphs, as it is used to deﬁne their virtual realities, create stunning vistas, and establish new infomorph fashion trends.
===Art: Fashion===
The saying, “the suit makes the man,” has proven to be truer with time. A character will always be judged by how they dress. Fashion permits a character to garb, paint, and design their morph to meet, exceed, or sidestep current fashion trends. A character who can recognize fashions can dress to better ﬁt into a given niche or network, and will be more successful with social tests where that fashion sense is visible. This skill intersects with Art: Digital Art, as augmented reality animations, colors, and transitions are an essential part of many modern styles.
Frequently overlooked, a skill in Art: Fashion permits a character to create a convincing copy of someone else’s clothes, including uniforms, badges, and vehicle paint jobs. When props or uniforms are used, or where a sense of dress plays a role, these skills may contribute a complementary skill bonus to Disguise rolls.
===Art: Performance Arts===
The character can sing, dance, tell jokes, project their voice, and otherwise interactively engage the audience in real-time. Any sort of art helps a character quickly gain rep and establish friends, however most art requires some time to create or an established setting before it can be displayed. Performance art is frequently undervalued compared to other categories, but it can be improvised at the bar starting from just a normal conversation, letting the character reap immediate beneﬁts.
In addition to being ideal for characters with limited time and social contacts, it combines well with Impersonation, Deception, Persuasion, and Palming. A more subdued performance may help a character get an “in” with a target or location, establishing an immediate camaraderie.
===Interest: Morphs and Interest: Robot Models===
These and similar skills are useful in identifying morphs. A character with this skill can gauge a morph’s or robot’s capabilities, what augmentations and traits it is likely to have, who manufactured it, and its availability.
===Interest: Gossip, Interest: Markets, and Interest: Politics===
Each of these skills is typically taken with a more speciﬁc focus, such as Guanxi Gossip, Consortium Markets, or Locus Politics. As usual with Knowledge skills, the broader the focus, the more shallow the level of detail that can be acquired. These skills map the web of transhuman relationships, speciﬁcally in regards to reputation/networking, capital, and inﬂuence, respectively. A character with Interest: Gossip knows who’s taken a bit rep hit recently, who public ﬁgures are sleeping with, and the latest social injustice that has all of the rep networks buzzing. A character with Interest: Markets knows which politico recently bought two million shares in a corporation under investigation, what resources a ﬂedgling hypercorp can bring to bear, or what strategies the Uranian cloud skimmers are pursuing to keep the ultimates out of their markets. Skill in Interest: Politics can reveal the motivations behind a government’s new laws, the behind-the-scenes allies of a major anti-uplift candidate, or the subtle factions that have developed in an autonomist habitat. Characters may use these skills to discover a subject’s connections, motivations, resources, positions and strategies, and details on their personal lives. In many situations the character will not acquire intimate details of a situation, but they will gain a context for understanding what is going on and may ﬁnd clues for further investigation.
===Interest: TITANs and Interest: TITAN Technology===
Useful to scavengers, gatecrashers, singularity seekers, and Firewall agents, these two Knowledge skills and similar variations allow a character to identify TITAN machines and signs of TITAN activity or inﬂuence, prepare safeguards, identify vulnerabilities, or otherwise come up with information that may be useful to surviving an unfortunate encounter.
===Profession: Darknet Operations and Profession: Smuggling Tricks===
When a character needs to leave town quickly or get into a habitat with no one knowing, these skills may come into play. Profession: Darknet Operations focuses on secret data networks, data drops, and off-the-record egocasting. It can help a character acquire illegal or DRM-free blueprints, locate sensitive/stolen data or other virtual assets, purchase zero-day exploits, send a secret farcast to a distant receiver, or locate a black market egocasting ring. Profession: Smuggling Tricks includes how to hide objects or people, evade searches and inspections, pinpoint ship trafﬁc patterns, locate smuggling rings and hidden ports, and otherwise know what it’ll take to get people and/or things past security.
===Profession: Forensics===
This skill covers the process of collecting evidence, ensuring legal admissibility and chain of custody, interpreting evidence, and documenting ﬁndings. It does not include collection of evidence through interviews or electronic recordings. Once the hacker has eliminated digital evidence and any witnesses have been dealt with, a character with Profession: Forensics can destroy or corrupt what evidence still remains or note which evidence cannot be easily be corrupted and will need to be explained in other ways. Alternatively, Forensics may be used pro-actively in conducting investigations. Firewall maintains a lower burden of proof when it comes to mobilizing against x-threats, due to the inherent risks, but in order to compel a regular security force or habitat polity into action, the characters may need to assemble a compelling case.
===Profession: Lab Tech===
Characters in Eclipse Phase frequently encounter artifacts or evidence that requires careful collection, storage, and transport for further study. It’s also not uncommon for characters to operate in research or biomedical facilities. A basic knowledge of lab procedures, equipment, and safety precautions can be invaluable. The Profession: Lab Tech skill includes the ability to manage and store specimens of a particular type, sterilize and operate basic laboratory equipment, use safety equipment, perform basic experiments, and read, maintain, and interpret data.
===Profession: Law===
Profession: Law is normally used reactively, when a character is being investigated by security or is arrested for a crime. Characters with no knowledge of the local legal codes are less likely to exercise rights that may be afforded them, which makes them more likely to be arrested, more likely to self-incriminate themselves, and less likely to be able to access the resources they need to prove their innocence. Most habitats, as well as Firewall, will provide attorneys to defendants, but at this point the character is far into the legal process and may have already caused signiﬁcant harm. By its nature, laws vary widely from habitat to habitat. Characters will require access to legal articles and archives in order to appropriately use the Law skill. However, Profession: Law lets the character understand the legal codes, apply precedent, make a compelling case, and potentially talk their way out of a legal bind in the ﬁrst place. The big brother to Profession: Law is the Active skill of Persuasion (or Deception). This combination is a force multiplier. 
Pro-actively, a knowledge of law may be used to choose the less illegal course of action. Characters may be able to swap a destruction of property or public endangerment charge with the lesser charge of trespassing just by selecting a different approach. In addition to reducing the legal troubles should a character be arrested, it reduces the likelihood the character will arouse suspicion of security.
===Profession: Security Operations===
This includes police and militia responses, tactics, common equipment, training regiments, search techniques, escalation procedures, and so on. Characters may use this to predict where security forces will move or how they will react to a situation or call. Additionally, it can be used to draw security forces to a particular area or escalate or de-escalate a situation. This skill will not eliminate a security response or prevent a character from being arrested if captured, however it will help the characters direct security’s focus and predict police response. This skill is essential for attempting to impersonate police.

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