Hereditary Memory

Hereditary Memory (minor) by Taalismn

“You could say these skills run in my family’s blood.”

The character’s family line has practiced certain skills to proficiencies so fine that a proclivity for them has been imprinted in their very DNA and passed down through the generations. This may be a form of inherited muscle-memory(such as a certain flair in handling a sword or knife) or ingrained knowledge(the person has an in-depth knowledge of certain events in history because their ancestors were there when they happened, and the knowledge has been embedded in the lineage genetic memory).

Roll or Choose

01-50% Skill Proficiency---Roll 1d4x10; that’s the total number of percentile points that the character can add to one skill or spread around several. For example, if the character has 40 pts to spend, they may choose to give a +10% to their gymnastics, a +15% to climbing skills, +5% to ropeworks, and +5% to wilderness survival, to reflect a family history of mountaineering, or the PC could drop it all on a single skill, as a +40% to climbing, showing them to be an inherent genius at scaling surfaces and ascending heights.

51-00% Combat Proficiency---Roll 2d4; that’s the total number of points that be spread as bonus points amongst hand to hand and/or weapons proficiencies. The character may choose, for example, if they have 7 pts to spend, to give themselves a +2 to strike in hand to hand, +2 to dodge, and a +3 to strike with the W.P. Archery skill they possess, or drop that 7 pts as an incredible single bonus.

A note of caution: Skills so modified by this power selection should be chosen so as to reflect the PC’s family history, and should be appropriate to both setting and time period(s). A 20th century character is unlikely to have a hereditary perchance for piloting spaceships, operating computers, and using energy weapons unless their ancestors were time travelers or high-tech aliens from outer space. And while the PC can have the inherent skills skip a generation, they MUST be skills that were practiced by the family somewhere along the bloodline(so if your family background is four generations of homesteaders living on the Great Plains, it’s rather dubious that you’d have any inherent seafaring skills. On the other hand, if Grandpa Salty ‘swallowed the anchor’ and gave up the family traditions of fishing the Atlantic to move out to New Mexico, you just might be able to revive the saltwater talent waiting in your genes when you rebelled against your landlubbin’ parents and moved to the coast).