ÍNDICES DE COMPETITIVIDAD E INVERSIÓN EXTRANJERA DIRECTA

Before the word had left the Immaculate’s tongue, Novia Claro was in motion, vaulting through the teahouse window in a burst of shattered glass. There were reinforcements stationed outside, ringing the teahouse to cut off any route of escape—so she went up, scaling the wall as if she had made the climb a hundred times. Once she reached the brick-tile rooftop, she took a moment to center herself. An archer of the Wyld Hunt was already there, poised to intercept—but since he had expected her to flee from the back door, a steel-shod boot to the back of his head was all it took to send him tumbling into the koi pond below, long before he could so much as nock an arrow.

With a single bound, Novia made her way to the treetops above, springing from branch to branch as she made good her escape. As she vanished into the foliage and the night mist, she cursed herself for not thinking to bring the cup of black tea with her.

This Ability is important in combat.

Athletics is the discipline of physical fitness and acrobatic maneuverability. It is used in

performing feats of strength, such as lifting up a fallen cart or bending the metal bars of a prison cage. It is also used for movement both in and out of combat—racing towards a distant enemy,

jumping over a gaping chasm, climbing a brick wall, and swimming against a powerful tide are all uses of Athletics.

Awareness

Silver Dusk Returning felt something was wrong the instant she stepped out of the restaurant, but didn’t let it change the pace of her stride. It wasn’t until she had taken a feigned wrong turn into a dead-end alley before she addressed the figure tailing her in the darkness. “I know you’ve been following me. I heard the knives when you drew them five minutes ago, and you reek of black adder venom.” She turned around, smiling broadly, making sure to lock eyes with the point in the darkness where she knew her would-be assassin hid. “And, from how hard you’re breathing, I know you’re slower than me. Whereas you,” she said, unsheathing a length of golden metal from its leather scabbard, “know nothing about me. Who do you think wins this fight?” This Ability is important in combat.

Awareness is the practiced discipline of alertness and wariness of one’s surroundings. It is used for rolls to notice or pick up on sensory information, but is also important in combat, adding to the Join Battle roll that determines a character’s starting Initiative and allowing her to notice hidden enemies.

Brawl

The tyrant lizard bit down hard on Noxx’s right shoulder, huge fangs striking sparks off steel- alloyed jade. “All right, I gave you that one,” the Dawn Caste said, gritting his teeth against the pain, “but I’m getting bored.” Drawing his front leg back, he pivoted around the weight of the tyrant lizard’s jaw, dragging it down with his dropping arm. In the same instant, he threw a crushing jab with his left hand, puncturing the giant lizard’s eye and smashing through its skull to bury his fist in its brains.

This Ability is important in combat.

Brawl is used by unarmed combatants who fight based on instinct and a natural talent for violence, rather than any particular discipline or style. It’s used for punches, kicks, head-butts, shoulder thrusts, grappling, and all similar methods of using one’s own body as a weapon. Brawl also conveys an aptitude for brawling aides such as brass knuckles and improvised weaponry such as chairs and broken bottles. In addition to covering attacks, Brawl can also be used to calculate a character’s Parry rating in combat, although parrying a weapon capable of inflicting lethal damage with one’s bare hands requires a stunt.

Bureaucracy

Few understood the importance the numbers written in Rising Echo’s ledgers held for the Lianhua Principality. A decimal slashed from a tax rate, and prosperity followed. So many talents of jade held in reserve from the coffers today, and Lianhua’s people would have food in a year of blighted fields. A slight increase to the tariff rate, and the flow of heroin from Guild caravans dwindled down to nothing. Few understood the importance of Rising Echo’s ledgers, and that was just the way he wanted it.

Bureaucracy represents a character’s acumen in organizational, mercantile, and legal endeavors. Bureaucracy is used to assess and evaluate the resources—both wealth and manpower—

available to one’s self or one’s rivals, as well as to understand the legal codes of a society or the bureaucratic structure of an organization.

Craft

The ethereal sound of barking boomed over the clangor of Yosef’s workshop—the Wyld Hunt had found him at last. He silenced the alarm with a pat on the head of the lion-dog statuette, and took stock of his resources. A daiklave of black jade and behemoth-bone—no good, its blade still in need of tempering in glacial meltwater. A pouch of ornate eggs carved from yasal crystal, a starving, half-mad demon caged within each brittle shell… that might be useful. An orichalcum gauntlet, inlaid with the fangs of a storm serpent… oh yes, that would do nicely. The salvaged head of a First Age warstrider, severed from its body centuries ago, but re-rigged with a makeshift set of controls… well, it might make a useful distraction.

By the time the Dragon-Blooded reached the Twilight Caste’s lair, they had no idea of the trouble they were in for.

This Ability is necessary to create artifacts.

Craft is used to create or repair objects through skilled labor, whether forging a sword, cutting the gem for a merchant prince’s brooch, or planning and overseeing the construction of a temple. The Exalted and other supernatural beings are capable of using this Ability to create artifacts, treasures of legendary quality that possess powerful magic of their own.

Special rules: When a character first buys this Ability, she must declare an area of expertise to which her crafting skill applies. Potential areas of expertise include weapon forging, armoring, architecture, tailoring, woodwork, carpentry, cooking, and anything else a player might come up with, covering similarly broad (but not all-encompassing) concepts. Additional areas of expertise must be purchased as independent Abilities—thus, a character might have Craft (Weapon

Forging) 4, and Craft (Gemcutting) 2. Of note are Craft (Artifacts) and Craft (Geomancy); these two craft skills in specific are needed to craft artifacts and design and raise manses, respectively. For mundane crafts projects, Storytellers are encouraged to be generous in interpreting logical edge cases for uses of Craft. If a character needs to repair a horseshoe, but only has Craft (Armoring), it’s reasonable to declare that the character’s Craft rating encompasses basic metal fabrication and to allow her to use her Craft rating anyway, perhaps at +1 difficulty.

Dodge

It happened in a second—the click of a pressure plate, the oncoming rush of air, the countless guillotine blades descending from their niches in the ceiling of the subterranean passage. A second was all Fen needed. As the first blade descended, he flipped backwards, finding the few inches of safety between it and the next. The Shattered Mendicant of Dreaming Masks’ manse was well-defended, but it would take more than traps to deny Handsome Fen his revenge.

The sound of the sprung trap summoned the manse’s guardians, hulking abominations of stitched flesh. One on one, Fen would have trusted his knives against such monstrosities, but the

Abyssal’s lair teemed with dozens of them, held at bay only by the few seconds it would take for the traps to retract their blades. It was time to discover if he was faster. And, if he had to gamble, he would say that he was.

This Ability is important in combat.

Dodge is the skill of evading one’s enemies, deftly maneuvering out of the way of attacks or managing to avoid the dangers of fighting on hazardous terrain. In combat, a character’s Dodge

rating contributes to her Evasion, but is also used to escape from close-quarter conflicts with enemies or to take cover from the attacks of far-off foes.

Integrity

The faerie queen’s eyes were pinpoints of light, colorful stars scattered carelessly across the swirling darkness of her countenance. These eyes surveyed Lance of Starfallen Justice as he entered her boudoir, with a polite nod to his salamander-headed guide. The warrior’s garb—a polished orichalcum hauberk—was as splendid as his bearing, and the constellation of the queen’s eyes could see the tongues of fire that burnt in his soul—surely a man to be tempted by power and glory. With a wave of a seven-fingered hand, she called up gossamer marvels from her treasure vaults: a mirror that whispered profound and terrible wisdoms; an ewer styled as a dragon’s head that held liquid immortality; a black diamond that could beckon forth countless hobgoblin servants.

Lance of Starfallen Justice regarded her display politely, as he took a seat to negotiate for the souls of the villagers imprisoned in her palace. “No thank you, fair lady,” he said.

This Ability is important in social influence.

Integrity is the Ability to remain resolute in one’s beliefs, principles, and decisions when they are challenged, an active discipline of self-assurance and refuting opposing arguments. It contributes to a character’s Resolve, which is used to resist the persuasion of socially skilled characters.

Investigation

Tenth Reed took a long drag on his hand-rolled cigarette, letting the tobacco smoke fill his lungs like the swirling clouds of confusion that filled his mind. It had been weeks since the Council of Entities had contacted him, and the facts of the case seemed plain enough—the ashes of a burnt letter, a midnight getaway, a murdered husband. But still, he thought, looking down from the rooftops of Nexus, there was something missing. If Izaya Nora had run off with some paramour, it would explain him killing his merchant prince lover, but not the apothecary robbery that had his lackeys’ hands all over it, or the faint scent of rotten honeysuckle that clung to the stables like cheap gin on a drunkard’s breath.

Realization hit hard, as if the cigarette’s embers had suddenly cast a new light on the case. With all the facts together it seemed obvious. The stab wounds on Izaya’s husband were too clean to be fresh—they had been made after the fact, to cover up the real cause of death, a dose of hemlock stolen from a disreputable medicine shop. The secrecy, the betrayal by poison, the otherworldly smell—this was no affair, and the author of the burnt letter had not been human. It was a ritual, a demon-summoning, and it clearly went further than the Council had imagined when they contracted him.

Investigation is used to uncover hidden or obscured details through close surveillance or

examination, whether it is searching a magistrate’s chamber for a hidden letter, unearthing clues at the scene of a murder, or reconstructing the details of a crime from the evidence presented before a magistrate at court.

Larceny

Three Shores was a quiet village between Ragara Akina’s estate and the Imperial City. A few rice paddies and the hovels of the peasants who tended them; nothing that would delay her journey to

deliver the execution orders for magistrate Koizu to the capital. At worst, she would suffer the clinging hands of filthy laborers—a tolerable annoyance.

Mongoose had other plans. The lanky thief had no great love for the law, but she knew Koizu for a fair judge. She rubbed her wrists, remembering a verdict of imprisonment that would have been death but for Koizu’s mercy. She would not let House Ragara dispose of him simply to further their designs on the throne. Disguised beneath a mud-stained shawl, a false hunchback, and enough make-up to add decades to her face, she approached the Dynastic procession, grabbing for the hem of the Dragon-Blood’s robes in seeming supplication.

By the time Ragara Akina realized she was short one execution degree and several obols of jade, such was her rage that she scarcely noticed the urchin girl sleeping in the alleyways, resting on a bunched-up shawl.

Larceny covers a range of talents that fall under the general penumbra of criminal activity. Pickpocketing, lock picking, and sleight of hand are all uses of Larceny that rely on physical deftness, but it also applies to more intellectual tasks such as creating an effective disguise, hiding evidence at the scene of a crime, or navigating a society’s criminal underworld.

Linguistics

“Trees that flowered in Spring, as your children marched away, now paint their graves red. Mothers, if you cry,

salt will fill their coffers full. Burn with rage instead. Stain the earth with red.

Call your children back to sleep with their killer’s death.”

—Excerpt from the poem believed to have incited the overthrow of Nyala’s satrap, authored by the so-called Mirror Flag.

This Ability is important in social influence.

Linguistics is the Ability used to compose works of writing—literary epics, poetic verse, propaganda pamphlets, or even a simple conversational letter. It can be used to influence the thoughts and feelings of characters who read the work using social actions. A character must have at least one dot of Linguistics to be able to read.

Lore

“Once, mankind understood the workings of the world, and lived in an age of wonders beyond our comprehension,” Ineffable Blossom said to her Circlemates, her eyes dark from sleepless nights of study. “The greatest libraries of the Realm are but droplets from that ocean of lost wisdom. The wonders of the Lookshy foundries are paltry toys compared to the treasures of our forebears.” She brandished a map annotated with countless markings from weeks of study, Scribbled in the margins were broken ciphers, solved equations, and entire fields of mathematics

she had reinvented, centered around a bold, red X. “Which is why, once we have delved into the ruins of Is-Tagath, we will wield power beyond the dreams of any who’d oppose us. And I’ve found just where those ruins lay.”

This Ability is necessary to create artifacts.

Lore represents a character’s understanding of the world, covering academic disciplines of history, mathematics, geography, literature, science, philosophy, and similar scholarly pursuits. It can be used both to recall useful pieces of academic knowledge, as well as to perform scholarly research in a library or archive. It is also important in the forging of artifacts and the raising of manses.