Meet Your Skills

“Man is changed by his living; but not fast enough.”

– W.H. Auden

In ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies, Skill Badges are responsible for shaping your operant through three main faculties: Action, Relation, and Intellect.

These three faculties represent the key branches of an operant’s training, and within each faculty sit five skills, making 15 Skill Badges in total. In ZERO PARADES, skills exist at the intersection of who you are and what you do. Think of them as applied selfhood.

Skills are not static qualities you choose. In ZERO PARADES, Skills are entities with personalities that speak to you directly. If you want something from your skills, they want something from you.

Here’s a brief run-through of the Skill seen in ZERO PARADES:

FACULTY OF ACTION: left to right.

COORDINATION

Different parts of your body acting in concert. Aim a gun, slide down a railing, take (literal) leaps of faith without looking like a total idiot.

DOPPELGÄNG

Summon your inner gang to endure pain and overcome the odds. There is strength in numbers, and no one else has got you like you’ve got yourself.

INSTINCTS

The uncontrolled aspects of your physicality. Unleash your inner animal, pepper some violence into your day, and indulge in unprofessional thoughts: fight, flight, fuck and feed.

SENSORS

Perceptions and pleasure of the phenomenal world. Tune in to a conversation in a loud bar, see familiar faces from even a great distance… identify the fridge buzzing at an odd frequency.

SHADOWPLAY

For any action you’d prefer to go undetected. Become functionally invisible: sneaking, stalking, slinking and stealing without ever being noticed.

FACULTY OF RELATION: left to right.

BLUEPRINTS

Use your deep understanding of the city and its inhabitants to get around problems. Your knowledge of how spaces tend to be planned out and designed gives you insight. You have foresight into the movement patterns and behaviour of city dwellers – sometimes mystically.

COLD READ

Your natural attunement to body language and unconscious signals. Notice small movements – a twitch, an uncomfortable shift. Read the room and act before anyone else.

NERVE

When the task requires a steady hand and a quiet mind. Keep cool under threat and stonefaced when questioned. Breaking others' composure is a light task.

PERSONALISM

Apply emotional intelligence and see feelings from under the surface. Understand people on a deeper level; what motivates them, what moves them.

STATEHOOD

Overwhelming rhetorical force, inspired by the Party’s propaganda machine. DEPLOY VERBAL WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION TO BATTER YOUR FOES INTO SUBMISSION.

FACULTY OF INTELLECT: left to right.

ENTANGLEMENT

Spooky action across this plane of reality and beyond. Mysterious and inexplicable. Tap into the universe’s secret vein, mainline directives straight from the stars.

GREY MATTER

Deploy rational thinking, using logic and analytics. Pick up on inconsistencies, loose threads, and patterns. Finds the order in everything.

POETICS

Your inner creative engine, lateral thinking and subconscious associations. Use your imagination to see opportunities others don’t. Become an imaginative powerhouse.

RECORDS

Your inner filing cabinet, the totality of facts about the world. Reach into your past training, education, and memory to unravel the present.

TECHNOFLEX

The secret language of machines and consumer products. What was once magic is now technology. Bend any device or system to your