Section 2. Professions and Skills

The revised skill system combines the Primary Skill Areas (PSA) from Alpha Dawn Expanded Rules with the Professions of Zebulon’s Guide. Professions describe the field of work a character engages in, while PSAs describe clusters of related skills for which a character has a certain knack or aptitude. There are four traditional professions (Enforcer, Techex, Explorer, Scispec) and several new professions and PSAs (Spacer, Mentalist, Administrator, Counselor, Investigator, Rogue). Each profession has three or four PSAs associated with it, representing skills that are typically associated with that profession. When creating characters, choose a profession and three PSAs. You can customize your character by choosing ANY three PSAs: all three from the character’s profession, two from the profession and one from another, or all three from different professions. If your character has at least two PSAs from one profession, then he or she receives the automatic bonus skill associated with that profession. Otherwise, no bonus skill is awarded, and the character has no concrete profession to speak of. Characters start out with 20 XP instead of the 10 listed in Zebulon’s Guide. All skills listed within the character’s three PSAs are available for learning at in-profession cost. All optional skills listed under each profession are available at in-profession cost at the referee’s discretion. All other skills are considered to be out-of-profession in terms of cost. See Table 5. Skill Costs for the cost scale.