Your ace pilot can fly a screaming rocket ship through a collapsing stone arch, tumble a damaged ship between crashing asteroids, and land a flamed out freighter on a rock just slightly wider than its fins. The party's RAY gun toting ex-freebooter speaks eight languages, can shoot the eye out of a diving devil vulture at a hundred meters, and knows how to field strip a German RAY Schmeisser blindfolded. Dr. Fielding is a whiz with a wrench or soldering gun, translates Ancient Martian as a 'cool-down' mental exercise, and once rebuilt a damaged roboman with only a pair of pliers and a blowtorch.

How did they get this way? Where did they learn these incredible skills? Yes, I know you bought them during character creation and showed them off in play, but where did they come from? Well gentle readers; this is what this month's The Future is going to answer. How do characters learn their skills in a sci-fi setting?

In a retro sci-fi game like Rocket Age (which the above examples come from) characters generally learn their skills the way people have for generations, through formal and informal education combined with experience. Our ace pilot (drawn from the playtesting characters), was the child of barnstorming aerial acrobats, attended US Rocket Corps flight school and washed out of the US Rocket Ranger training program do to her poor attitude towards both authority, as well as 'safe flying' and 'not making a visiting dignitary vomit when shuttling him between ships'. After being kicked out of the Rangers and the Corps, she went on to become one of the top rocket race pilots in the Solar System, twice winning the prestigious Solar Cup. A fine back story (and thanks to Samantha Parish for giving us Alyssa Hart, the rocket age would not be the same without her) that gives plenty of character hooks and explains from where her top-notch skills come.

However, odds are your sci-fi game is not a retro pulp extravaganza (though it probably should be). This still leaves the question, where did your character get his skills? While it is perfectly reasonable to say they came about through the mundane and time tested approach described above, there are other options, many other options, and these help flesh out a character's background, provide hooks for stories, and add to the game.

They were Given to Me

Perhaps your character picked up her skills by simply having them downloaded into her brain. This would be fairly advanced technology, or it might be a simple affair that everyone in the future does. You log into iMind and buy the skills you want. Learn French? No problem, pay the fee and wait for the download and it is parelz-vous fran?ais. Need to shoot a gun or learn Kung Fu, well, that might be more difficult. A skill is not just a thing in your head; many skills have a physical component that will need to be learned as well. You could not simply download Yoga Master v.2.1 and expect to be bending into a pretzel without hurting yourself.

Downloaded skills might be a normal part of life, at least for some skills. Pure knowledge, such as a language (at least to understand and read it) can be purchased or might be a part of compulsory education. Your character could have learned how to read, write, basic history and science, as well as how to be a good citizen through a series of downloads. Skills with a physical component would need to be practiced, but with the knowledge already in your head learning would be much faster.

This could be used to build a background for a character who knows all the theory, but might still be a little short on the practical side of things. Yes, you downloaded Fundamentals of Archaeology 101, but that won't help you know how to hold a trowel to scrape a trench wall, not to mention how to analyze an artifact. One of the funny things about learning is that the most important skill is the hardest to teach, as well as being the least well understood, and that is critical thinking. This is compounded that critical thinking skills are somewhat topic specific; you might know how to think critically about piloting, but that doesn't entirely transfer over to critical thinking involving navigation. Not to say that learning critical thinking skills does not allow you to apply those skills across the board, just that there are aspects of these skills that are tied to the topic involved.

My Skills Have Always Been Part of Me

Now here is one that is of use in Rocket Age as well as non retro-pulp-sci-fi games. A character who is an artificially created being, such as a roboman in Rocket Age, a cyborg, android, biodroid, or some other engineered lifeform, might come to consciousness with a set of skills already in place as well as the physical components of those skill built in. No additional training or practice needed, just power it up and its ready to go right off the assembly floor. This can present some interesting problems for our artificial character. First off, we are assuming that any player character will have freewill, even if that freewill might have some limits or inhibitions (and it should be possible to overcome these in order to maintain PC agency). This means that a character built with combat programming might turn out not to want to fight, or might have to constantly resist the urge to use force to solve problems. This, and for our example we will use roboman, combat model might want to be an artist, scientist, or pilot, but it 'wakes up' only knowing how to fight. You can then have an interesting back story, or even play out during the series, how our combat roboman struggles to learn new skills more suitable to its personality.

I learned Them Overnight

Perhaps a combination of the classic learning style and advanced technology allows for someone to learn skills using natural (for a certain definition of natural) learning, but vastly accelerated. The character could be placed in a special chamber that feeds massive amounts of nutrients while at the same time providing metabolism boosting drugs, nanites, or some other wonder invention. The character is placed in a special state that allows the body to rapidly build the needed neural connections to enable new skills to be learned. During this period the character is taught through a virtual reality, basically learning without the risk of accident that physically learning a dangerous skill would entail (imagine learning martial arts where all sparing is full contact with live steel). Even if the skill being learned is something as simple as a language, full immersion is possible without having to worry about food, rest, rent, or any of those things that full time students are distracted by.

Through the combination of rapid neural network building, as well as reduced risk and distraction, months of training can be shortened to days or weeks. You can have a novice come in on Monday and leave an expert on Friday, ready to take the weekend off and start work the next Monday. This accelerated training might take its toll on a person, requiring a bit of downtime afterwards to process the data, or it might be instant and even refreshing, with raw recruits stepping out of the training pods ready to fight like hardened veterans. Considering the amount of time it takes to train a soldier to fight in a modern war, this approach would be used by the military to rapidly raise an army, especially if the training pods can rework the recruit's body while they are rewiring the mind.

I am a luddite Who Eschews 'Fake' Learning

It might not be a revolt against technology or a yearn for a simpler life that leads a person to reject some of these rapid or instant learning approaches. A teacher with little or no knowledge of their subject, or worse, flawed knowledge, is a detriment to learning. In fact, with just such a teacher students are likely to fail to learn, or learn incorrect information and thus poor skills. If you download a third party, possibly pirated, French language skill you might not be getting what you want. In addition to errors, some joker might have edited the skill software to replace 'hello' with a hearty 'shit on your head'. You might not know about this until too late. There might be bugs, you might have to keep updating to the latest iteration in order to get those pesky irregular verbs right.

Then there is the larger issue whenever you are using technology to mess about in people's heads. Damaging an intricate and complex system is always a possibility, but there are much worse things that can be done. If elementary school is little more than a set of hyper sleep induced skill downloads, what else can the state be putting into their little brains? A totalitarian regime might program all its citizens, as well as constructed workers, with a love of the Glorious Leader and the Revolution. Soldiers might be unwittingly given subliminal orders to obey, kill, and sacrifice their lives. Free will becomes a hazy uncertainty and are you buying Spanish v.3.2 because you really liked the French v.2.1 you bought last week, or because iMind installed an illegal 'buy this' order in with the skills? This existential uncertainty can be a corner stone of a setting, or ignored as the GM and players feel.

Did reading this give you a nagging and strangely comforting desire to read next month's The Future? Well it should have programmed you to buy Blood Tide my new rpg of pirates, voudoun, and the evil of dead men (not to mention an undying Ponce de Leon ruling his horrid kingdom of Bimini) for the BRP system, available from Chaosium and fine retailers. If your local game store doesn't carry it, then they are not a fine retailer and need to amend this error. Come back next month for The Future Presents the Past: Blood Tide Designer's Notes! You know you want to.