Making Your Own First-Through

Cultures

Distribute 100 points among your culture’s Standard skills, and choose up to three Professional skills from its list and spend points on those too. No more than 15 points into any single skill.

Where you grew up is most of who you are out here, and the lists are the proof.

The Garden — born on the Remainder

Earth. Weather nobody made, an ocean you can walk into, six thousand years of farmland, and no money at all. Outdoors is normal to you and strange to everyone you will ever work with.

Standard: Athletics, Endurance, Swim, Locale, Perception, Customs, Willpower, Brawn

Professional: Craft (any), Healing, Lore (the Remainder), Navigation, Survival, Track

Nobody else in the Causeway has Swim. They will ask you to prove it and then not believe you.

Station-born — the Nine, Procyon, Alpha Centauri

Raised in a turning cylinder in a port. You have never stood on a planet. You can read a queue, a hall and a stranger’s boots at ten paces.

Standard: Customs, Influence, Insight, Vacuum, Evade, Deceit, Perception, Sleight

Professional: Commerce, Courtesy, Streetwise, Lore (a system), Acting, Mechanisms

Holding-born — Coldwater, Teegarden’s, the farm worlds

A settlement small enough that everybody has a job and everybody knows yours. Grain under lamps or a red sun, and a council that meets in public.

Standard: Endurance, Brawn, Locale, First Aid, Willpower, Athletics, Drive, Customs

Professional: Craft (any), Healing, Survival, Commerce, Lore (a system), Track

Shelter-born — Tau Ceti, YZ Ceti

Underground, because something comes down every few weeks. Vaulted halls lit from shafts, built by people for whom a roof is a theological matter. You were raised careful and quiet and you know where the strong walls are.

Standard: Perception, Willpower, Stealth, Insight, Locale, Endurance, Sing, Customs

Professional: Engineering, Lore (any), Musicianship, Science (any), Craft (any), Navigation

YZ Ceti children grow up with a sky that is audible. Their Musicianship is the best in human space and they are unbearable about it.

Works-born — Barnard’s, the Gliese 65 refineries

Three shifts, forever, and the air tastes of it. Your vote is your shift. You were useful at eleven.

Standard: Brawn, Endurance, Vacuum, Athletics, Drive, Willpower, Unarmed, Customs

Professional: Engineering, Mechanisms, Craft (any), Commerce, Lore (Tally procedure), Survival

Belt-born — Epsilon Eridani, the Luhman 16 decks

Vacuum, rocks and drift, or a sky with no ground in it. Everything either floats or falls and you learned which very early.

Standard: Vacuum, Evade, Perception, Athletics, Stealth, Conceal, Endurance, Customs

Professional: Pilot, Navigation, Survival, Mechanisms, Streetwise, Science (any)

Careers

Distribute 100 points among your career’s Standard skills, and choose up to three Professional skills from its list. No more than 15 into any one skill.

Every one of these includes Crossing. A character with Crossing is a first-through; a character without it is somebody else’s story.

Your knack suggests a career and does not dictate one. A Quick who works as a Doorwright is a slightly odd and very employable person.

Courier

The standard, and three-quarters of the service. Carrying books, carrying news, carrying whatever a hall hands you, across as many doors as the rota says.

Standard: Crossing, Customs, Influence, Perception, Evade, Insight, Deceit, Athletics

Professional: Commerce, Streetwise, Reading, Courtesy, Lore (a system), Acting

Pathfinder

First through a door that has moved, to find out where it goes now. The job the service is named for, and the one with the funerals.

Standard: Crossing, Perception, Vacuum, Endurance, Evade, Athletics, Willpower, Stealth

Professional: Survival, Navigation, Lore (anchors), Science (any), Track, Pilot

Doorwright

Housings, collars and load beds. A first-through who can read a door is worth three who cannot, and every hall in human space would like one.

Standard: Crossing, Perception, Brawn, Vacuum, Willpower, Endurance, Locale, Athletics

Professional: Mechanisms, Engineering, Lore (anchors), Craft (pressure fitting), Science (physics), Lockpicking

Lifeline

The ones sent when a hall calls for help. Evacuations, pressure casualties, and the carries nobody else will take.

Standard: Crossing, First Aid, Endurance, Athletics, Willpower, Perception, Brawn, Vacuum

Professional: Healing, Survival, Craft (any), Science (biology), Lore (a people), Track

Envoy

Carries people rather than books: negotiators, specialists, prisoners, the old. The most political job a fifteen-year-old can hold and the one with the best clothes.

Standard: Crossing, Influence, Insight, Customs, Willpower, Deceit, Perception, Dance

Professional: Courtesy, Oratory, Commerce, Lore (Tally procedure), Acting, Musicianship

Scout-runner

Speed as a profession. The ones sent when the answer has to be somewhere before anybody else’s answer is.

Standard: Crossing, Athletics, Evade, Endurance, Stealth, Perception, Vacuum, Unarmed

Professional: Acrobatics, Navigation, Survival, Streetwise, Track, Lore (a system)

The Knacks

“What’s your knack?” is the first thing one first-through asks another, and it is nosier than it sounds, because the answer tells you roughly how many times they have been through a door.

Where they come from

Three things have to be true, and the third is the one that costs.

You have to be born able to take it. Most people cannot. Most children, crossed once under supervision, simply fray like an adult — a bad week, a nosebleed, no knack, and they are never asked again. Perhaps one child in a few hundred builds instead of tearing. They are the ones who get taken up.

You have to be found. Every system tests, because every system needs couriers and no system can make them. The test is a short supervised crossing and back, and the halls do it at nine or ten, and the whole family comes.

And then you have to go through, over and over. A knack is not switched on at the test. It surfaces after a dozen crossings and deepens with every one after, and it deepens for exactly as long as your body is still mending the error — which is to say, it grows strongest in the years just before it stops growing at all.

Nobody has ever had a knack without crossing. Nobody has ever kept one after being landlocked; they go quiet within a year, and people describe losing them in the same words they use about losing a sense.

What they do

Knacks run in families of a kind, and the Threshold has names for them that the rest of the Causeway has mostly adopted.

The Listen. You can tell something about the far side before you step through — pressure, heat, whether there is air, whether there is a floor, whether anybody is standing there. It is not a picture and it is never detailed. It is the single most valuable thing a first-through can have, and it is the reason any of them survive a door that has moved.

The Hold. You can keep a door where it is, for a few minutes, with nothing but your attention. It is rare — rarer than anything else here — and in a galaxy where doors move without warning it is the most valuable human ability that exists. Holdings build machines to do what one child with the Hold does with her hands, and the machines are not as good.

The Quick. Reflex and speed past what a body should manage. Common, obvious, and the one every twelve-year-old in the Yards wants.

The Set. You take what should break you — falls, pressure, cold, a baton across the back — and get up. Also common, and the reason first-throughs have a reputation for being difficult to discourage.

The Reckoning. You always know precisely where you are and which way the door was, from the instant you arrive, while everybody else is still being sick on the deck plate. Unglamorous. Saves more lives than the Quick.

The Knowing. Hands and eye: you understand a mechanism by touching it. The Threshold’s engineers are made of this one.

The Read. You see what people are doing and about to do. Rare, resented, and very hard to live with.

At the table

Every character is built from scratch; there are no ready-made first-throughs. Pick one knack at creation and take the power it maps to. Rule ids below resolve in the engine’s rules graph — cite them on the sheet so get-rule can reach them mid-session.

The Hold is not available at creation. It is rarer than anything else here, and a fifteen-year-old who could pin a door would make the rest of the setting’s problems negotiable. It surfaces in play if it surfaces at all.

Everybody also has Life Support (magic/power-life-support), which is the weave and not the child: it takes the Limit External Power Source, because the suit can be taken off, taken away, or run out.

How many powers. Core powers are POW + INT on the tech-and-training branch: 12 or under gives 1, 13-20 gives 2, 21-30 gives 3, 31-40 gives 4, above 40 gives 5. The first Limit you accept buys a Boost; every Limit after that buys another core power.

Nothing here moves a person between places. Personal teleportation being impossible is the reason the Causeway matters at all, so no knack grants Teleport, Flight, Vaporous Form, Animation, Elemental Control or Energy Blast — and a third power slot left open at creation can never be filled with one.

What it costs

Every crossing deepens the knack and frays the body, and they are not two processes. They are one process, looked at from the two ends.

So the strongest first-through in any intake is always the one closest to being finished, and everybody can see it, and nobody says it.

You will be offered crossings you do not have to take. Some of them matter and some of them are a shortcut. The choosing is the whole job, and it is yours.

Skills in the Causeway

Mythras Imperative as written, with three changes and a Professional list that has had the swords taken out of it.

Standard skills

Every character has all of these at their base value.

The two swaps

Vacuum is moving and working outside: suit discipline, handholds, tethers, microgravity, and not dying of a torn glove. Every station child has some.

Crossing is the discipline of the door itself. Not the knack and not the fraying — the craft: how steady you are in the housing, how you hold it open, how you carry somebody who is frightened, how long you can keep going and how honestly you judge when to stop.

It is the one skill every first-through in human space has, and it is the one nobody else has at all. A character with Crossing is a first-through. That is what the word means.

Professional skills

Chosen three at a time, from Culture and from Career.

Reading is the one that only exists here. A reader can write into a fetch who consents and get it back out at the far end, and the trade of writing and the trade of reading dislike each other on principle.

No Magic skill. Nothing in this setting is magic, and the knacks are not a skill — see The Knacks.