Borrow Skill

for each additional level
Skill: Borrow Skill (IQ/Hard).
You can reach out and tap into the knowledge of the peo-
ple around you, temporarily gaining a skill or language. Roll
against your Borrow Skill skill to find the range of this abil-
ity. If successful, consult the Long-Distance Modifiers chart
(p. B241), reading your margin of success (as a negative num-
ber) on the Penalty column. If anyone within range has this
skill (GM’s call), you gain it temporarily; this takes seconds
equal to the number of points in the skill. Alternatively, if you
are in direct mental contact with a person, via other tele-
pathic or similar abilities, you may borrow from him, treat-
ing range as negligible. The “donor” does not lose the skill.
Nonetheless, if he has Mind Shield, he may choose to resist
this ability.
You lose this skill once you “overwrite” it with another skill,
or if the distance between you and the donor increases enough
to take that person out of range. If you wish to retain the skill
by actually learning it, you may reduce the required study time
by 10% if you borrow the skill for the entire time; this is cumu-
lative with Deep Study (Telepathy Perks, p. 63).
You can only learn normal skills and learnable advantages,
such as languages. This specifically excludes psionic skills,
spells, Imbuement Skills, etc. Your Telepathy Talent does not
add to any borrowed skills, though any appropriate normal
Talent will do so, of course.
At level 1, you can borrow the equivalent of 1 character
point (e.g., if you learned Finance, you would know it at IQ-2).
Each additional level lets you borrow 1 additional character
point. There is no limit, but note that you cannot have more
points in the skill than the person you’re borrowing it from
does. Since most people won’t have more than 4 points in a
skill, or 6 points in a language, it is rarely worth taking Borrow
Skill above level 6. (Treat a native speaker as having 6 points in
the language, even though it was technically free for him.)
You can buy Borrow Skill multiple times, allowing you to
learn more than one skill or language simultaneously. An easy
way to write this down is to note how many Borrow Skill abil-
ities you know, followed by the level of each in parentheses.
Example: Rita buys Borrow Skill three times, so she can
“learn” three skills at once. She buys the first Borrow Skill at
level 6 (good for languages), which costs 22 points; the second
at level 2, for 10 points; and the third at level 1, for 7 points.
She writes this on her character sheet as “Borrow Skill 3 (6, 2,
1) [39].”
Statistics: Telepathic Learn-
ing 1 (1) (Limited, No “special”
skills, -5%; Required IQ Roll,
-10%; Telepathy, -10%) [7]. Fea-
ture: Skill roll takes long-dis-
tance modifiers instead of
having a fixed range. Further
levels add +1 point [3/level].