If you want to get detailed about a particular kind of training or talent, you can create a stunt family for it. This is a group of stunts that are related to and chain off of each other somehow.
This allows you to create things like fighting styles or elite schools in your setting and represents the benefits of belonging to them. It also helps you get specific about what types of specialized competencies are available, if you want to give your game a sense of having distinct “character classes”— so there might be an “Ace Pilot” or a “Cat Burglar” family of stunts.
Creating a stunt family is easy. You make one stunt that serves as a prerequisite for all the others in the family, qualifying you to take further stunts up the chain. Then, you need to create a handful of stunts that are all related somehow to the prerequisite, either stacking the effects or branching out into another set of effects.
Stacking Effects
Perhaps the simplest way of handling a related stunt is just making the original stunt more effective in the same situation:
• If the stunt added an action, narrow it further and give the new action a bonus. Follow the same rules for adding a bonus—the circumstances in which it applies should be narrower than that of the base action.
• If the stunt gave a bonus to an action, give an additional +2 bonus to the same action or add an additional two-shift effect to that action.
• If the stunt made a rules exception, make it even more of an exception. (This might be difficult depending on what the original exception is. Don’t worry, you have other options.)
Keep in mind that the upgraded stunt effectively replaces the original. You can look at it as a single super-stunt that costs two slots (and two refresh) for the price of being more powerful than other stunts.
Here are some stunts that stack:
• Advanced Warmaster. (requires Warmaster) When you’re fighting anyone who is armed with a sword, you get a further +2 bonus to creating an advantage using Warmaster.
• Scion of the Court. (requires Child of the Court) When you overcome an obstacle with Child of the Court, you may additionally create a situation aspect that describes how the general attitude turns in your favor. If anyone wants to try and get rid of this aspect, they must overcome Fair (+2) opposition.
• Advanced Ritualist. (requires Ritualist) You gain a +2 bonus when you use Lore in place of another skill during a challenge. This allows you to use Lore twice in the same challenge.
Branching Effects
When you branch, you create a new stunt that relates to the original in terms of theme or subject matter, but provides a wholly new effect. If you look at stacking effects as expanding a stunt or skill vertically, you can look at branching effects as expanding them laterally.
If your original stunt added an action to a skill, a branching stunt might add a different action to that skill, or it might provide a bonus to a different action the skill already has, or create a rules exception, etc. The mechanical effect isn’t connected to the prerequisite stunt at all, but provides a complementary bit of awesome.
This allows you to provide a few different paths to being awesome that follow from a single stunt. You can use this to highlight different elements d of a certain skill and help characters who are highly ranked in the same skill differentiate from each other by following different stunt families.
As an example of how this works, let’s take a look at the Deceive skill. If you look at the skill description, there are several avenues that we might enhance with stunts: lying, sleight of hand and misdirection, disguise, creating cover stories, or social conflict.
So let’s make our first stunt something like this:
• Fast Talk. You get a +2 to overcome obstacles with Deceive, provided you don’t have to talk to the person you’re trying to deceive for more
than a few sentences before blowing past them.
Here are some potential options for branching off of that stunt:
• Quick Disguise. (requires Fast Talk.) You’re able to put together a con vincing disguise in a heartbeat, using items from your surroundings. You can
roll Deceive to create a disguise without any time to prepare, in nearly any situation.
• Instant Cover. (requires Fast Talk.) You can whip up a cover story like no one’s business, even if you haven’t made an effort to establish it beforehand. Any time you overcome an obstacle in public using Deceive, automatically add a situation aspect representing your cover
story, and stick a free invocation on it.
• Hey, What’s That? (requires Fast Talk.) Gain a +2 bonus whenever you’re using Deceive to momentarily distract someone, as long as part of the distraction involves saying something.
Every one of those stunts thematically relates to very quick, spontaneous uses of Deceive, but they each have a different flavor of awesome.
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