When you can take a Legacy Knack you can select from these Knacks common to all Legacies. Each Knack can be taken as a TieredBoon (auto-scales per Tier: T1=1d4, T2=1d6, T3=1d8) or as a Boost (+5% flat, stackable if retaken).
Any Knack can be taken more than once as a Boost (+5% per take) instead of a TieredBoon. Retaking the same Knack stacks: twice = +10%, three times = +15%, all four = +20%.
Three people who owed money to the same loan shark lived on your corridor growing up. One morning you woke up and knew, before the screaming started, that today was collection day. Turns out when your survival depends on reading a room before you're old enough to spell "threat assessment," your nervous system does the reading for you. You don't predict the future. You just notice the present faster than most people.
Effect: TieredBoon to Espionage - Search checks when detecting ambushes or hidden threats.
Your first job was returning defective black-market goods to a vendor who didn't accept returns and settled disputes with a rivet gun. You walked out with a full refund and a drink recommendation. You're not charming; charm implies effort. You just happen to say the thing that makes people forget they were angry. It's a gift. It's also why you have no savings, because you keep talking yourself into terrible ideas.
Effect: TieredBoon to Espionage - Social checks.
You spent your childhood losing at Sovereign, the officers' wargame, to a retired UNI-NAV tactician who lived three doors down and had nothing better to do than humiliate children. You lost four hundred games before you won one. "Congratulations," he said. "Now do it when someone's shooting at you." You haven't yet. But you keep counting exits.
Effect: TieredBoon to Intel - Street Smarts checks.
The housing blocks on Luna-7 had paper-thin walls and neighbours who reported everything to building management for credit incentives. Cooking after hours? Report. Music above a whisper? Report. Existing too loudly near the ventilation shaft? Believe it or not, report. You learned to move like a ghost because noise was a luxury your family's credit rating couldn't afford. You still flinch when doors slam.
Effect: TieredBoon to Espionage - Stealth checks.
Variable gravity makes for interesting childhoods. Section C ran at 0.6G, the cargo decks at full standard, and the maintenance tunnels, where you definitely weren't supposed to be, fluctuated based on whatever the station's antique AG plating felt like doing that hour. Your body adapted or your body broke. Yours adapted. You're not winning any sponsored races, but you can outrun most problems, which statistically is more useful.
Effect: TieredBoon to Movement - Athletics & Climbing checks.
The shuttle you were supposed to be on depressurised over Callisto. You missed it because a street vendor shorted you on change and you went back to argue about it. NERD ran the numbers once; a probability analyst flagged your incident-avoidance rate as "a statistical anomaly consistent with pre-cognitive bias or, more likely, a data entry error." They closed the file. You're still alive. The analyst transferred departments.
Effect: Once per Mission, re-roll one failed skill check and take the better result.
The doctors on Titan called it "atypical mnemonic retention" and wrote a paper about you without asking. Your mother had the same thing, could recite cargo manifests from years back, which is how she caught the embezzlement that got her fired for "creating a hostile work environment." You can't always control what your brain archives. Serial numbers, faces, the colour of a stranger's shoes three stations ago, it's all just in there, whether you want it or not.
Effect: TieredBoon to Intel checks (any sub-skill).
Three generations of your family have made a living pulling dead machinery apart and selling the organs to people who bolt them onto something else. You knew which end of a servo wrench was the bitey one before you lost your first tooth. You're not an engineer; you're the person an engineer calls when they need someone who isn't scared of the sparky bit to hold the thing steady while they do the clever part.
Effect: TieredBoon to Engineering - Repair checks.
You drew schematics in the margins of your schoolwork. Your teachers called it "disruptive." The engineering instructor who pulled you aside after class called it "surprisingly viable, but for the love of god stop using pen." You see solutions sideways. Not better; just different. The kind of different that either saves everyone or costs a fortune. Usually both, within the same hour.
Effect: TieredBoon to Engineering - Rigging checks.
They tried to medicate it out of you. Didn't take. When something hooks your attention, a lock mechanism, a firing sequence, a structural flaw, the universe narrows to a tunnel and you just work. Someone once set off a fire suppression system in the same room and you didn't notice until the foam hit your neck. The lock was open, though. The lock is always open.
Effect: Once per Mission, gain Boost(+5%) to one skill check you spend a full round Focusing on.
You don't talk about what happened. The people who were there don't talk about it either, mostly because they work for an organisation that would prefer the whole event stay redacted. What you brought home from that experience is a stare that makes interrogators uncomfortable and an almost pathological inability to do things you don't want to do. Pharmaceutical persuasion, coercion, good-cop-bad-cop, you've developed antibodies.
Effect: +1 Willpower (one-off stat bump).
Your aunt was CORSEC; interrogation division, the quiet floor where the lights were always too bright and the chairs were always too hard. Over family dinners she'd quiz you on micro-expressions. "That waiter's lying about the special. How do I know?" Pupil dilation. Breathing. The weight shift before someone commits to a bad decision. You're not psychic. You just had a childhood that doubled as an observational psychology course.
Effect: TieredBoon to Espionage - Social checks when reading intentions or detecting deception.
Ganymede market district rules: the sticker price is a threat, not a promise. You cut your teeth bartering for rations, passage, and once, memorably, a light freighter that turned out to be stolen from a FOFT subsidiary. The negotiation was brilliant. The due diligence was not. You still maintain you got a good deal, because you're measuring value in experience gained rather than warrants issued.
Effect: TieredBoon to Intel - Marketeering checks.
You've broken bones that healed crooked and kept your shift. You've taken hits that should've put you in medical and walked to the canteen instead. The doctors wrote "abnormally high pain tolerance" in your file. Your drill sergeant wrote "too stupid to fall over." Your file is now three inches thick and mostly consists of X-rays that make medical students wince. You're not proud of it. You just don't have time to be hurt right now.
Effect: +3 HITS (one-off).
Small-time identity work on tourist stations; nothing violent. New face, new accent, new walk. You learned that people don't see what's in front of them; they see what they expect to see. Walk like maintenance, carry a clipboard, nobody asks questions. Walk like money, nod at security, they nod back. The trick isn't the disguise. The trick is conviction. You once walked into a restricted CONFED facility wearing a borrowed jumpsuit and a confident expression. Walked out too. Still have the jumpsuit.
Effect: TieredBoon to Espionage - Stealth checks when using disguise or blending in.
Your family kept one weapon; cleaned it every Sunday, locked it in a case that required two biometric scans and a prayer. Not a collection. Just the gun. The one your grandfather carried, and his mother before him. You grew up stripping, cleaning, and reassembling that weapon before you were tall enough to fire it. You know its weight distribution the way other people know their own heartbeat. You're not a walking armoury. You're just very, very familiar with one particular way to kill someone.
Effect: TieredBoon to one Weapons skill of your choice (chosen when this knack is taken, locked).
You don't know why the cargo manifest feels wrong. You just know it does, and when they crack the crate, you're vindicated and everyone else is embarrassed. Corporate psych eval flagged it as "accelerated subconscious pattern matching." Your crew calls it "that creepy thing you do where you ruin everyone's day by being right." You'd apologise, but the last time you ignored the feeling, someone lost a leg.
Effect: TieredBoon to Espionage - Search checks.
Born on a station with AG plating that flickered off twice a day like a budget lightbulb. Everyone on Deck 9 learned to grab a handhold mid-sentence, mid-meal, mid-argument. Weightlessness isn't disorienting to you. It's home. While ground-born recruits are fumbling with mag-boots and turning green, you're already across the room, upside down relative to them, wondering what all the fuss is about.
Effect: TieredBoon to Movement - Flying / 0-G checks.
You played competitive tactical sims. An embarrassing, career-jeopardising amount of tactical sims. Your handle was moderately famous in three systems and your sleep schedule was a war crime. But somewhere between the ranked ladders and the 3AM replay analysis, you developed a genuine instinct for positioning, resource management, and "oh god, don't stack up on that doorway." You've never commanded real troops. But you've never entered a room without counting the exits.
Effect: TieredBoon to Intel - Street Smarts checks involving tactical assessment or planning.
You read spreadsheets the way some people read faces; trends, outliers, that one decimal point that shouldn't be there. You developed this particular affliction processing shipping manifests for a logistics outfit that definitely wasn't a front for anything. The data was always clean. The conclusions you drew from it were not, which is why you no longer work in logistics and why two mid-level FOFT managers are no longer at large.
Effect: TieredBoon to Systems - Sensors checks when analysing data feeds or detecting anomalies.
Most people fight like gravity is a given. You trained in a converted cargo hold where the AG plating was sold for scrap six years ago; just you, the instructor, and Newton's third law in its purest, most humbling form. You know how to throw a punch without corkscrewing into the far wall, how to use a bulkhead as a launch pad, and how to redirect someone who was sure they had you pinned. You still have the bruises from learning. Everyone does. The ones who quit have fewer.
Effect: TieredBoon to attack rolls (toHit) when fighting in zero-G environments.
Dock workers, alien traders, encrypted military chatter on frequencies that shouldn't have been broadcasting in the clear; your brain hoovers up grammatical structures the way other people hum songs they heard once. You're not fluent in everything. But give you a week of exposure and you'll be conversational. Give you a month and you'll be closing deals in someone else's mother tongue, which either impresses people or makes them very nervous. Turns out how you say something matters more than what you say when the other party's deciding whether to shoot you.
Effect: TieredBoon to Espionage - Social checks.
You're not a doctor. You're the person who kept being the closest to the first aid kit when things went sideways, and eventually the knowledge just stuck. Decompression bruising, radiation burns, the specific way blood pools in zero-G that means "this is fine" versus "we have about four minutes." You've seen the ugly, specific things that vacuum and radiation do to the human body, and you know the ugly, specific things that keep it running. Your bedside manner needs work. Your triage doesn't.
Effect: TieredBoon to Medic - Triage checks.
You grew up navigating a station that was built by committee across three centuries; where Deck 7 connects to Deck 12 through a maintenance hatch that isn't on any official schematic, and the "approved" route takes forty minutes through two security checkpoints and a broken escalator. You build maps in your head the way other people build resentment toward their employers: automatically, constantly, and with surprising accuracy.
Effect: TieredBoon to Intel - Astrography & Navigation checks.
You can flip, spin, redirect, and arrive at the correct wall with a fluidity that makes ground-born people deeply uncomfortable. It's not training; or rather, it wasn't intentional training. It was growing up in a micrograv habitat where the shortest route between any two points involved at least one wall push-off and a prayer. You move through weightlessness the way fish move through water: automatically, instinctively, and with a vague sense of superiority toward creatures that can't.
Effect: TieredBoon to Movement - Acrobatics & Jumping checks in zero-G environments.
You've logged more hours staring at star charts than most people spend on all their hobbies combined. Every port, every transit route, every gravitational anomaly that turned a three-day haul into a two-week disaster; it's all filed in your head, cross-referenced and annotated. You read astronomical data for fun. Your crewmates think you're strange. Your navigator thinks you're indispensable. You think they're both right.
Effect: TieredBoon to Intel - Astrography & Navigation checks.
Your parent ran the only pharmacy on a mining station three jumps from the nearest hospital. You grew up sorting pill bottles by colour before you could read the labels, memorising contraindication charts because they were on the wall above the toilet, and learning exactly which stim cocktail keeps a 140kg miner vertical for a double shift without cardiac arrest. You know dosages, interactions, and the creative applications of things that are technically legal in most jurisdictions. The word "technically" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
Effect: TieredBoon to Medic - Pharmaceutical checks.