Tags

A Tag is a character-bound unlock. It records something a character has lived through, earned, or been trusted with, and it opens a door that stays shut for everyone else; usually a character-creation option (an Origin, a Core, a Legacy) for a future character.

Three rules govern every Tag:

1. Tags belong to the character, not the player. They travel with the sheet.
2. Death loses them. If the character holding a Tag dies, every unbanked Tag dies with them; the only exceptions are Tags that explicitly trigger on death (see Special Tags).
3. Banking a Tag takes work. To hand a Tag down to a new character, the holder must first be advanced beyond Tier One; no retiring a fresh character just to cash the Tag in, and no "charging in all guns blazing" to free up the slot. Earn the exit.

Some effects interact with Tags directly; an Android's Nuronet Backup reload, for instance, scrambles away 50% of the character's Tags at random. Handle with care.

The Three Families

Origin Tags unlock playing that Origin with a new character. You cannot earn the Origin Tag of the Origin you are currently playing; you learn another people from the outside. (See Origins for how Origin Tags gate the playable races.)

Core Tags unlock taking that specialist Core with a new character; you watched a Breacher work, you carried her charges, you get to be one next time.

Legacy Tags unlock that Legacy at creation; a background becomes available to you because someone who lived it made you understand it.

Where Access Starts

A module's character-creation presets define the free picks; the Origins, Cores, and Legacies any player can take at the table without a Tag. (Cold Booting, for example, opens three Origins and its five local Legacies for free.) Everything outside the preset list needs the matching Tag. After your first character, the doors you walk through are the doors you earned.

Earning Tags

• Mission awards. Modules and GMs place Tags as mission rewards; completing the right job, saving the right person, surviving the wrong place.
• Lockdown Stories. During any Lockdown, a player may tell the table a story from their character's own Origin, Core, or Legacy; a real story, with a place and a cost, not a stat read-out. When they finish, they grant the matching Tag to one listening player's character. At most two players may tell stories in a single Lockdown, and a character may receive at most one Story Tag per Lockdown. Six hours in a sealed room is what stories are for.

Special Tags

Modules may mint Tags with printed effects of their own. The convention is square brackets and a one-line trigger. The first of them:

Wealthy — This character carries a paid-up life-insurance policy. When they die with the policy active, the payout finds its way to the player's next character; by descendancy, by corruption, or by an intergalactic clerical error nobody chooses to correct. Wealthy is the standing exception to rule 2: it only pays out on death.