Flashing back, you don't know if Adventure! can be found on this planet or that - Use your dowsing rod!

Dowsers are people looking for something; usually, they find it. The determining factor in [i]what[/i] they find is dependent on what they're satisfied with, and what they're looking for. The trick is being absolutely committed to finding it, no matter what - otherwise "not found" is the steady-state and you don't find it.

Core Value:
Dowsing for "____" - This is your determination to find ____, and what it is you're looking for. Use it defend from giving up your dowsing rod, to give up looking, etc. It's also somewhat representative of the severity of what you're looking for; a low CV in "Dowsing For Adventure" means you're happy with simple adventures; a high one represents the adventures that change worlds.

Benefit: (Suggested)
Divide your CV by 2, rounding down. You can ask your GM which way to go, to find that thing, that many time a session. If you take a Theme Descriptor meaning something like "Found it!", you get a free twist to spend on it.

Here's the gist: You can use an oracle to have a conversation with the version of yourself that had a different day, if you do it right, but it's tricky and takes a particular attitude. Also, it'll need adjusting if you use a different model of temporal communication, but I think the basics are sound given that the Ts work.

Okay, so, you have a cycle time. Say, a day. At the beginning of everyday you "download" (although it's literally a read) information from your buffer, which corresponds to different possible futures.
At the end of day, you open the packets and have a conversation with the yous of different possible days, which at that point are all "virtual"

Now, there are issues. At this point we've resovled (checked that this works) in most places, but I've got some new ones:

At some point, the possible future that sent that particular information no longer exists; what happens to that portion of the buffer? What happens to that information?

On that note, we're dealing with two different methods of using Oracle buffers, the observer effect and the aiming effect, both of which, I think, must necessarily work differently…

Anyway, I'm damn sure this works, and it might work really weirdly, but I'm certain it works.

Stop caring. What's the difference between someone convincing you of something using an argument, and using metatech? What's the problem with a drug changing you over time? People change - and they change because of what they've come into contact with.

Heterolinguists attempt to cut themselves off from this, because they fear it. Collectors think that these attempts are both way to drastic and eventually doomed to failure anyway, so why cut yourself off so much from everyone else? Well, you know what they say - if you can't beat them, join them.

If you can't protect yourself from all the metatech "diseases" out there, invite them in. All of them.

At some point all the pulling equals out. Absorb the memesphere. Long cat is long.

—-
Partial inspiration to Pneumonica's Qualia lenses; "embed a metatech virus in a popular lens, and you get something that slowly changes the user into something else every time they use it." Alright… don't normal drugs do that? And isn't that kinda true of everything?

The Artisans edit their minds to be more creative. The Heterolinguists edit their minds to protect themselves from memetics. The Tritogeneia edit their minds for the sake of editing their minds.

“Tritogeneia” refers to the Greek god Athena. Specifically, her birth from Zeus’s head (near the river Triton). It embodies the ideals of the Tritogeneia, who seek to create (and become) entirely new people by editing their minds.

Tritogeneia modify their minds to adapt to any situation they come across. If a person needs to be a skilled orator, they may pick up a lens in it. A Tritogeneia would also permanently modify their personality to enjoy orating and deeply believe what they are saying… even if they normally wouldn’t. Moreover, most people treat skill lenses as tools. Tritogeneia treat them as real modifications to their minds, something to be embraced as part of themselves. They intentionally build the lenses into their minds, improving and personalizing them organically.

All this editing comes with a price, although the Tritogeneia rarely see it that way. Every Tritogeneia character has edited out some undesirable part of their personality, such as their anxiety, fear, hatred, sadness, frustration, or boredom. Logician Tritogeneia often edit out distractions such as the ability to perceive music, hunger, tiredness, or pain.

Tritogeneia are most common among the Logicians and Stardwellers. Some younger Stored have experimented with Tritogeneia, often with disasterous results. Masqueraders consider Tritogeneia anathema, as it destroys a person’s identity.

Their symbol is a neuron crossed with a wrench, combining the cellular symbol of consciousness with the ancient symbol of engineering. Or, as their detractors describe it, the symbol of the “wrench in the works”.

Benefit:
Tritogeneia have a minimum Cognitech of 6. If their civilization does not support Cognitech 6, they will have to sell out to reach it. Given a week, Tritogeneia may increase the level of any profession lens by 1, and give it 2 reserve. This may only be done once for each lens. Tritogeneia characters start with up to three lenses improved in this way.
In addition, Tritogeneia characters must have at least one theme related to their ability to edit their personality to adapt to any situation. They get one additional twist each session which can only be spent on those theme(s).
Tritogeneia must have an undesirable part of their personality edited out.

Example themes effects
Plot Immunity: The Tritogeneia can edit their skills to be whatever is needed at the moment. Complications often involve additional personality flaws.
Intrigue: The Tritogeneia has several spy personalities and often makes new ones on the fly.
Empathy / Magnetism / Romance: The Tritogeneia can edit his/her personality to best mesh with the immediate person / group. This can result in some really bad feelings later, when he/she changes again.
Comprehension: The Tritogeneia can modify him/herself to think the same way as the people he/she is up against, predicting their actions. Complications usually involve changing core values to match the enemy.

Core Value: Adaptability - Tritogeneia value the ability to mentally adapt to any situation. In addition, they may use this to prevent someone from convincing them not to edit their own minds in response to events. As the Tritogeneia view it, adaptability is the opposite of the Masquerader idea of Identity.

While humanity has met (and created) alien life, some just can't leave it alone and want to create new intelligent alien forms of life. To that end, they have tinker with the genes and neurology of likely candidate animals. The goal is to create a new intelligent, but non-human species, uplifting them. Their biggest problem with earlier efforts is that they include human genetic material and not a new species. They have disparaged many of these as 'Stardweller cousins.'

Likely Candidates

• Chimpanzees
• Gorillas
• Orangutangs
• Baboons
• Barbary Apes
• Parrots
• Dolphins
• Orcas
• Octopi
• Ravens
• Otters
• Racoons
• Pigs
• Coyotes

Their efforts are controversial at best, partly from previous efforts (everyone remembers the AIA and the Transcendentals), but also due to the morality of it. Is it right to create a new child species that can and will compete with humanity? Or possibly our successors? It is a controversial decision.

Then there are the failures. For every success they've had there are hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals that are semi-functional, insane, doomed to mental collapse or with serious physiological defects. Some of these are cared for as best the Uplifters can. Others are euthanized. This alone makes them wanted criminals in some civilizations. And the successes are disturbing - they take animals that are familiar to humanity and make them very strange. Instead of understandable aliens, they wind up with entities that are partially understandable (and in some cases very competitive), which is incredibly frustrating.

Emblem: Neural network with the ascent of man superimposed on it.

Core Value: Uplift, or that mankind should create its successors and companions.

Benefits: +2 to Biotech Researcher and Engineer and Cognitech for uplift research purposes.

Edit: Implemented change ideas based on Colin and TauCeti's comments.

Transapients get the Core Value “Superiority”. This may be used to prevent following orders, but also makes it easier for others to convince the transcapient to ignore orders (especially from Ts). It also protects against being convinced that the Transapient is in any way inferior to someone else.
Transapients must always sell out for at least 1 point. At the beginning of each session, the Transcapient's player may opt to trade in their twist for a +1 in every capability (to a maximum of 11). This does not increase the character's reserve, only his/her/its score.

"Frontiers" mean something different in galactic societies. Planets aren't being methodically colonized by most Civilizations - they jump from one system to one many light years away without settling the intermediary steps because certain planets seem more "useful" than others. The "frontier" of a Civilization might be all over the place, and Civilizations may well be threaded well into each other when looked at on a star chart. The "frontier" is anyplace no Civilization actively claims. These are the places that Traversers go to live.

They also form the first layer of trade relation between Civilizations, because while the Civilizations might have official trade negotiations, these generally account for a small percentage of the total product influx/outflow. The majority of it comes from the Traverser frontier settlers, who trade for useful supplies with each other. The Traverse was founded in part based on rules of negotiation and approach between settlers so that hostilities are kept minimal. As such, even Traversers who belong to Civilizations at war might negotiate with each other for trade, sometimes with the irony of the trade knowledges being used against the ones they got it from.

Benefit: Traversers gain +1 Twist, but only for Empathy Themes. Traversers also have access to "Conestoga" type space craft, capable of carrying a family and enough goods for that family to settle another world, making them good for small-quantity technical barter. They can also exceed one of their Capability limits by 1 without suffering the "sell-out" penalty to their Themes.

Core Values: The Boundary Traverse Core Value is Frontier Spirit. Traversers want to deal with other cultures and civilizations, rather than merely deal with only their own people. They want to find strange, possibly desolate places. They want to see the strange vistas of the world. More importantly, they want to settle those places and have their kids there. This might not keep them from shooting at anybody who approaches "their" time-space, but it will get them willing to talk before delivering a killing blow.

Ted was a dreamer, and dreamed of traveling the stars, creating realities, swimming threw nebulae, knowing the satisfaction of the Union, the exhilarating lack of guidance of the Independents…
Ted was a philosopher in an age of possibilities, held in a cocoon where such things remained amazing. Ted wondered - what if I had been born a girl? What if I had been born a cripple? Poor? Rich? A Replicant? A Roamer?

But Ted was patient, so he bought a mesh and lived a long, contented and unremarkable life on Sturgeon. He died holding onto his dreams.

Then he reincarnated.

THE REBORN
You can't make a perfect copy of a person with mesh, but you can make a pretty good copy if you give it a decade or two. What about an entire lifetime? What about two entire lifetimes? That's what the Reborn do, and Ted was the first to think of it. Clone yourself as a baby, implant your old mesh. Technological Reincarnation. Sure, there are going to be some losses, some changes - but hey, nothing's perfect.

CV: "Reborn: ???" This CV acts weirdly. All Reborn had a reason to, but those reasons don't usually match up. Regardless, you don't reincarnate if you don't have a good reason.

Advantages: First, all Reborn get a mesh. Secondly, and here's the doozy - You get an entire extra lifetime for Professions. GM Options: You-relearn them extra fast. They're unique proficiency lenses - no reserve, but the only way someone could be a familiar with the "lens" is if they knew you last time around.

BACK TO TED…
But Ted didn't just reincarnate. Nope. Ted sold his idea to the Patent Office when he first thought of it, around the age of twelve, and became secretly rich. Which was the plan. After all, he wasn't just going to live an extra lifetime, he was going to live hundreds. What if he'd been born a girl after all, eh?

MANY BORN -
Ever wondered what life would have been like if….? There's a way to find out! Reincarnate twice! Thrice! Ten times! Twenty! Sure, it's expensive, but it's life, isn't it worth it? The Many born are actually very different from the many-reborn, although it's very typical to have both. The Manyborn process starts before the birth of the "new" individuals, with the "elder" setting up the situations for the clones, picking wheres, whats, ages, sexes, civilizations, etc, etc. It's a tricky process to get right and the Many-born Society goes to a lot of meta tech effort to get what it's members are after.

CV: "Manyborn: ????" - Another duet. You don't Manybirth without a reason, but, more particularly, you're just playing one of the Manyborn. What's this one doing? Doctor, serial killer? Investor? "Manyborn" also means that you're going to survive until your Convention, in some shape or another.

Advantage: Mesh. A destiny, be it good, bad, vague or specific, you wanted yourself to have a life starting here / going there / hitting that bump.

TEDCON:
But Ted wasn't done yet. Not at all, in fact. He'd reincarnated himself into hundreds of different situations with hundreds of subtle variations on himself, and set a date. Fifty years. Fifty years of life, and the strangest convention ever held. After all, what's the point of many-birthing if you never compare the different lives? All of the Teds, everywhere, left and converged on a rented chunk of a Stardweller Convention space (the particular chunk that had been designed by a Ted), and spent the next five years "catching up".

Ted himself has kept this pattern up for generations, versions that die early freezing themselves until the entire generation can merge using adapted technologies, reincarnating into one Ted, who then sets up for the next generation of Manyborn Theodore.

"We are dreamers, shapers, singers, and makers. We study the mysteries of laser and circuit, crystal and scanner, holographic demons and invocations of equations. These are the tools we employ, and we know many things."
Galen, “The Geometry of Shadows,” Babylon 5

Are they con-men? Scoundrels? Entertainers? Scientists? Engineers? Mystics? Pranksters? Sacred clowns? Ask a technomagus this question and the answer will be a smiling "Yes."

They are an ancient organization with links back to the early 20th century magical societies of amateur and professional illusionists, as well as enthusiasts. Over the centuries, elements of these ancestral organizations became interested in merging the potential of advanced technology with performance, and even more the psychology of performance. In time, these elements split off to form their own organization, as they believed more and more of their own press, which has come down to the present day as the Technomagi (Technomagus, singular).

"Do not try the patience of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger."
Galen, “The Geometry of Shadows,” Babylon 5

They routinely use advanced technology to create the appearance of magic. They delight in bringing wonder and joy to others, and have no qualms about striking terror into the hearts of those that would harm them. To these ends they have evolved their own Ten Technomantic Virtues: Mystery, Majesty, Wonder, Beauty, Humor, Solidarity, Secrecy, Science, Spontaneity and Knowledge. Needless to say, these virtues conflict with each other and many technomagi follow a few virtues over the others.

Technomagi are adept with nanotech, metatech and cognitech - they typically have high values for their civilizations - and use them to good effect in their performances and day-to-day life. They are alert, social, intelligent and quick-witted, and usually, their actions reflect this.

Technomagi come from many walks of life - scientist, entertainer, clown, criminal, engineer, hobbyist, priest, policeman to name a few - and a multitude of civilizations. All of them bring a sense of wonder and insights into human nature and the universe to the Technomagi. Technomagi organize themselves into semi-secret rings, based around the members that are in proximity to each other.

Technomagi can be found among all civilizations (even the Cargo Cults) save the Logicians and the Old Worlders. They are relatively common among the Roamers. They sometimes come into conlfict with Organized Crime, but otherwise get along with almost anyone.

Common additional Core Values for Technomagi can be drawn from the Ten Technomatic Virtues.

Attributed to Technomagi

When it is necessary to dissemble, do so quickly.

---

There are times and places for tact, and times and places where tact is entirely misplaced.

---

If your friends can see through your act, expect the blow from your enemies at any moment.

---

Always make your lie the lie the listeners want to tell themselves.

---

Be aware of intentions - others and your own.

---

Self-creation is the highest art.

---

A fool and his money were lucky to get together in the first place.

---

I never cheated anyone honest, only rascals. They wanted something for nothing. I gave them nothing for something.

---

Luck favors the prepared mind.

---

One of these days in your travels, someone will come up to you and show you a new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this individual will offer to bet you that the Jack of Spades will jump out of the deck and squirt cider in your ear. But, do not take this bet, for as sure as you are standing there, you are going to end up with an earful of cider.

---

Looking foolish does the spirit good. So, its best for all concerned if you consider this a good deed.

---

Take all of the fools out of the world and there wouldn't be any fun living in it. Or profit.

---

The dark side of wonder is terror.

Requirements: Minimum nanotech, metatech and cognitech scores of 4, neural mesh.

Core Value: Technomagery, or using science and technology to seemingly accomplish the impossible through magic.

Benefit: Technomage skill at 4. A technomage may create a deception of any complexity. It is easier if the targets expect, fear, or desire the apparent event, as they will convince themselves. Technomagery overlaps with Art (performance), Criminal (con man), and Media (marketing). It also confers familiarity with the techniques and technology behind such deceptions, making them somewhat easier to spot. They also gain access to the rings of Technomagi, which are peers and collaborators on entertainments and watching each others backs.

The Razorboys are an anti-masculine hate group. Seeing that a female child can be produced by the merger of two female zygotes, and that men are the "warmaking gender", and a whole host of largely-irrelevant, mostly-wrong, but emotionally-provocative data, the Razorboys have decided that males are obsolete, and that women have the sole right to life. What sets the Razorboys apart is their nature - the hate group is entirely male. Feeling dispossessed or disempowered, the Razorboys have justified their feelings by validating them. To them, men should be the final bastion of war, a war fought by that gender against itself. Once masculinity has been annihilated, there will be no more war, no more violence, and no more needless upheaval in civilization.

Personally, the Razorboys are sad and frightening at the same time. They are haunted by their own masculinity - although the biotechnology that can alter their gender is well within their grasp, they feel as though their masculinity runs "far deeper" than anything a surgeon could fix. They are intelligent terrorists who conceal themselves behind their protectiveness of the "purity" of women, often assuming feminine styles. There are a large number of transgender and transvestite Razorboys, even if they do feel they can't truly escape their birth gender.

It is in their operations that Razorboys become frightening. Nanophage blooms that target Y chromosomes, anti-male memetic attacks, hacked and mass-distributed lenses to make males seem less desireable in society, and other terrorist actions are all commonplace for the Razorboys. The Razorboys are one of the most active cross-Civilization terrorist organizations in the galaxy. They can be found in such diverse roles as the Tao of History (where whole gender-role environments have been intensified yet reversed), Replicants (where several terrorist acts are directed at the "source" for male Replicants), and the Union (nobody goes to the Union Razorboy world, ever, and nobody lets them leave the system they're in).

The Razorboy symbol is the astrological symbol for Mars, but pointing downwards like Venus and with an "x" marking out the circle.

Benefit: Razorboys are immune to Empathy, Romance, or other Themes of friendship, camaraderie, or appreciation by men. Women, on the other hand, gain a +1 bonus to any Empathy, Romance, or other Themes of friendship, camaraderie, or appreciation when used against a Razorboy. All Razorboys must be identifiable in some way as "male", however that identification is made.

Core Value: Self-Loathing. More than anything else, Razorboys hate themselves, and they subjugate and validate that hate by hating others more than they hate themselves. Their self-loathing manifests in their despise of anything that reminds them of themselves, namely men, and especially men whom they recognize as being like themselves.

A Replicant Cognitechnician named Varia Secundus at one point was studying the decision process of a person who was choosing between an apple or a splarama to eat when she suddenly had an epiphany. She had a machine that could track which synapse fired to start the chain reaction that led to the subject to eat the splarama rather than the apple. She could even determine with scientific falsifiability that the subject happened to really like splaramas, and had already determined that his pleasure at the splarama originated from this one synaptic cluster. Then it occurred to her – why was that one cluster always firing? Why did it fire to begin with? Why those specific synapses in that cluster? What made them fire? More importantly, if that cluster was so prone to firing, why sometimes wouldn’t it fire the same way, meaning why would he sometimes pick an apple when he preferred splarama?

The question would lead to a bout of obsessive behavior bordering on madness by Varia Secundus. The rest of her stopped wanting to be around her, and eventually refused to merge with her, citing that she had “diverged too greatly”. At that point, she left the Replicants entirely and went elsewhere, eventually traveling with Taoists, Spacefarers, and a host of other individuals who were willing to listen to her “wild” ideas.

To her, there was still magic in the world, one final riddle that science could not solve. The question was this: why did the synapse fire? The answer, as far as Varia could determine, was this: because its owner chose for it to. That was the magic, and was why humanity reached to the stars and whales went extinct. Humanity could choose an apple or a splarama.

This became a strange theosophical religion, especially popular with many Civilizations, with their “prayer” being meditations to try to become more closely in touch with the “decision-making soul” latent within every human being. They are most popular among Spacefarers and Cargo Cults (for widely antithetical reasons), but can also be found among Taoists and the Stored. Strangely, Logicians are often highly interested in this faith, and practice it with a fervor that almost seems irrational. There are no Unionist Humanists at all.

The Temple of the Human Soul’s symbol is the image of an unaltered human, typically naked and standing upright, hands at sides, or perhaps two humans, one of each gender. This holy symbol has several variations – a single hermaphrodite, a wildly inhuman mechanism with a human silhouette, and in more than a few cases an image of the person wearing it. The common factor is a naked human shape.

Benefits: Humanists are ennobled rather than debased by their own augmentation. To them, the human soul doesn’t rest in the synapses but is a force immediately behind them, and therefore switching out the synapses for something even more effective isn’t debasing the human being at all. Thus, they gain an additional point to spend on Themes, above what they get as a consequence of their Capabilities.

Core Value: Freedom. A Humanist’s greatest strength (and perhaps greatest weakness) is his or her ability to choose, and the lowliest sin imaginable is for someone to steal the free will of another. They despise Unionists, incidentally, but are less put off by Group-Minds (though Humanists and Group-Minds still don’t get along).

As a note, a few of the Civs in the New Civ contest would also be good candidates, but I'm hesitant to insert them not knowing which will make it into the final cut. As one final note, I'm not certain of the Theme bonus - I'll have to pour over the books a bit more. I know I want them to have some kind of Theme bonus, but I don't know if two points is right.

Abstractionists believe that each culture is a living organism no more bizarre than a temporally-dispersed artificial intelligent or an inorganic life form. They form their own social orders and they have their own ecologies (technically, economies). Their mouths are consumer goods (which are, indeed, the things that do the consuming), and their food is money. The people that compose them are their blood, and contracts and laws are their nervous systems.

Abstractionists will fight for the rights of these "abstract life forms". While this is actually beneficial for Patent Office workers (it makes them more dedicated to protecting the rights of a corporation if the corporation is actually a living entity), it can lead to some problems. In one noteworthy terrorist act, a group of Abstractionists transformed a group of Unionists into members of a Civilization that was in a rapid decline as a sort of "emergency organ transplant".

The Abstractionist symbol is a stylized version of an old-world paper scroll contract with an eye peering out from it. Although the Abstractionists rather like the Transcendentals, they have little to do with those worthies simply because everybody already knows they're intelligent - it's the resident intelligence in subcultures taken as a whole that lack recognition. Of all civilizations and societies, most Abstractionists believe that Unionists and Group-Minds aren't abstract life forms. Group-Minds aren't because they aren't abstract or social (this is an almost universal belief), and Unionists don't because they are functional group minds of their own (this idea spurs some controversy among Abstractionists).

Benefit: When you've spent your life doing what you can to carry on a conversation with patriotism, there's no form of life that will truly astonish you. While Abstractionists can be startled by unexpected traits in cultures and intelligences, they aren't easily fuddled. They do not suffer penalties when dealing with bizarre or esoteric cultures, traditions, practices, or ways of thinking. Although they aren't able to bypass the Heterolinguist's defense against memetics, they need only interact with the Heterolinguist for a while to know how do design memetic pathogens to affect the Heterolinguist. Unfortunately, this has drawbacks - Heterolinguists do not automatically lose on ties against Abstractionists.

When dealing with other alien minds, similar rules should be used, dependant on the circumstances.

Core Value: Free Thinking. An Abstractionist needs to think (get this) abstractly in order to recognize the intelligence in complex sociodynamics. In addition, in order for those sociodynamic intelligences to grow and develop, they must also be encouraged to think freely. In so doing, a cycle is made that will produce its own great advances, independantly of the Transcendentals.

Many of their members are doctors, but despite its medical overtones, the non-medical membership provides the bulk of the operational and research funding, as well as research grants. These members are frequently among the first to reap the benefits of the longevity research.

Methuselahs can be found throughout human space, with fewer among the Stored and Replicants (who carry out a lot of research for the society) and none among the Cargo Cults and Old Worlders.

Core Value: Long Life (and have a nice time doing it). Old age isn't for sissies. Well, whoever said that never met a Methuselah.
Benefit: Members are considered to have a Biotech score 2 higher (maximum of 10) for both determining maximum lifespan and the addition for medical care. They also receive a +2 to Metatech for dealing with age related issues.

• Exploration suits: These are multi-environmental suits that can function in vacuum, under water, high (or low) temperatures. It has a programmable surface allowing it to armor up, as well as functioning as a nanoweave great coat. It has memory plastic inserts in the boots and gloves to give it swim fins, and its smart enough to help ballast itself (unless the wearer wants to do that). For non-members, the suit has a cost of High. For a member of the Explorers' Society, it has a cost of Moderate.
• Enhanced Outdoorsman Lenses: These are a bit better than the standard lens, but are more specialized. Typically, they are produced for a specific type of environment (hard vacuum, alpine, deep ocean, tropical jungle, swamp, etc.) or a specific planet. Within the specific environment or planet, wearers gain a +2 to the Outdoorsman profession. Outside of it, a -1 while using the lens. Available to Society members at Moderate Cost. Expensive for non-members.
• Robohelmet: The Explorers' Society freely admits they stole the idea from the Spacers - a mobile robot space suit helmet that is smart enough to follow its owner around. The Spacers admit that the Explorers have tweaked it pretty far. They added additional sensors (Nanotech 6), as well as boosting the computing ability (Cognitech 2), plus small manipulators. The Spacers aren't sure about the last piece, but Explorers that specialize in hostile environments love them. A Robohelmet has a cost of Moderate for members and Expensive for non-members.

And so on. A member of the Explorers' Society may start with one piece of survival gear for free at character creation and always has access to other pieces of gear for lower cost than non-members.

Over the centuries, the Cognitechnicians moved from initially a specialized medical society (Planetary College of Cognitive Neurologists), to a far broader group dealing with how humans think and learn. This included parents, teachers, employers, doctors and more, plus those that just wanted to more intelligent. The majority of the membership is still medically focused, but it is a bare majority.

Currently, the Cognitechnicians study how the mind and brain work, and continually strive to improve their own minds and brains. To that end they have a very good working knowledge of Nanotech and Cognitech. Its unusual to see high Biotech scores among their members, but stereotypical to see high Biotech Engineer and Research skills.

Cognitechnicians are the 'egg-heads' of the setting. They are all types – from professors and doctors, to parents that hope to make their kids smarter, to the children of those parents, to self improvement buffs of whatever profession. They are found everywhere except among the Cargo Cults and Old Worlders. The only requirements for membership is a desire to understand and a neural mesh.

Benefits: Cognitechnicians have minimum Nanotech and Cognitech scores of 4, which can raise them above their civilization’s maximum if necessary, and their Cognitech is considered one point higher for the purpose of learning. They can exceed their civilization’s maximum Cognitech and Nanotech by one without suffering Plot Score reduction.

Core Value: Mind Over Matter – Cognitechnicians are convinced of the supreme power of intellect over everything else.

The typical Social Engineer is bright, inquisitive and so smooth that tar wouldn't stick to him or her. Some come to the Social Engineers this way. And if they aren't when they join, the training classes and apprenticeship programs quickly make them more like that stereotype. Because of their interests, they have refined teaching techniques for metatechnology very, very well (they even have several schools and a dynamic Infosphere learning program). Social Engineers can be found in all civilizations save the Cargo Cults and Old Worlders.

Benefit: Social Engineers have minimum Metatech and Cognitech scores of 4, which can raise them above their civilization’s maximum if necessary, and their Metatech is considered one point higher for the purpose of persuading others and for Memetic defense. They can exceed their civilization’s maximum Cognitech and Metatech by one without suffering Plot Score reduction.

Core Value: Metatechnology over all – that Metatechnology is the key to understanding humans and interacting with them.