Reference — The Pull (Optional Rules)
The Shore is a material place. Its rules run on reactors and jump drives, its dead stay dead, and its mysteries — the lost arks, the silent colonies — have causes, even when no one living knows them. This module is for the tables that want one exception. Switch it on and a rare few Wanderers carry a gift the Shore cannot explain: six disciplines of the impossible, bought dearly, grown slowly, and priced in the same currencies as everything else. Leave it off and nothing elsewhere in this book changes.
The gift is called the Pull, and the people who carry it are the Drawn — names as old as the boarding itself. Chapter 2 records why anyone climbed onto a sunless rock falling out of the galaxy: the pull of the anomaly, felt by some and not others, never explained. Perhaps it was never a metaphor. Wanderstar defied the physics of its age — that defiance is where the jump drive came from (Chapter 29) — and the Drawn are the people it defies physics through: rarest among the Seeders, who left the planet early; strongest among the Wanderborn, who rode it for five thousand years; strangest among the Sleepers, who dreamed the whole crossing beside its impossible heart. The Shore's scholars, who dislike all of this, file the Pull under mysticism and fund no further study. Or discard every word of this lore and write your own source — the rules below don't care where the gift comes from.
Index§
- The gift is gated
- The six disciplines
- Using a discipline
- Strain — reaching past your grasp
- The gift's shadow
- Masteries by discipline
- The last Mastery — The Lingering
- The Order of the Receding Light
- Adopting the module
The gift is gated§
The Pull is a sixth skill category, but it breaks the first rule of the other five: a Pull discipline cannot be used Untrained. There is no −3 attempt, no lucky amateur. Either the gift is in you or it is not — and reaching Trained is the awakening.
- Entry is XP only, with the GM's blessing. Raising a discipline from Untrained to Trained costs the usual 10 XP, spent only with GM approval and a moment in the fiction — a teacher found, a near-death that opened something, the anomaly surfacing in the blood. No career grants a Pull discipline, no D66 event or Life Event bestows one, and the random-skill table never lands on one (a first-die 6 is still a reroll). Where a table result says "any skill (player's choice)," these six need the GM's yes.
- At creation, a player may spend starting XP to awaken, with GM approval — some are born Drawn. A table that would rather every awakening happen on screen may instead rule the Pull play-only, the way Masteries already are (Chapter 20).
- Past Trained, the gift grows like any skill. Marks on failure, XP for ranks, Masteries at Expert — the ordinary ladder (Chapter 20). The gift is extraordinary; the climb is not.
The six disciplines§
Each discipline is keyed to one characteristic — your nature chooses your gift — and each is the uncanny twin of a mundane skill, which is also the skill that counters it. A sharply drawn Wanderer (Chapter 16) arrives with disciplines that would come easily and disciplines that would fight them; a Disadvantaged characteristic makes its discipline a struggle, and the struggle feeds Momentum, as struggle always does.
| Discipline | Characteristic | The mundane twin | Countered by |
|---|---|---|---|
| Telekinesis | Strength | Mechanical | — (the world resists by weight and scale) |
| Quickening | Dexterity | Athletics | — |
| Elemental Control | Endurance | Survival | — |
| Projection | Intellect | Deceive | Psychology (disbelief), Recon (the flaw in the seeming) |
| Clairvoyance | Education | Research | Sneaking (what hides), another's Pull (what wards) |
| Telepathy | Social Standing | Charm | Psychology (a guarded mind) |
Telekinesis (Strength). Force applied without touch — lifting, holding, pushing, turning — the same will that lifts with the back, lifting without it. Baseline is what your own two hands could do; weight and scale (Chapter 12) are the limits the gift respects until a Mastery says otherwise.
Quickening (Dexterity). The body outrun by its own spirit: speed, reflex, and strength past what sinew allows. While Trained or better, Quickening also acts as an always-relevant Boon for feats of speed, strength, and reflex — 1 Momentum for Advantage on the mundane roll (Chapter 9). Roll Quickening itself only when the feat is beyond any unaided body.
Elemental Control (Endurance). Heat, cold, current, and wind, channeled through a body that must weather what it wields — shaping what is present, never conjuring from nothing. Survival's twin: the elements obey the one who has endured them.
Projection (Intellect). The crafted lie made visible — images, sounds, and sensations that are not there, built the way a good lie is built: detail by plausible detail. Scrutiny is an opposed test, your Projection against the viewer's Psychology or Recon (Chapter 5).
Clairvoyance (Education). Perceiving what is beyond the senses — not deduced but consulted, as if the world kept records and you had learned to read them. Research's twin: the archive is simply larger. What hides opposes you with Sneaking; what is warded, with a Pull of its own.
Telepathy (Social Standing). Presence reaching all the way in — the surface of a mind read, a thought sent, an impulse nudged. Influence with the skin of the skull removed. A guarded mind opposes with Psychology, and what you take from an unwilling mind is never free of consequence in the fiction.
Using a discipline§
A discipline resolves like everything else: 2D6 + skill ≥ 8, Advantage and Disadvantage as the fiction warrants, Momentum paid to activate an edge as ever (Chapter 7). Three rulings keep the scale honest:
- Baseline is human-scale. A successful test achieves what a strong, skilled, well-equipped person could achieve by mundane means — the gift replaces the tool, not the scale. Everything grander belongs to a Mastery, or to strain (below).
- An offensive use is an attack like any other. The discipline's test vs 8; on a hit, 2D damage against armor, with no traits — until a Mastery arms it properly.
- The world's skills still matter. Every discipline has a mundane counter (the table above), and the GM calls opposed tests exactly as in Chapter 5. One of the Drawn among the untouched is formidable, not unanswerable.
Strain — reaching past your grasp§
Once per scene, before a Pull test, you may strain: mark 1 Mental trauma to attempt a feat beyond your baseline — the kind of feat a Mastery you don't hold would permit. The trauma is marked whether or not the test succeeds, it feeds Momentum as trauma always does (Chapter 7), and what it buys is the attempt, never the certainty. Strain is how the desperate moment gets its miracle, and how the gift writes its cost on the two tracks everything else already uses (Chapter 10).
The gift's shadow§
If your table wants the Pull to tempt, no new rules are needed — the Bane economy is the shadow (Chapter 9). One of the Drawn who leans on power picks up Banes that pay them for it: The Hunger for More, The Anomaly's Whisper, Easier Than Asking. Each bite earns its 1 XP at session end — the dark path literally pays — and buying one off costs 10 XP and a hard scene. Corruption, when it comes, lands where strain already lives: the Mental track, Shaken → Broken.
Masteries by discipline§
A discipline at Expert (+3) opens its Masteries — 20 XP, play-earned, permissions never bonuses, exactly as in Chapter 20. These tables follow the Chapter 23 pattern: roll D6 for a suggestion or choose; reword to fit; the GM has final say on scope.
Telekinesis Masteries§
| D6 | Mastery | Permission |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Far-Hand | Fine work at a distance as if standing there — keys, latches, triggers, stitches; no roll for anything your own hands could do unhurried. |
| 2 | The Unseen Fist | Your telekinetic strike is a true weapon: 3D, Smasher, out to Short range. |
| 3 | Catch | Once per scene, arrest a fall — an object, an ally, yourself; the landing deals no trauma (Ch 13). |
| 4 | Wrench | Once per scene, strip a weapon or object from a same-scale foe's grip, no roll, fiction permitting. |
| 5 | The Greater Lift | Your baseline rises one scale band: S1 vehicles answer your pull (Ch 12). Strain to touch S2 — once, briefly, and never gently. |
| 6 | Deflection | As a reaction (Ch 11), parry a ranged attack — the parry the rules otherwise forbid. A Smasher weapon still bulls through. |
Quickening Masteries§
| D6 | Mastery | Permission |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Surge | Once per scene, take a second Significant Action on your turn. |
| 2 | Faster Than Thought | Your second reaction each round is free — only your third and later cost Momentum (Ch 11). |
| 3 | Impossible Leap | Clear gaps, walls, and heights no unaided body could; every fall lands one band gentler (Ch 13). |
| 4 | The Still Moment | Once per session, act first in a round regardless of the order — the world slows, and you have already moved. |
| 5 | Borrowed Might | Once per scene, perform a feat of pure strength as a Dray might — a hatch forced, a beam held, a comrade carried at a dead run. |
| 6 | Tireless | Privation's clocks — hunger, thirst, sleeplessness (Ch 13) — do not tick for you for a day at a time. Strain to stretch a second day. |
Elemental Control Masteries§
| D6 | Mastery | Permission |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Spark and Ember | Kindle or quench fire up to a campfire's size at will, no roll. |
| 2 | The Body Furnace | While you concentrate, you and those at your side shrug one temperature hazard's clock (Ch 13). |
| 3 | Call the Current | Once per scene, surge or still a machine's power — one Disruptive-grade effect (Ch 24), no trauma, no trace. |
| 4 | Wall of Weather | Once per scene, raise wind, water, or dust as Light cover (+2) for the crew until your next turn (Ch 11). |
| 5 | Elemental Lash | Your element is a weapon: 3D at Close range, carrying Fire or Concussive by its nature (Ch 24). |
| 6 | Eye of the Storm | The wild treats you as shelter: allies beside you roll their resist tests against weather and element hazards at Advantage, free (Ch 13). |
Projection Masteries§
| D6 | Mastery | Permission |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Glamour | Hold a minor seeming — a face not yours, a badge, a clean coat — without concentration; scrutiny is an opposed test against your Projection (Ch 5). |
| 2 | Crowded Room | Once per scene, conjure a phantom — a figure, a sound, a signal only they perceive — that draws eyes exactly where you need them. |
| 3 | Perfect Decoy | Once per session, an attack that would hit you strikes your image instead: no roll, the hit simply misses, and the image is spent. |
| 4 | The Long Con | A seeming you set persists after you leave — until touched, or until local dawn, whichever comes first. |
| 5 | Shared Vision | Project a scene you witnessed (or scried) for others to see — testimony made visible; rolls to convince with it are at Advantage, free. |
| 6 | Nothing There | Once per scene, erase yourself from perception while still — no cover needed, until you move or act (as Sneaking's Hide in Plain Sight, with nothing to hide behind). |
Clairvoyance Masteries§
| D6 | Mastery | Permission |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Open Archive | Once per session, ask the GM one concrete question about anything that has ever been witnessed, anywhere; they answer truthfully. |
| 2 | Psychometry | Handle an object and learn its last keeper and the strongest moment it witnessed, no roll. |
| 3 | Farsight | Scry any place you have stood, or can name precisely; distance imposes no Disadvantage. Wards and another's Pull can still blind you. |
| 4 | The Forewarning | Once per session, declare you foresaw this moment and know one useful fact you'd have gleaned (as Research's Forewarned — but you never had to look). |
| 5 | Read the Thread | Glimpse a person's immediate intent; once per scene, whoever acts on it gains Advantage, free. |
| 6 | The Hour Untold | Once per session, put one yes-or-no question to the Oracle (Ch 43) — even at a GM's table — and the answer is true. The dice of fate speak to you directly. |
Telepathy Masteries§
| D6 | Mastery | Permission |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mindtouch | Speak silently with anyone you can see — or anyone you know well, anywhere on the same world. No device, nothing to intercept. |
| 2 | The Suggestion | Once per scene, plant a small, plausible impulse in a stranger's mind; they act on it as their own, fiction permitting. |
| 3 | Surface Read | A moment's attention yields a person's emotional truth and surface thought, no roll; a guarded mind opposes with Psychology. |
| 4 | The Veil | Your own mind reads as you choose: lie-detectors, Psychology, and other telepaths receive the surface you author. |
| 5 | Link the Crew | Once per session, bind the crew in silent rapport for a scene — coordination flows without a word spoken (Advantage still lands on one ally per roll, as ever). |
| 6 | The Deep Word | Once per session, send one sentence to a mind you know intimately, however far — it arrives as a dream, and you mark 1 Mental trauma for the reaching. This is the module's one crack in the Shore's hardest law — no word outruns a ship (Ch 27) — and the GM may rule it closed. |
The last Mastery — The Lingering§
Beyond the six tables stands one Mastery that belongs to no discipline, or to all of them. It costs 20 XP like any other, demands any one discipline at Expert, is bought only in play with the GM's blessing — and does nothing at all while you live. It is the gift's answer to the Shore's second-hardest fact: that the dead stay dead.
The Lingering. When you take this Mastery, name one unfinished thing — a promise, a person, a work — and set it on the table's thread list (Chapter 44). When you die, you do not entirely go. You linger: a presence that those who knew you, and any of the Drawn, can see and hear — there and gone, like a voice from the next room. A lingerer makes no tests, holds no trauma and no Momentum, and cannot touch the world; they perceive, they speak, and they counsel. Once per session that counsel lands as more than words: one living crewmate gains Advantage on one roll, free — wisdom from the far side of the door. They carry one other Mastery they held in life through with them, if its permission can be kept without a body. And they remain only while the named thread stays open: the day it closes, by any hand, they finish — and this time they go gently.
The player of a fallen lingerer builds a new Wanderer as normal; the one who stayed becomes a recurring voice at the table, still theirs to speak. Death in Wanderstar is meant to be final (Chapter 10) — this is the one bought exception, and its price is watching.
The Order of the Receding Light§
Optional lore, for tables that want the Drawn to have somewhere to go. Skip it and the Pull stays a wild gift; adopt it and the gift has a door, a discipline, and a politics.
For centuries after the Ejection, Wanderstar was still visible from the Shore — a receding point of light, dimming year on year until no eye could find it (Chapter 29). The Order of the Receding Light was founded by Drawn who swore their first vows while it could still be seen: that what the light had given them would be spent on those still crossing. They are not priests, though they keep a Rule; not an army, though they bear arms; not a bank, though half the Shore's honest sleeper-trusts are held in their vaults. They are knights, in the oldest sense — sworn, landed in scattered houses, and answerable to their Rule before any crown.
The work. The ballistic arks are still arriving, and will arrive for centuries yet (Chapter 30). The Order's calling is the still-crossing and the newly crossed: meeting inbound arks, defending wake-stations the authorities have stopped funding, escorting the revived through their first bewildered years, and holding the estates of the frozen in trust — honestly, which is what distinguishes a preceptory vault from a cryo-trust that votes the shares of people it quietly never thaws (Chapter 34). Protecting pilgrims made the Order beloved; holding their fortunes made it rich; and being both beloved and rich has made it, on more than one world, intolerable to the powers that owe it.
The shape. The Order is built for distance. Each preceptory — a fortified chapter-house, often beside a wake-station or a highport — keeps the Rule on its own judgment, since no word outruns a ship (Chapter 27); a Preceptor governs it, and the preceptories correspond in a slow tide of couriered letters. The oldest houses keep one more thing: a founder who took the Lingering, still watching from the far side of the door, whose counsel the living Preceptors do not always welcome.
Rank follows the gift. The Order's ladder maps onto the module's own:
| Rank | What it means |
|---|---|
| Aspirant | One of the Drawn taken in for training — the fiction's answer to where do I find a teacher? A preceptory is the sanctioned path to awakening a discipline (the GM's blessing, embodied), and to training the next. |
| Sworn | An Aspirant who takes the vows. Each vow is a Bane, freely chosen and honestly binding — Obedient to the Rule, Holds No Fortune, No Sleeper Left Cold — and it pays its 1 XP when it bites, as every Bane does (Chapter 9). The Order's discipline is not flavor; it is the Bane economy, worn as a habit. |
| Knight | A Sworn whose first discipline reaches Expert (+3) kneels an Aspirant and rises a Knight of the Receding Light. Knighthood grants the Boon Knight of the Receding Light, free — Advantage (1 Momentum, as any Boon) where the Order's name opens doors, steadies the frightened, or stays an official's hand — and the standing to walk into any preceptory in the Shore as family. |
| Preceptor | A Knight who holds a Mastery and teaches. Preceptors govern houses, keep the vaults, and carry the Rule's hardest decisions. |
The politics. Run the Order as a faction (Chapter 34): reach through its preceptories and vaults, methods of patronage and solidarity, standing toward the crew by their conduct toward sleepers. And give it the enemies its history has earned — an order that is owed too much by the great is always one writ away from dissolution, and what its inner Rule teaches about the anomaly is, on several worlds, already called heresy. Roll 1D6 for the thread a preceptory brings with it:
| 1D6 | The thread |
|---|---|
| 1 | A preceptory has gone silent — no letters, no lights, its vault sealed from inside |
| 2 | A dynasty that owes the Order a fortune moves to have it proscribed, and needs one scandal to do it |
| 3 | A false knight is trading on the Order's name, one jump ahead of its justice |
| 4 | An ark the Order swore generations ago to meet is arriving — at a world where the Order is banned |
| 5 | The heresy surfaces: what the inner Rule teaches about the anomaly, written in a founder's hand |
| 6 | The preceptory's lingering founder has begun to counsel against the living Preceptor — and both are right |
Adopting the module§
Switching the Pull on changes nothing it doesn't name. The core book's thirty skills stay thirty — these six exist only at tables that adopt them. The random-skill matrix (Chapter 8) is unchanged, and every table that grants skills keeps granting only the thirty; a mystic-heavy campaign may, if it chooses, read a first-die 6 on the random-skill table as the Pull row, in characteristic order — Telekinesis, Quickening, Elemental Control, Projection, Clairvoyance, Telepathy — but that is a campaign's deliberate choice, never the default. The companion app carries the six disciplines on the character sheet for any Wanderer who awakens one.