Sorry for my horrible work ethic, no excuses I am afraid.
So next up is the Agent career which is meant to encompass spy and secret agents although it could also be a undercover police officer or insurance claims investigator I suppose. Basically anyone who gathers information under false pretenses. It is moderately easy to join up with your social position helping or hurting you. That is an interesting choice to me although the predecessor to the CIA was the OSS which was said to mean Oh So Social! as it was staffed by all the right families. Survival is a slightly riskier proposition than either of the first two I have covered, being quick on your feet mentally helps you as INT is the bonus (or penalty) characteristic. Commission and promotion is helped or hindered by EDU although neither are terribly difficult to obtain. Re-enlistment is pretty high at 6+ leaving me to believe no one stays for long. Possibly because of paranoia on the part of the Tiber-Beltaine Referendum (TBR) in regards to the loyalty of it's agents. At the end of your first term you gain Streetwise - 1 and level 0 in admin; computer; bribery; leadership and vehicle. The lack of a combat skill as part of basic training implies they aren't expecting you to go in or come out with all guns blazing as your first course of action. At rank 4 you also get Admin - 1 to account for all the bureaucracy you will be dealing with. Mustering out offers passage of all three types; a mental boost; weapon (and possible training); A SOC boost and possible membership in the Explorer Society. All of these I am fine with and I like them even more as prizes for a game show rather than awards from a spy agency. The money table goes from 1,000 to 50,000 which strikes me as a little low but not enough to change anything.
The personal development table offers a boost to DEX and END but not STR and both mental stats, it also has carousing and athletics which seem like handy things to pick up. I am not sure about not being able to get a STR boost but that can be left until after I look at hand to hand combat to know if it is as disadvantageous as it seems. It does seem to imply (again) that you are not supposed to be getting in fights which makes sense. How good a spy can you be if you keep getting caught after all? The specialist skills are gun and melee combat; bribery; leadership; recon and survival. This seems to again imply the goal is not to get caught. It is true that combat skills show up but the other four entries are skills to avoid direct confrontation. Finally the advanced table has advocate; computer; liaison; linguistics; medicine and leadership. Interesting to note that the premier agent skill is leadership not streetwise. Realizing this changes my view on the career as a whole, Leadership provides a pool of points that can be doled out to members of a team to accomplish a common goal. So our spy becomes a team leader rather than a lone wolf. Coupling this with the general low emphasis on combat skills leads me to the view that agents are more Mission:Impossible than James Bond. They get a mission but little manpower support from the agency and assemble their own team to accomplish whatever task is set before them. In Fermi's Universe (FU) it goes along with my view of a very weak central government having deniable assets with little to tie them back to the TBR. Also with so many internal (effectively rival) governments I imagine this to be a common career which goes back to the relative low bar to entry. The only other skills to show up more than once are bribery and computer again implying a preference to avoid situations where you could be identified.
And this is why I am doing this series of blog posts. Just looking at the Career name I was thinking James Bond but actually delving into the skills awarded changed that view into a different but still valid one.
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