ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies - Skills
Hershel Wilk's fifteen operant skills, divided into three faculties of five: Action, Relation and Intellect. Every check in the game is tied to one of them, so a character build is really a statement about which kinds of scenes Hershel is allowed to win. Points are assigned at character creation (ei...
We are updating the data
These pages are being expanded and corrected right now, so some entries may be
incomplete or out of date. Check back soon for the full dataset.
of 15 entries
· updated 2026-09-15
| Name | Type | Description | Tree | Cost | Prerequisite |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coordination | Operant Skill | Precise physical control: aim, fine motor work and any check that depends on doing something exactly right with your hands. | Faculty of Action | Skill points per rank | None |
| Doppelgäng | Operant Skill | Inner resilience and the discipline of being someone else. | Faculty of Action | Skill points per rank | None |
| Instincts | Operant Skill | Bodily impulse and reflex: reacting before thinking, flinching at the right moment, and reading a threat physically rather than analytically. | Faculty of Action | Skill points per rank | None |
| Sensors | Operant Skill | Perception and environmental awareness. Sensors is the skill that spots the detail, the tail or the bugged room before it becomes a problem, and it is one of the two skills guides consistently recommend for first runs because it reduces missed clues and ambushes. | Faculty of Action | Skill points per rank | None |
| Shadowplay | Operant Skill | Presence and tradecraft: shadowing, misdirection, and the theatre of being a spy in a room where everyone is also a spy. | Faculty of Action | Skill points per rank | None |
| Blueprints | Operant Skill | Planning and organisational understanding. | Faculty of Relation | Skill points per rank | None |
| Cold Read | Operant Skill | Reading people: micro-expressions, tone and the tells that reveal what someone is actually thinking. | Faculty of Relation | Skill points per rank | None |
| Nerve | Operant Skill | Composure under pressure, for the moments when the room is watching and the wrong word gets someone killed. | Faculty of Relation | Skill points per rank | None |
| Personalism | Operant Skill | Personal magnetism and emotional connection: persuasion, charm, and getting someone to trust you enough to say the true thing. | Faculty of Relation | Skill points per rank | None |
| Statehood | Operant Skill | Institutional literacy: how states, agencies and bureaucracies actually work, and how their procedures can be turned against them. | Faculty of Relation | Skill points per rank | None |
| Entanglement | Operant Skill | Associative reasoning: linking people, places and documents that do not obviously belong together. | Faculty of Intellect | Skill points per rank | None |
| Grey Matter | Operant Skill | Deduction proper: synthesising the inputs gathered by Records, Sensors and Cold Read into a conclusion. | Faculty of Intellect | Skill points per rank | None |
| Poetics | Operant Skill | Language and expression: reading and writing with precision, and finding the words that land. | Faculty of Intellect | Skill points per rank | None |
| Records | Operant Skill | Documents, archives and procedural memory: evidence handling, forgery, and knowing what the file actually says. | Faculty of Intellect | Skill points per rank | None |
| Technoflex | Operant Skill | Machines and systems: hacking, improvised devices, and the gun-crafting route. | Faculty of Intellect | Skill points per rank | None |
No matching entries
Try a different search term.