Sensors
Sensors is the Action-faculty skill for the five senses doing their actual job. What you see, hear, smell, feel, taste — and what those reports are telling you before any other skill has time to interpret them. Where Instincts is the body's preconscious threat alarm, Sensors is the sober inventory. The room. The smell of the air. The faint hum from the broken payphone the Duchess works out of. Pair it with the rest of the Action stack for a body-first build, or keep it on any spec — Sensors is the cheapest insurance against missing something the writers actually wrote.
Stats
| Faculty | Faculty of Action |
| Resource | Fatigue (red) |
Strengths
- +Surfaces environmental detail the other skills would never roll for — smells, sounds, the temperature of a room.
- +Pairs with everything. A Sensors-light operant misses content; a Sensors-heavy one finds it.
- +Reliable in scenes the Intellect skills would also catch — but Sensors gets there cheaper and earlier.
Costs
- −Burns Fatigue. Frequent Sensors checks across a long scene push the Action stress meter.
- −Can flood the player with detail in scenes where less is more. Sensors-heavy CASCADE will sometimes notice the wrong thing first.
Description
Your perception of the phenomenal world. Receive reports from your senses.
Sensors is one of the five Action-faculty skills, alongside Coordination, Doppelgäng, Instincts, and Shadowplay. It's the body's intake — the way the room gets into the operant's head before any other skill has a chance to think about it.
This is the most underrated of the Action skills. Where Instincts shouts *danger* and Coordination plans the next move, Sensors quietly logs the room. The smell of the alley. The way the light hits a wall. The carabinero who isn't paying attention. The phone that's slightly off the hook in the Backways.
The whole game is set in Quisach — a district stuffed with environmental detail, hand-painted apartments, a Bootleg Bazaar full of texture. Sensors is the skill that lets the player see what the artists actually put there.
It's the calm voice in CASCADE's head. Not jittery like Instincts, not nagging like Records — just reporting. *Light is here, the air smells like cooking oil, there are three people behind you, one of them is breathing wrong.* Fills in the world without editorialising.
For a 14-year veteran, Sensors is also the trained part of perception. She's been looking at versions of this room since '82. Treat it as the operant's default scanning mode — always on, always logging.
Faculty
Faculty of Action
Mechanics
Sensors checks resolve perception — sight, sound, smell, touch, taste. The skill picks up environmental and physical detail the other Action skills don't roll for. Burns Fatigue (red), the Action-faculty stress resource. Each check spends a bit of Fatigue; failed checks spend more. If the Action stress meter caps at 20, an Action skill drops a level permanently. Preset starts: Kinetic 4, Charismatic 3, Analytical 2.
Builds & playstyles
**Kinetic (Action 4):** good fit. Walks into a room and knows where everyone's hands are.
**Charismatic (Action 3):** workable. Reads the room before working it.
**Analytical (Action 2):** acceptable floor — back-fill with Records and Grey Matter for the slower interpretive work, but a 2 means missing the obvious stuff.
No documented Conditioning Thought directly buffs Sensors.