[Basic] Advantage of the Week: Racial Memory

[johndallman]

Racial Memory [15 or 40] is an exotic mental advantage. You have access to the memories of your ancestors (if you’re biological), or previous generations of software (if you’re a Digital Mind). This advantage first appeared in GURPS Aliens for 3e and has not changed much.

For [15], the advantage is passive, and quite vague. You depend on the GM to notice that your ancestors might have had information about your current situation, and secretly roll vs your IQ. On a success, you have a feeling of déjà vu about the situation, but on a critical success, you get to experience ancestral memories. Failure gives no information, and critical failure gives misleading information. For [40], you can also use this ability actively. The GM has to decide if your ancestors had the information you’re after, and then rolls secretly vs your IQ. If your IQ roll succeeds, you get the information, or know that your ancestors didn’t have it. On a failure, you get nothing; on a critical failure you’ll be sure they didn’t know, even if they actually did. Active use requires at least a turn of total concentration, and the GM is at liberty to require more time, or other actions, to access ancient memories.

Powers points out that this advantage can be necromantic, consulting the spirits of the dead; biological, accessing information in your genes; psionic, via looking into the past or occult, accessing the “collective unconscious.” Fantasy adds an alternative – your own previous incarnations – and Space a more plausible biological explanation for species that reproduce by budding or fission. All of these will flavour the information you can get. The rules for active use can require some GM creativity:

• Can you use it to access your own childhood memories?
• If you know for sure, by mundane means, that your father, or your grandmother, knew something then the critical failure result may need changing.
• It’s not clear if the information you get is enough to use a skill, but I would suspect not. For example, my own father* was reasonably skilled at Electronics Operations (Communications)/TL6. I doubt successful use of Racial Memory would let me transcribe Morse Code in real time as it came over the air, because that takes more skill than knowing the sequences of dots and dashes. But if I had some Morse written down as dots and dashes, Racial Memory should let me read it as if I had a list of the sequences to use as a dictionary.
• Autohypnosis skill looks like a good way to improve your effective IQ for this.

Species with Racial Memory in GURPS supplements include Banestorm’s Insect Men, unusually successful homunculi from Magic, and the Venusian Krik from Tales of the Solar Patrol. Bio-Tech computers made out of multiple brains can have this advantage, although Flashbacks or Nightmares are equally possible. Fantasy: Portal Realms uses it for exiles from a Realm recalling childhood or repressed memories, and Horror: Madness Dossier lets you acquire it through getting too involved with alternate histories or reality shards. Magic: Plant Spells lets you access the memories of plants and Psionic Powers provides a skill to use in place of IQ. Steampunk 3 makes Racial Memory an option for Mediums, while Thaumatology includes it in the Reincarnation power and Urban Magics offers access to the memories of past residents of the city, or of your memory house.

I’ve never played or run a campaign that featured this advantage, that I remember. How has it played in your games?

*He was a British Army signals instructor during WWII.

[ravenfish]

For fifteen points, I would expect to get rather more information than "one of my ancestors once saw something like this". At the very, very least, a vague emotional context seems called for ("my ancestors saw this and felt fear/safety/familiarity/uncontrolled greed/whatever").

[David Johnston2]

One of those abilities priced for exoticism not utility. The 15 point version is more like a perk.

[Refplace]

I agree its a bit underwhelming. I consider it a UB that allows purchasing of rare skills during play - though Wild Talent with Retention is probably better.
The information portion seems to rarely come up.

[Christopher R. Rice]

I've used it several times. Mostly for reincarnation or refluffed for immortals with long memories. Works ok. Needs to be tweaked pretty often though.

[jason taylor]

Treecats in Honor Harrington have a form of this whereby the most powerful minds jointly preserve the relevant information from the ages. A "memory singer" is always female and so valued that she never goes on hunting parties or war parties unless there is a strong political reason to do so (such as the question of opening contact with humans). She is like a walking library. The effect is a video recording of events generations in the past though there can be an effect like a "telephone game" and some things don't seem to record properly anyway. In A Beautiful Friendship, Climbs Quickly had in his mind records from some earlier scout about humans who had landed here long before the present colony on Sphinx and they included observation of such things as spacecraft, tents, and firearms (they had witnessed an attack by a large animal so they knew the humans were dangerous if not necessarily dangerous to Treecats who were simply watching).

[Prince Charon]

I tend to use some variant of Reawakened for this purpose, but using Racial Memory as an UB or otherwise expanding on what's written does make sense.

[RogerBW]

This feels like the sort of capability that would have a campaign built around it ("you each have the ancestral memories of your family line of monster hunters") rather than being something just one PC can buy.

[Phil Masters]

Hmm. The 3rd edition version of Transhuman Space allowed AIs to take the 15 point version of this as a legacy code effect. I neglected to note this in Changing Times, perhaps simply because it requires no actual conversion. Sloppy of me, though. I'm not sure how much crucial knowledge could reasonably be buried in old code in that specific setting, but the idea has some potential.

Anyway, this could be quite a nice advantage in fantasy (or far future science fantasy) games where all sorts of important stuff happened in the deep past, and being able to rummage around in the akashic record for cool Deep Lore could be a strong character shtick. For other games, though, I'd rather take a slightly limited version of Modular Abilities (Skills Only) and claim I was pulling actively useful stuff (i.e. training) out of the past, rather than just vague hints.

[lugaid]

I haven't used it in play yet, but Racial Memory always seemed to me to be perfectly suited to a campaign setting based on the Dune novels.