Skip Tracer Specialization

Of the 8 Career Skills, choose 4 to get a free rank. Of the 4 Specialization Skills, choose 2 to get a free rank.

Bounty Hunter Career Skills: Athletics, Brawl, Perception, Piloting (Planetary), Piloting (Space), Ranged (Heavy), Streetwise and Vigilance.

Skip Tracer Specialization Skills: Cool, Knowledge (Underworld), Negotiation and Skulduggery

Not all debts need to be settled with blasters. Sometimes, a Bounty Hunter just needs to do some legwork, find a target, and get that individual to pay what is owed with a few well-chosen words. This is the specialty of Skip Tracers, who take on commissions to seek out people with unpaid debts from clients who wish to have items returned, cash given back, or recompense paid in some other way. Most Skip Tracers prefer to keep their guns holstered for the whole job, and try their utmost to avoid causing negotiations with their targets to break down explosively. Property destruction and medical bills cut into the commission, after all. Of course, as most Skip Tracers know all too well, things rarely go so smoothly. More often, the Skip Tracer ends up needing to apply pressure somewhere along the line, whether this takes the form of gaining leverage on the target or delivering a threat of violence—at the hands of the client or otherwise.

All Bounty Hunters have access to investigative abilities through access to Perception and Streetwise as career skills, but Skip Tracers are particularly strong at this aspect of the job. Several Skip Tracer talents are especially useful when backed by a high Cunning or Intelligence; Improved Street Smarts and Reconstruct the Scene let Skip Tracers find leads on even the scantest of evidence, and Bypass Security can help these investigators reach secured locations where their targets might be hiding. Through dedication and keen insight, Skip Tracers can locate and pursue a target across nearly any distance, which makes them ideal for finding people who wish to avoid notice.

Skip Tracers also benefit from an investment in their Presence, as once they find their marks, they must convince them to part with what is owed. Several of the Skip Tracer’s talents, such as Good Cop and Nobody’s Fool make it difficult for targets to get the better of Skip Tracers in negotiations, and ensure that they recover the client’s property. If matters do become ugly, however, Skip Tracers are not defenseless: Hard-Boiled and Rapid Recovery allow Skip Tracers to doggedly pursue their quarry even after taking a beating, and Soft Spot lets them slip a finishing blow through at exactly the right moment, even against a tough opponent.

Potential Backgrounds

In It For the Money: As an integral part of their work, Skip Tracers maintain a broad web of informants, spies, and contacts throughout the galaxy. Always on the move, they have the common expenses of their profession—ship and vehicle maintenance, gear upkeep, medical services— but a surprising amount of their money goes toward maintaining their contacts. The constant upkeep of such a list of contacts involves a massive outlay of capital in the form of bribes, gifts, regular payments, and loans. It also requires an amount of quid pro quo that other hunters rarely need to address. Skip Tracers know the value of a good contact, and they know to the fraction of a credit just how much it costs to keep each one happy and reliable.

Lawbringer: Nothing makes some Skip Tracers angrier than an absconder. Fugitives who have jumped bail, escaped prison, or have otherwise run away from a lawful punishment raise their ire to such a pitch that they rarely take other types of bounties. They are tireless in their pursuit of these fugitives, and no matter how far an absconder runs or where that person hides, a law-abiding Skip Tracer will follow the trail to its end.

Thrill of the Hunt: Skip Tracers are the consummate urban hunters. They use their arrays of contacts and informants as a spider uses its web—drawing their prey in slowly then pinning them down for capture. Skip Tracers are dedicated to the chase and masters of the tail, of tracking a single individual unseen through a street choked with traffic and pedestrians, and of patiently waiting for the perfect moment to act. Skip Tracers motivated by love of the chase are notoriously hard to shake, even among Bounty Hunters.