Editing Stars Without Number: Back in Black (section)

=== The Academe ===

The Academe is sort of a meta-university. It's a research rather than teaching institution, but it's research is practical in many ways, rather than theoretical. So, it can also be seen as a kind of think tank. People who are already accomplished in their field might apply or be invited to join the academe; or they might start being groomed for membership and pushed toward accomplishments. The central advancement mechanism of the academe is original research. That is, you have to go out and do something, and you have to write up a good solid report on it. And you need to learn new things to put in your report. The whole point is to add to the sum total of human knowledge.

Unfortunately, humanity is not always ready for all this knowledge. So, this research is often not published externally. The Academe sits on lots of information, and they dole it out when they think it's time for people to know it. They are currently engaged in a huge drive to regain pre-scream levels of technology, and so most of their findings on that subject (for example) are released publicly. However, they also need to make sure that any recovered artifacts don't fall into greedy and selfish hands that won't share them. So they keep a tight lid on leads to locations of pre-scream tech, for example.

There are times that this is vitally important. For example, the Golden Empire is jealous of advanced psychic training techniques. They really don't like it that the State steals away their best young psychics and gives them a better life that isn't under the thumb of the Emperor. So, if you manage to get down there and kidnap away young psychics, you definitely want to hide where you did it! Otherwise the Golden Empire might do things like hold their family hostage and torture them to get them to return. So, it is important for people doing practical research into psychic recruitment techniques to carefully document what techniques worked and what did not, and then to keep that information from becoming public knowledge (just as an example.)

The best way to get into the Academe is to make inroads with people who are professors of it, and get some leads on topics to investigate. If your "research" is good, you'll gain status and be asked to join, or at least gain status and maybe another mission or two to prove yourself.

Learning more about the Academe would make a great leveling Research Project. It's surprisingly shadowy despite being an academic organization.

Please don't get the impression that they own education, either! The Black House is pretty closely married to the Academe, but every other field of study is primarily managed via normal planetary university systems or corporate research or whatever. The Academe is a (relatively) small organization that sort of sits on top of everything else.

What you need to do in order to make inroads in the Academe is find a full professor who is willing to take you on as a student assistant, and then bring that person information and stuff. You can actually bring the whole party in as a research group, although they'd technically be interdisciplinary. The major barrier to being taken seriously as a full grad student is that you need to have at least one appropriate skill at 3, and some associated skills at 1 and 2. I don't want to come up with a complete list of what skills are acceptable, but no class is barred from joining just because they don't want to waste points on out-of-class skills. For Warriors, the most common way in is a combo of Tactics & Leadership. Experts have scads of options, Psychics are somewhere between the two.