Trademarks

Trademarks are similar to tropes, but tend to be slightly narrower in scope and are different for every game. Trademarks cover specific areas of endeavor that are integral to the genre, setting, or style of the game being played: Sorcery, Computer Hacking, or Kung Fu, for example. The selection of standard trademarks for a particular game help to add focus and nuance to the characters' skill sets by providing more points of contact between the game mechanics and the things that the type of fiction being model deals with in more detail. While each game includes a list of "stock" trademark options, players who want to explore unusual character types or rarely-visited corners of a genre or game world are encouraged to work with the GM to create new Trademarks appropriate to the story they want to tell.
Players begin the game without any dice in Trademarks. The Character Point costs for trademark dice are shown on the table below. As with trope dice, players only get to add one trademark die to their roll, though they can add both a trope die and a trademark die. Since many trademarks are subsets of tropes, having 0 dice in a Trademark doesn't necessarily mean you're unskilled or inexperienced, just that your performance in the relevant activities doesn't stand out against your baseline level of ability. For example, a character with a d12 in Combat and but no dice in Archery is very good with a bow, they're just not any better at archery than they are at boxing or sword fighting or knife throwing. That said, some rules sets may restrict certain types of activity to characters with an appropriate die value in a Trademark. For example, a fantasy game may only allow characters with at least a d4 in Sorcery to cast spells.

Trademark Die	CP Cost	Ability
0	0	On-Brand
d4	1	Knack
d6	2	Forte
d8	4	Specialty
d10	6	Gimmick
d12	8	Trademark

Since trademarks are game-dependent, we'll try to provide a bit more illustration of how they work by examining how a few common character abilities might be handled in different types of games.

Fighting

• In a game where fighting is rare or in genres--zombie movies, for instance--where characters are basically divided into fighters (who are good at all types of combat) and non-combatants, the Combat trope does all the work and there's no need for combat-related Trademarks.
• An action movie game might have Trademarks for Guns, Melee, and Martial Arts to distinguish the various types of action heroes.
• In the fantasy RPG genre, characters often train in specific weapons or weapon groups, so you might have Trademarks for Sword Fighting, Archery, Axesmanship, Unarmed Combat, etc.
• In a game where fighting is a major focus of the story--a martial arts or wrestling game, for instance--you might have dozens of different trademarks based on different techniques, styles, and schools. To make these distinctions mechanically meaningful, the combat system would need to be expanded to include special rules or options for characters using different trademarks.
  

Science

• For a game set in ancient Greece or Rome, scientific knowledge would be encompassed in a general "Scholar" trademark for characters who have been formally educated.
• In a game set during the Age of Reason or a pulp adventure game, the "Science" trademark would cover all scientific endeavor.
• As time progresses and scientific knowledge expands, characters in non-pulpy games will have to specialize in particular branches of science. For most games, only the branches that are relevant to the action of the game (Engineering, Medicine, and Chemistry are common) will be included as Trademarks.
• A game that's actually about scientists may include very specific science-based trademarks to better distinguish between different characters. For example, CSI characters can choose trademarks like Ballistics, Medical Examiner, Hair & Fiber Analysis, and Bug Guy.

Magic

• In a game where wizardly variations are mostly a matter of spell selection or where magical abilities are rigidly defined (usually by character class) a single "Sorcery" Trademark is all you need.
• In a game with different distinct types of magic that player are not required to choose exclusively, having a Trademark for each type (Necromancy, Fire Magic, Alchemy) allows players to specialize.
• In worlds where the term "Wizard" covers a lot of messy ground, the magic-users trademarks might be equally broad and disjointed, with characters choosing from Trademarks representing different types of magic (conjuring, illusion), techniques (potion-making, demon summoning), and traditions (witchcraft, druidism).