What is the Meditation skill?

The rules for enlightened alchemy in the Enlightened Magic supplement mention that Third Circle meditations are rolled under a Meditation specialty. However, there is no Meditation skill in the Basic Roleplaying rulebook! Some old supplements and variants like Mythras list a Meditation skill, which seems to be essentially useless and has no specialties. It’s a strange oversight in what are otherwise pretty coherent rules.

Snead’s draft for the Nephilim rules doesn’t mention a Meditation skill at all. The alchemist just rolls Philosopher’s Stone to design the meditation and Ka to cast it. Somewhere in the adaptation process the writer referenced a Meditation skill that didn’t exist in the BRP rulebook or else forgot to include it in the supplement.

If you don’t have a supplement explaining a Meditation skill (and none of the publications I’ve found list specialties either), then I’d let PCs substitute another appropriate skill like Art/Craft (these were combined in Call of Cthulhu 7e), Insight, Martial Arts, Perform or Psychotherapy. If I’m using my (still embryonic) original system rather than BRP rules, then the player just selects a Meditation specialty and writes it next to their Philosopher’s Stone skill.

Hope you enjoyed!

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