A suggestion made by Clinton on the Anvilwerks forum:

Eero, in the Finnish translation of the book, says to do something awesome: figure out the one heroic or noteworthy thing your character's done to put him or her on this path. Do this first, even before determining culture. That's your Adept ability. Then determine culture and species, and pick three things she does regularly. Those are your starting Competent abilities.

During chargen, you are given 5 advances. Are you forced to spend these during chargen, or can you save them for later?

You aren't forced to spend any advances ever. You can spend them whenever you like, though, especially in the middle of BDTP. That's essential to the system - you should be doing crazy stuff like buying off Keys in order to advance in the middle of a fight. (Clinton Nixon)

I'm confused about the Innate Abilities of the various species in The World Of Near. How does a player give this Innate Ability a level? Is it considered a mandatory "more abilities" selection? Can a player choose it as one of the three innate abilities, pushing one of the standard three into the "more abilities" category?

Well, what we've done in my games, by default, is added it to innate abilities and said that you start with 1 adept, 1 competent, and 2 unskilled. It's rare that the racial ability is set at unskilled. (Clinton Nixon, 12/01/2006)