Spending Culture

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Culture is the statistic which represents that ineffable quality that makes a settlement a civilization. It's art, knowledge, justice, identity, and religion, amongst other things.

You can generate Culture from certain types of gems in quintessence engines. You can also collect it via adventure rewards. You can also create it by staffing structures designed to generate Culture.

You spend Culture during the economic assessment. You can use it to build structures or in any of the following ways.

This is not intended to be an exclusive list. Many of the achievements of the vision phase will be accomplished via creative uses of Culture.

Sending a Team to Resolve an Adventure
As you go on adventures and have people arrive from Lemuria, you will have a list of characters you have met. These characters can be hired to complete missions on your behalf.

Characters have a certain number of accomplishments they can make in a week in three categories: social, physical, and mental. Characters can be average (+2), good (+4), or excellent (+6) at this accomplishment. To recruit a character for the week requires an expenditure of culture points equal to the number of accomplishments they can complete.

For example, let's take Lizbeth and Holmes as two example characters. Note that between these two, Holmes is more effective for the same cost, but only at physical accomplishments. If faced with mental or social challenges he would be less useful.

Adventures have a number of challenges based on their difficulty with the same types as accomplishments. Challenges are resolved as successful or failed based on a d20 plus the modifier from the character taking on that challenge. Any character may be used for a challenge with no modifier if they have no accomplishments left in that area. If the character has an accomplishment left to use in that area they may roll at advantage in addition to adding their modifier. Once a character uses an accomplishment to attempt that challenge they may not use that accomplishment again that week; however, players are not required to use a character's related accomplishment to complete a challenge.

Challenges may be simple, complicated, or heroic. An easy challenge requires the roll plus modifier to be 12 or greater; hard 14 or greater; difficult 16 or greater.

If the team decides to complete an adventure using NPCs, the following steps must be completed in order:


 * 1) The adventure to be completed is selected.
 * 2) BEFORE THE PLAYERS CHOOSE CHARACTERS the DM must be given a chance to determine the types of challenges as fits the difficulty of the adventure. This is based on the brief description of the adventure as well as the context it happens in. These will be written down but not yet revealed to the players.
 * 3) The players can pick characters from a list based on how they believe the DM interpreted the description and context. They will know the difficulty and therefore how many challenges they will face at what level. Players must have enough culture left to hire the character. (Note that culture may be purchased at 100gp/point, modified by the reputation of the civilization that character belongs to. For characters from the settlement, this is based on happiness. More on civilizations, happiness, and reputation below.)
 * 4) The DM reveals the challenges for this mission. At this point the players can decide to evacuate the mission. They have lost the culture they spent, but the adventure remains available with the exact same challenges, the players themselves can decide to complete it as normal.
 * 5) Each challenge is resolved in any order the players wish:
 * 6) Pick the challenge to complete and the character to complete it
 * 7) Decide if which accomplishment, if any, is used
 * 8) Roll d20. If using an accomplishment, roll again, take the higher score, and add the modifier. You cannot stack 2 accomplishments.
 * 9) If the result is equal or higher to the level, the check was successful: that challenge is accomplished and the team can move to the next challenge. If an accomplishment was used it cannot be used again this week.
 * 10) If the result is lower than the level, the check failed: The accomplishment is still consumed as with a success. One character must be picked to be wounded. It does not have to be the character who took the challenge. Wounded characters have -2 to all checks for the remainder of the week. If the character already had been wounded they are severely wounded. They cannot complete any checks for the remainder of the week and the next week. The challenge remains and the adventure cannot be successful until it is successfully completed.
 * 11) Once all challenges are completed, the adventure is a success and the reward is immediately granted.
 * 12) If the players decide to withdraw, the adventure is lost and cannot be completed by the player characters or the NPCs in the future.

Characters, Reputation, Agendas, and Happiness
If you want to recruit a character from another civilization, you must meet or exceed the reputation threshold they ask for. So, if you want to recruit the Taxe captain from the drow outpost, you must have a reputation with the Taxe Empire of 3 or above.

If you want to recruit a character who is associated with a society, the adventure must relate in some way to their society's true agenda. For example, a character from the Bardic Collective would be interested in adventures related to art and music (if that is their true agenda). The DM can determine how much the NPC is swayed by the players' arguments about the connection. How open they are to broader interpretation will be based on the friendliness of previous interactions. If the players have not yet learned a society's true agenda they can match the public agenda and hope the overlap is enough that the argument works. They may learn later how the adventure furthered the society's agenda.

See more details about this in the section on civilizations and societies.

If you deal with characters from the settlement, they have a happiness threshold. These require a score on one of the four happiness tracks, which are dealt with in another section. For example, Lady Martha Bellabranda would be willing to help on an adventure so long as the Settlement's happiness measure for "Trust, Humanitarianism, and Belonging" is above 0.

Creating Adventures
Culture can be used to create adventures with specific rewards they choose. The cost of creating a adventure is culture points equal to the number of challenges it would take to resolve it with an NPC team.

Players will leave it to the DM to determine exactly what challenges and situations they would face during the adventure, but they define the broad situation, the goal, and what the benefit is of completing it successfully. Adventures can be created anywhere and with any standard reward as per the adventure reward chart. Note that reputation-granting adventures adjust that civilization's happiness via events, and when you create an adventure you can determine what impact that will have. For more on that, see the section on society and happiness.

In addition, players can create adventures to convince characters to reduce their threshold for recruitment to NPC adventure teams. Players should create some story to explain the change in the character's friendliness to their cause. In the rare case there are two thresholds (you require reputation with two different civilizations or two different happiness tracks), a single adventure can only reduce one. To reduce both would require two adventures. Note that player-generated adventures can be accomplished by NPC teams. You could even send a character on a mission to reduce their own threshold (for example, send them with a team and equipment to rescue their kidnapped sister, which they could not manage on their own) though if you're already meeting the threshold this would only be useful if you know your reputation or happiness are about to fall.

Creating Quests
To change or add a civilization trait to the settlement or another civilization requires a quest. Traits are values or skills, and they effect the happiness of that civilization. You can learn more about this in the section on civilization values and proficiencies.

A quest is a series of related adventures created by the players spend culture using the system above. Players include one adventure of each difficulty level (easy, medium, hard, and very hard) to construct a quest. They may be completed in any order.

If you are adding traits to a new civilization (like the settlement) you can add three traits on the successful completion of a quest which can be in any category.

If you want to change an existing civilization, you may replace one trait but no civilization may have more than three traits of one of the three types. Types are values, skills to excel in, and skills to be disinterested in.

Note that skills are used in two places (excel and disinterest) and duplicates are allowed to show special emphasis on something.