This week we once again take a closer look at an area of the rules which saw significant growth during the playtest process. This time we're taking a deeper dive at the Knowledge skill and its derivatives, especially with regards to identifying enemy combatants. Both the Recall Knowledge and Recall General Knowledge uses of the Knowledge skill do a lot of heavy lifting here, and while the basic mechanics of these checks have remained largely the same, the accessibility and utility of them has improved.
Recall Knowledge and Recall General Knowledge function in nearly identical ways. Both use the same difficulty as the target for your check, and provide the same information and effects with their degrees of success, but Recall General Knowledge always comes with a steep -5 penalty. This makes Recall Knowledge the superior option. However, even though it is an unrestricted use of the skill in the sense that you do not have to have any training in the skill to use it, it is restricted in another way. The difference between Recall Knowledge and Recall General Knowledge is entirely determined by whether the information you are trying to recall is included under the umbrella of your Knowledge Specialties.
So what are Knowledge Specialties, and how do you access them? A Knowledge Specialty is an esoteric concept that represents personal investment into a field of study. This can be a creature type, like Undead or Oozes, or it can be something more personalized like a deity, pantheon, another plane of existence (besides your home plane), the history of a civilization, and so on.
The first and easiest way to gain a Knowledge Specialty is to become trained in some skills. Becoming trained in the Knowledge skill itself gives you a free Knowledge Specialty immediately, with total freedom in which one you pick. Some other skills also function as Knowledge Specialties themselves if you are trained with the skill. Arcana, Nature, Occultism, Religion, Society, and even Crafting have this additional functionality. Unlike the actual Knowledge skill, however, these skills are specific in how they can be used as a Knowledge Specialty. For example, Arcana as a Knowledge Specialty always lets you Recall Knowledge for information about magical theory (regardless of tradition), the Beast and Dragon creature types, and the Golem subset of the Construct creature type. All you have to do is be trained in a skill to get access to its utility as a Knowledge Specialty, but these skills also allow you to substitute your modifier with that skill for you Knowledge skill modifier when you do so. If your bonus with one of these skills is better than your Knowledge bonus, this ensures that you're always the most likely to remember something important from that field. This can also essentially make Knowledge a Wisdom skill for information related to Nature and Religion, which is an especially a great boon to Clerics and Druids, who tend to be more wise than smart.
One can also gain more Knowledge Specialties directly through perks. The Knowledge Skill has the Additional Knowledge perk. Each time you take this perk, you get to pick two more specialties with no restriction on what those are. Besides bonuses to checks and damage against types of creatures, one of the benefits of a Ranger's Favored Enemy perk is that it adds that creature type as a bonus Knowledge Specialty. There is no hard limit to the number of Knowledge Specialties a character can have, and characters that like to always have answers will likely have many different specialties, and expand upon them throughout their adventuring careers.
Or maybe not! There are some ways to mitigate the significant penalty from Recall General Knowledge. The Bardic Knowledge class perk completely removes the penalty, making a Bard with that perk always likely to know something useful, regardless of specialties. Similarly, the Cultural Osmosis Knowledge skill perk reduces the penalty by a little bit, and this reduction further improves by your proficiency with the Knowledge skill. Eventually a legend with the skill will have reduced the penalty to just -1. The Survival skill perk Canny Survivor lets you substitute your Survival skill to Recall Knowledge about animals, insects, traps, hazards, weather and the environment, and to Recall General Knowledge about any other creatures. For those invested in Survival, which is Wisdom-based by default, the skill can almost entirely replace the Knowledge skill.
But what's the point? Why is it important to Recall Knowledge (or General Knowledge) at all if your character isn't intended to be an insufferable know-it-all? Identifying a creature has a few intrinsic benefits. You get some important information about it, such as resistances or weaknesses to certain damage types, special abilities it might have, and so on. These are all good things to know that inform a party's tactics. But there are also some other ways to make this information work for you and your buddies. Thoughtful Preparation is a Knowledge skill perk that lets you substitute your Knowledge skill for saving throws against a creature you have identified, and others like it, until the next time you make your Daily Preparations. Deadly Knowledge is a General Perk which adds your Intelligence to damage you deal against creatures you have identified. While those perks work just for you, Rangers have a whole slew of class perks that grant your whole party bonuses to attacks, damage, saving throws, and even offer damage resistance against creatures you have identified. Thanks to Dedication Multiclassing, these perks can also be gained by other classes as well, with some additional effort investment.
Recalling Knowledge is also easy and convenient to do. In combat, it's a free action triggered by the start of your turn, so it never eats into your action economy. But since it can only be done on your own turn, it makes it makes your positioning in the initiative order somewhat more important for identification effects that help your allies. Outside of combat, you can choose to try to Recall Knowledge or Recall General Knowledge simply whenever you want. The only restriction is that you can't generally try again to Recall Knowledge or General Knowledge about the same topic more than once per day. Unless, of course, you have the Sudden Inspiration Knowledge skill perk that lets you try again to identify a creature each time it uses a special ability to jog your memory.
Knowledge and creature identification is an important aspect of Realm of Runes for more than just serving as a lore mouthpiece for the setting. It has tangible benefits, and is easily accessible to all sorts of characters, whether those characters are classically smart or not. Next week we'll introduce the class exemplar poised to make the best use of these rules, the Ranger!
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