This week we take a deeper dive into Settlement Prestige, a new game system that was added to Realm of Runes as money was being removed. Part of the inspiration for its inclusion was to provide an outlet for looted treasure that a party wouldn't want to use. A lot of players really like gathering loot to sell later, and it feels structurally incomplete to fail to cater to that urge just because the system does not have a standardized economy. Yet, as Settlement Prestige became more fleshed out, it evolved into a system that feels like it ought to be included even if your group plays in a setting that uses money. It's a system that is robust enough to be interesting, but not so overbearing that it will ruin your play experience if you have little interest in it.
At its core, Settlement Prestige is a reputation-tracking system on a settlement scale. Your character's prestige value within a settlement is an indicator of how well (or poorly) they are received in the settlement as a whole. It does not have an influence on how individuals within that settlement treat you, however. It's not that granular. Indeed, how you treat specific NPCs probably won't move the needle on your prestige value in a settlement. In this way, the system does not force most normal interactions to be affected in inorganic ways. Just because you might have made a positive impression overall doesn't mean that some people won't have their own reasons for disliking you, and the reverse scenario is also true.
Settlement Prestige is measured by points, and can have a positive, negative, or zero value. There is not a cap to the number of points a character can accrue, either positively or negatively. The specific number of points isn't usually important in and of itself. The effects of your prestige manifest based on passing certain thresholds. These thresholds get further apart the farther away from zero you get, making a reputation harder to improve the better (or worse) that it gets. These diminishing returns makes it hard to grind out a good reputation all at once. Making an impression at the scale of an entire settlement is something one continues to work at over the course of an entire campaign.
A prestige value of zero (or low enough either in the positive or negative direction to not yet pass those first thresholds) is equivalent to having no reputation at all. This is generally the level at which your character starts when they first arrive in a new settlement, but not always. A particularly insular or unfriendly settlement might cause newcomers to begin with enough negative points the have already passed some negative thresholds. Oppositely, particularly friendly settlements might cause players to start with positive points. One of the Backstory Boons, "Hometown Hero," also lets a character start the game with enough positive points in a specific settlement to have passed the first two positive thresholds right from the beginning of the story.
Prestige Thresholds
The thresholds for positive and negative prestige are mirrors of each other in both the values at which their effects manifest, and the nature of those effects. We'll take a look specifically at the positive prestige effects here, but know that the negative effects are equal and opposite. The effects of all of your positive or negative prestige thresholds are cumulative, as well. You don't "lose out" on lesser effects by getting better ones. While the number of prestige points you can accumulate are not limited, there is a finite number of thresholds that can be reached. Once your reputation has exceeded the best threshold in a settlement, gaining more points essentially becomes a buffer against losing points in the future. Listed below are each of the positive thresholds and their point values. There are essentially three different types of rewards that your character can get from having a large prestige value. We'll discuss their effects some more afterward.
0: This is where most characters start in a new settlement. This has no special effects.
10: The character has a +1 un-typed bonus to civil social checks in this settlement.
20: Most NPCs are Friendly upon first meeting, unless they have a personal reason otherwise.
30: Increase the effective level of items available in this settlement by 1.
50: Increase the bonus to civil social checks by 1.
100: Most NPCs are Helpful upon first meeting, unless they have a personal reason otherwise.
200: Increase the effective level of items available in this settlement by 1.
500: Increase the effective level of items available in this settlement by 1.
The first category of benefits unlocked is a bonus to civil social checks. This provides a small, but meaningful, numerical bonus to a type of checks that tends to be made often within settlements. Being generally liked makes influencing other people easier. This can help less diplomatic characters achieve a higher baseline of effectiveness or might help highly charismatic characters further press their advantage. As an un-typed bonus, these effects stack with any other bonuses a character might have to such checks, including other un-typed bonuses, so they'll always be there for you, provided you have a good enough reputation.
The second type of bonus essentially gives characters a head-start on making friends with NPCs. Though, while most NPCs in a settlement in which you have high prestige are likely to start either friendly or helpful, this does not enforce such attitudes on every NPC. You might still run into specific individuals who aren't as keen toward you as the general opinion seems to be. This category of benefit is somewhat vaguer in order to avoid backing the GM into a corner. Most people having a favorable impression of you shouldn't prevent important conflicts or interesting storytelling in a settlement. A population isn't a monolith, after all.
The third category of effects works more directly with the availability mechanics introduced as money was removed from the core assumptions of Realm of Runes. These effects, by increasing the effective level of items available in a settlement, allow for a way of getting better gear than might have otherwise been offered. Taking the time to nurture a good reputation in a settlement can directly pay off in terms of the equipment you can get. For bigger settlements, this can allow characters with high prestige to access gear that could normally only be found adventuring or made through crafting.
Gaining Prestige
So, now that we've looked at how prestige affects your character once you have it, let's take a look at how you get it. There are three main sources of prestige. The first is as a discretionary reward (or penalty) for character behavior in a settlement. This reward generally only applies to circumstances which affect the settlement as a whole. Helping an innkeeper clean a nest of dire rats out of the basement probably won't change your prestige, but clearing out a camp of bandits that have been harrying the local highways probably will. This discretionary method is likely the only way to reduce your prestige threshold as well. Bullying locals for information might be expedient, but most people don't take kindly to it and word spreads.
A second way to gain prestige is though downtime activities. Many skill uses which previously gave money as a reward now give Settlement Prestige instead. Things like practicing a trade, staging a performance, or even just doing hard labor can give a population an impression of you. These effects can be the fastest way to gain prestige, as critical success increments further increase the number of points you can get for each downtime session. They are not foolproof, however. Doing badly at these tasks can hurt your reputation instead, causing you to lose prestige. This outcome is probably not the most likely, though, as characters are probably not going to attempt ways of gaining prestige for which they aren't already suited, unless desperate.
The third method of gaining prestige is through equipment donations. In games which don't use money at all, this effect provides a use for looted equipment that you aren't going to use by "cashing it in" for some improved reputation. Even in games which do use money, this effect provides interesting competition for just selling that gear for cash. You could make money from your loot directly by offloading it for money, but by giving it away for prestige instead you could access new tools that all your money couldn't have bought otherwise if it weren't available. You have to donate enough equipment to make a settlement-sized impression, however. This requires either several bulk of raw materials, or a substantial number of items. If you have accumulated a lot of equipment, though, you can get a lot of prestige very quickly this way.
Of course, not all gear can be donated for prestige. Only equipment which is not available in that settlement gives you prestige points when donated. This has two primary effects. First, it prevents an infinite recursion in games which do not use money. You can't get free equipment and then give it back for a prestige benefit. That just doesn't make sense from a mechanical or story perspective. Second, it makes it harder to gain prestige this way in bigger settlements. It's a lot easier to impress a small hamlet that doesn't have a lot of good stuff already, but wowing a metropolis with gear is going to take some really special stuff. It also makes it harder to use this method to gain prestige over time. As you hit prestige thresholds that increase the availability of gear for you, that level of gear no longer gives you more prestige.
Using Prestige
There are several interesting ways with which Settlement Prestige integrates itself into a campaign. As previously mentioned, it provides a great way of giving characters an impression of a new settlement based on its impression of them. It also gives characters a long-term way of feeling like they're definitely making a difference to a settlement in which they spend a lot of time. It can be a difficult thing to get across through storytelling alone. Yet, while the mechanical benefits of Settlement Prestige are good, they're not so strong as to dramatically shift the balance of a game, or to feel mandatory for players that simply aren't interested, from either a character or meta perspective.
Although Settlement Prestige is generally assumed to be gained or lost at the level of an individual settlement, it can also be linked together to have results at even larger scales. If your party does something which positively (or negatively) affects an entire nation, you might gain prestige in several settlements at once. Similarly, there can also be interesting consequences when considering rival settlements or nations. If two settlements hate each other, you might find yourself in a situation where gaining prestige in one loses you prestige in another.
One final interesting aspect of this system that I'd like to touch on is that, although many of the benefits of this system impact typically charisma-based game interactions, good charisma is not required to engage with Settlement Prestige in the first place. To a certain extent, taking the effort to gain a high prestige value can make up for shortcoming in a character's social skills. In this way, the system helps to avoid putting pressure on that statistic during character creation. You don't have to build a character with prestige in mind.
Parting Thoughts
Overall, Settlement Prestige provides some small, but impactful, mechanical implications for game effects that are usually more esoteric. These effects are not so strong that they force themselves on players who don't care, but provide tangible rewards for those that put the effort in. And it does all this while providing GMs with a tool that helps characters feel like they're having a real impact on the world without handcuffing them into making every NPC behave in a specific way as a result. Next time we'll return to the Tome of Whispers for a deeper dive into that supplement, so stay tuned!
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