Character Knowledge for Val’Abebi with bloodline

Ranks in a Knowledge Skill represents formalized training and education in a field.

The val’Abebi Bloodline talent (Wisdom of the Ages) specifically states that you are untrained, but gain a bonus on active skill rolls.

In this case, your val’Abebi would NOT know this information automatically, but should it come up in the mod Althares would grant you the information you wish in divine revelation or you hear the ‘whispers of your ancestors’. For this you would make an active (if untrained) skill roll with a big bonus, but because you have not actively studied the material you would not qualify under the rules of this book.

Sometimes book learning has its advantages

We need to include SOME bonuses for the people who have burned Ranks to train their skills. Talent bonuses (like the Bloodline ability) reflect a character being a prodigy of sorts, able to instinctively know how to do something better, but not fundamental understanding in a given field. I might be able to pick up a trumpet and play it beautifully in a fully improvised way, but that doesn’t give me the ability to read music or understand the pseudo-Italian of musical notation.

If you do not have the listed number of RANKS in the given specialty, you do not know the information.

Hey even the dim witted get a lucky guess. But that does not mean they can rationally articulate why they are right. Think of it this way. With north south east and west as orinal points. There is a one in four chance to guess the sun rises in the east. But the educated know that illiirs chariot travels east to west. As for that whole arcanis travels around a star theory…. That’s heresy.

The answer is simple: Because you are not trained in that, and therefore do not know it.

Remember, an active Skill Roll can represent you remembering something you smelled a decade ago and never thought of. It is the random chance in life, the sudden epiphanies that hit us all at times. Encyclopedic Knowledge, like Wisdom of the Ages, represents your ability to recall these random, passing facts.

Skill Ranks, on the other hand, represent trained, learned expertise in a given field. In terms of Knowledges specifically, you have made it your vocation (or, at least, an avid hobby) to know this information and the skills relevant to it.

Either way: NO, talents and other situational talent-based (or non Skill Rank based) bonuses do NOT count as prerequisites for the learning of this knowledge. Should an appropriate knowledge check come up in an adventure, these talents will help you make the check (think of it of finally putting 2 and 2 together to get 4 after decades of never thinking about it before), but they do not give you the right or ability to know this information in character beforehand.

Because Encyclopedic Memory is a representation of what you may have picked up. Your knowledge in a single field gives you a better chance (hence, the dice roll) of knowing a tidbit of information than someone completely untrained in a field of study. The thresholds presented in the Blessed Lands book are represented as what a dedicated scholar has specifically learned and knows (no dice roll needed) in that field of study. To assume that someone with an Encyclopedic Memory who has only studied Trade should automatically know about the Second War of Extinction just does not make sense. But, in studying Trade practices of Ssethregoran races, they may (roll) have heard something about it.

Like toodeep, I would have expected Encyclopedic Knowledge to apply to things like this. What is the logic for it not applying? To me at least, Encyclopedic Knowledge represents a wide breadth of knowledge in many topics (the breadth being represented by the -5 which is enough to make really obscure knowledge unknown without the actual skill).

I considered the same thing and went back and looked at the Talent. The Talent and others like it that grant bonuses to untrained skill rolls significantly increases the likelihood that at some point the character has encountered some snippet, passage or note somehow dealing with the topic. You may remember something overheard or a passing reference relevant enough to pull out a key detail.

The information presented in the Blessed Lands book is collated for the convenience of us the audience, but does not represent an equivalent tome within the world for easy reference. There’s no “Blood Wars – How We Did It” anthology to reference. The knowledge represents the accumulated knowledge gleaned from the study of a wide range of sources over a long period of time. An untrained skill roll represents a check to see if the PC happens to remember something very specific on the topic applicable to the problem at hand. Think about the length of snippets within mods for knowledge checks compared against the 39 published pages of detailed history.

As Henry pointed out, should a piece of knowledge from within the book be important to a story, there would be a skill roll provided at that time with all applicable bonuses applied. You may recall an obscure reference to a second war of extinction (20 ranks required otherwise) against a race known as the Eladru. But the timeframe, length, difficulties in persecuting the war and the role the gates played in it requires a depth of knowledge that SHOULD be reflected in a lifetime of study for an obscure topic without sufficient references in existence to review.

In terms of the usefulness of the various talents, one of the approaches I’ve seen and used with Knowledge checks is if you have the various feats and your untrained roll would be better than trained, you can do it untrained. You just add one set of bonuses or the other, not both. Basically the untrained roll reflects knowledge gained outside of your core focus. “Well, I’ve spent a lot of time studying the history of the Coryani Empire, but I do recall coming across a treatise on the Second Gift of Althares written by a famous Coryani scholar who wrote…” Taken n that way you get a balance of the two approaches.

With a sweep of his hat,

Paul