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Archives of Nethys

Archives of Nethys

Pathfinder RPG (1st Edition) Pathfinder RPG (2nd Edition) Starfinder RPG

General Skills
Acrobatics | Arcana | Athletics | Crafting | Deception | Diplomacy | Intimidation | Lore | Medicine | Nature | Occultism | Performance | Religion | Society | Stealth | Survival | Thievery
There is a Remastered version here.

Society (Int)

Legacy Content

Source Core Rulebook pg. 250 4.0
You understand the people and systems that make civilization run, and you know the historical events that make societies what they are today. Further, you can use that knowledge to navigate the complex physical, societal, and economic workings of settlements. Even if you’re untrained in Society, you can use it for the following general skill actions.
  • Recall Knowledge about local history, important personalities, legal institutions, societal structure, and humanoid cultures. The GM might allow Society to apply to other creatures that are major elements of society in your region, such as the draconic nobility in a kingdom of humans ruled by dragons.
  • Subsist in a settlement by finding shelter, scrounging, or begging for food.

Society Trained Actions

  • Decipher Writing that’s a coded message, text written in an incomplete or archaic form, or in some cases, text in a language you don’t know.
Item Bonuses

Related Feats

To see a list of Feats related to Society, click here.

Society Trained Actions

Create Forgery

Downtime Secret 
Source Core Rulebook pg. 251 4.0
You create a forged document, usually over the course of a day or a week. You must have the proper writing material to create a forgery. When you Create a Forgery, the GM rolls a secret DC 20 Society check. If you succeed, the forgery is of good enough quality that passive observers can’t notice the fake. Only those who carefully examine the document and attempt a Perception or Society check against your Society DC can do so.

If the document’s handwriting doesn’t need to be specific to a person, you need only to have seen a similar document before, and you gain up to a +4 circumstance bonus to your check, as well as to your DC (the GM determines the bonus). To forge a specific person’s handwriting, you need a sample of that person’s handwriting.

If your check result was below 20, the forgery has some obvious signs of being a fake, so the GM compares your result to each passive observer’s Perception DC or Society DC, whichever is higher, using the success or failure results below. Once the GM rolls your check for a document, that same result is used against all passive observers’ DCs no matter how many creatures passively observe that document.

An observer who was fooled on a passive glance can still choose to closely scrutinize the documents on the lookout for a forgery, using different techniques and analysis methods beyond the surface elements you successfully forged with your original check. In that case, the observer can attempt a Perception or Society check against your Society DC (if they succeed, they know your document is a forgery).

Success The observer does not detect the forgery.
Failure The observer knows your document is a forgery.

Examining Forgeries

A creature on the lookout for forgeries, even one who was fooled on a passive glance, can take time to closely examine a document to see if it’s a forgery. They apply different techniques and analysis methods to look beyond the surface elements and attempt a secret Perception or Society check against the forger’s Society DC; any bonus you had to create the forgery initially applies to this DC. On a success, the examiner knows the document is a forgery. On a failure, they think the document is genuine and can’t try again unless they get a new reason to be suspicious of the document. If a PC examines a genuine document, the GM might still pretend to roll a secret check before revealing the document is genuine.