Area Knowledge
Cost: 2
Ability Type: Passive Ability
Related Skill: General Knowledge
Prerequisites: General Knowledge 1
This ability provides local knowledge of a single, specific area - with your degree of intimacy with the area being inversely proportional to its size and complexity.
Typically the area covered is a single city or a moderately-sized region - perhaps containing one or more towns or smaller settlements. In this case the ability allows unmodified General Knowledge checks concerning the nature of the area, and provides a +1 bonus to Navigation, Survival and Social Skills: Streetwise checks made in that locale. When considering a region in this case it should ideally be one that is reasonably logical and/or homogeneous, such as a county or state of a larger nation, or a discrete geographic feature such as a forest or desert.
If the area is larger - say a whole country, or a Plane on the Fringes, then the Survival and Social Skills bonuses are lost and General Knowledge checks concerning the area are made with a -1 penalty. If the area is larger still - such as an entire continent on the Core or in the Centre then checks are made with a -2 penalty.
As well as enabling checks in the area itself, Area Knowledge also allows checks to be made regarding the surrounding area, though with an additional -2 penalty (stacking with any penalty for the area itself). In this case the surrounding area is the next size category up from the area specified - so that knowledge of a city gives some knowledge of the country as a whole, knowledge of a country as a whole provides some insight about the rest of the continent, etc.
If a character has two or more overlapping Area Knowledge abilities (both a given city and the country that it is part of, for example) then he receives a +1 bonus to all General Knowledge checks made regarding the smaller of the two areas.
Characters attempting General Knowledge checks concerning an area with which they have no familiarity at all suffer a -5 penalty to the check - or the GM may simply rule that there is no way they could know.
