Good morning everyone! I hope the weather’s as nice where you are as it is here – in Texas, clear skies and 50 degree weather is about as good as it gets in January, so we’ll take it!

Anyway, in this second part of the Project post I’ll talk about corruption and what you can do to overcome it. When a character (contributor) commits to give money and ADM (short for ‘administrative points’, which is an abstraction for the men, supplies, construction machines, ships, transports, and logistical support needed to complete a Project) they only commit to a value that they could give, not that they will give. Depending on their attitude towards you, the Project, and the House that most benefits, they may choose to use their ADM to undermine rather than advance the project – and corrupt characters may even steal money from the pot rather than contribute to it.

You will get an alert from your Intel Prime if a Project is delayed due to less-than-expected ADM support, or if money is being stolen from it. At that point, you know you have a thief on your hands, but you don’t know which ‘contributor’ it is. The first thing to do is to take a closer look at who is part of the Project. When you select a character, you will see their public Honor rating, which is an indication of how likely they are to honor their obligations and not steal. Another factor that indicates how likely characters are to steal from a project is a hidden stat called Cover. Cover on a Project basically makes it easier for someone to steal, since it is theoretically harder to determine who was stealing if there are several characters who might be capable. Characters with high Honor generate a low Cover for the Project (since they are publically considered upright people, they generally are above suspicion) while lower-Honor characters generate more Cover (since they might be also considered people who would steal). Projects with a high aggregate Cover rating are much more likely to be stolen from.

(The reason we keep the Cover number hidden is that it’s a model for something that ought to make sense on a purely human level – if all but one of the participants are upstanding citizens, the one corrupt member probably won’t dare to make a move. One of the things we want to avoid here is overexposing the workings of the characters during play. This is a mistake Black & White II made when it showed you the mathematical innards of your Creature – it broke the illusion that it was actually, well, a creature. We want to avoid the same problem with our characters if we can.)

So what you can do? If you think you know who’s doing the deed, you can set your Inquisitors on them, but beware – they will find the truth. If the accused is guilty, you’ll be able to sentence them, and replace them on the Project. But if they aren’t, they’ll be free – and extremely angry. So you have to be subtle. On the Intrigue screen, you can look through each character’s history of Project, War Plan, and Plot participation. It might be that one character stands out as having a history of corruption – but perhaps multiple characters might. In that case, you may have to resort to entrapment: put together your Projects carefully, in the hope of tempting your suspects into stealing from a Project full of people you’re either sure are clean or have bribed, blackmailed or intimidated into staying clean on that Project. Alternatively, you could simply be careful only to employ your suspects in Projects where they won’t dare steal. Choose wisely!

Next: Pops – what’s changed, and Ideas – what they are!

-Steve