Threads and Knowledge

Momenta Core Rules · Moment 2 · Characters · Chapter 09

A Thread is a chapter of your character’s life, written as a short provenance phrase: “Raised in the Ashmark War College”, “Twenty years keeping ledgers in Varga’s counting-house”, “Field medic on the Ashen March”. Every hero’s mantle is woven from the threads of their past.

Every Thread does two jobs:

1. Knowledge - a character should simply know what someone who lived that chapter would reasonably know.
2. Action rolls - a relevant Thread can be invoked to improve an action roll (see Narrative Actions).

Thread Guidelines

Characters begin with 3 Threads, each ratified by the GM against this test:

1. A story lives behind it. The GM can ask “how did you come by that?” and the answer is a story, not a shrug. Trait-shaped Threads are legal if they have roots: “Never forgets a face” passes when the answer is “twenty years matching faces to ledgers in Varga’s counting-house.”
2. Big enough to recur, small enough to have gaps. If you can’t name three adjacent things it doesn’t cover, it’s too broad. “Warrior” fails; “Raised in the Ashmark War College” knows tactics and drill but not sailing, poison, or courts.
3. Superlatives are flavor. “The best baker in East Swineland” adds the same +2d bonus as just “a baker”, but the former is infinitely more interesting to roleplay, and should be encouraged.
4. Is it compatible with the concept line? Threads should be chosen to flesh out the backstory of the character concept, and not just for mechanical optimization of narrative play.

Gaining Threads

Threads are earned through the following:

• Completing a Personal Project aimed at gaining a new Thread. The time spent on the project clock is the story of how you came by this new experience.
• GM reward at a defining story beat. This can either be awarded to individual characters, or given as a shared award to the whole party that lived through a defining experience in the game (i.e., “Survived the Sorrowmaw”).

Design Note: For calibration purposes, we should expect roughly one new Thread per tier of play. As characters advance and grow and become richer in their experiences, each Thread should be worth a little less than the last.

Rewriting Threads

Threads cannot be retrained, swapped, or refunded; you cannot retrain your past. However, with GM consent, a player may propose to editorially rewrite a Thread that isn’t working at the table into something else that is more usable.

Knowledge and Languages

In Momenta, there are generally no rolls required for knowledge checks. For every subject matter in the world, the GM will make a simple determination based on the character’s knowledge level:

• Expert - a character can be considered an expert in a subject if they have a Thread that reasonably covers it.
• Familiar - a character may not have an applicable Thread, but their concept line and backstory plausibly provides the character with exposure to the subject.
• Unfamiliar - a character does not know any more about this subject than anyone else in the world would.

Languages are governed by the same framework; all characters are assumed to be Expert in Common, which represents the prevalent language that almost everyone speaks in the world. For additional languages, it will depend on the character’s Threads and concept line.

Specialized knowledge or languages could also be granted from archetypes or masteries.

Action rolls that require clear language understanding may suffer a penalty if the GM adjudicates that there is some kind of language barrier in place.