Artifact examination

Artifact examination, or artifact inspection, is an Intelligence-based task by which you identify unknown artifacts, at a risk of breaking them.

Each artifact has a difficulty, which is a penalty applied to your effective rating for the examination task, and a complexity, which represents the degree of success at the examination task you must achieve in order to fully identify the item.

Your performance at artifact examination is based on a specialized success roll, using an effective rating consisting of your Intelligence attribute plus any applicable modifiers.

The examination roll

• The minimum possible effective rating is -5
• The maximum possible effective rating is 35
• A number of successes from 0 to 10 is produced
• There is always a 1 in 100 chance of 0 successes
• Any other number of successes is generally possible, with the chance of a given number varying according to your rating
• The general behavior of the roll resembles that of the Action Table used by Gamma World 3rd Edition and Marvel Super Heroes

Possible results

• If you rolled 0 successes, the Broken effect will be applied to the item. (It will fail to apply if the item is Sturdy.)
• If you rolled 10 successes, the item will be identified regardless of its complexity.
• If you rolled at least as many successes as the item's complexity, it will be identified.
• If you rolled fewer successes than the item's complexity, it will be partially identified, and the name you see for it will usually change (for example, becoming a rifle rather than a strange artifact). In the case of examining modded artifacts, this may also result in having other variants of the item of lesser complexity fully identified.
• If you are Confused, you will always think you broke the item, and it will never be identified, partially or completely. You will only actually break the item if you rolled 0 successes.

Sources of examination rating modifiers

• Artifact difficulty
• +5 for Gadget Inspector
• +5 for a telescopic monocle
• +3 for a powered advanced toolkit, non-stacking
• +8 for a micromanipulator array
• +2 to +4 for sitting in a comfortable chair