Challenges

Challenges are undertaken by Agents of the elder gods, in order to enact their will upon the world.

There are many Challenges in the game. Most are available to all agents, but some of them are restricted to one of the Magics, requiring skill in that magic to perform, while others are restricted to specific Agents or Locations.

**Note**: Challenges are performed by Agents (the ones the player controls); Heroes go on Quests

## Basics

Challenges can be described by the following:

**Requirements**: Challenges will have some set of requirements that describes when they can be used

**Stat**: Most challenges are associated with one (or more) of the four agent stats: **Might**, **Lore**, **Intrigue**, **Command**.

**Complexity**: A measure of how **difficult** it is to perform the challenge.

**Profile**: How much completing the challenge raises your profile

**Menace**: How much completing the challenge raises your menace.

**XP**: How much experience an agent gets for completing the challenge.

**Effect**: The thing that the challenge actually *does*

Every turn, a challenge progresses by a number of points equal to the its associated stat. Challenges without a stat usually progress by an amount based on local conditions instead - see Lay Low. When progress on a challenge equals or exceeds complexity, the challenge is completed.

All challenges have a baseline complexity, but for many challenges the complexity can be raised by the Security of the location.

Most effects occur at time of completion of the challenge, though some challenges (notably geomancy ones relating to habitability) have an ongoing effect while they are being performed.

The menace and XP of a challenge change with difficulty level. The numbers listed below are for the normal difficulty level 0, but menace will be higher and XP will be lower if a harder difficulty level is chosen.

## Available Challenges

There are a great many challenges available. An attempt to catalogue them has been made. They are subdivided by the primary factor restricting their use for readability.

Values listed are subject to change as game development continues.

### Lay Low

Lay Low is the main tool for managing agents' profile/menace so that they can be used for longer periods of time without heroes/armies hunting them down.

As of 0.8, Lay Low behaves differently from almost all other challenges. It doesn't have a complexity, and an agent doesn't increase their progress each turn. Instead, Lay Low does nothing for the first turn that an agent is performing it, and then every turn after that it reduces the agent's profile by some amount and their menace by a different amount. It automatically ends when both profile and menace are at their minimums for that agent.

There are 3 tiers of Lay Low speeds:

1. Tier 1: 1 profile and 0.75 menace per turn; baseline for any human city/town
2. Tier 2: 2 profile and 1.5 menace per turn; This applies in any\* Witches' Coven or any Orc location. It applies in any Deep One Sanctum or Abyssal City. It also applies in any location with an Ancient Ruin POI, unless that location is a human city/town with both infiltration **and** shadow >= 50%. Finally, it applies in any city/town which has either shadow >=50 **or** infiltration >= 50% but not both.
3. Tier 3: 3 profile and 2.25 menace per turn; This applies only in human cities/towns with both infiltration and shadow >= 50%

\*currently, witch's covens and orc locations initially have a tier 1 Lay Low speed and only get tier 2 Lay Low speed once they're infiltrated. It isn't clear whether this is buggy behavior or just a mistake in the popups' text.

### Human Settlement

The following challenges can be performed at human settlements

### Human Towns/Cities

Next time the hero rests, they are disrupted for 5 turns - unable to act. Then for the next 25 turns they -1 to all stats.

### Character Present

These challenges can be performed as long as a character is present in the current province.

- trade (agents only)

- attack

- rob (requires your level be greater than theirs)