How do you handle forgery in the game? We have a Thrassian with fake papers of sale to get past of a lot of stuff in the game but the question came up who should notice it being fake, when should the get to notice, and how to you make forgeries to begin with? It was part of his background so we haven't put a lot of thought into it till now.
Could use the same rules as Disguise - someone intimately familiar with the form could take a 14+ throw to see an anomaly if taking the time to carefully check or has suspicion (and it's not Bob The Guard at the gate who can't read anyway...)
As far as making a forgery...depends. Is it just a form? Wax seals/etc? Embossed sigils?
If they had a sample to work from, I don't necessarily know if I'd do any more than that for a forgery of something 'simple' - else for seals or embossing or whatever I might look at an Art/Craft/Profession sort of thing to see what it might cost to get a replica from a thieves' guild or something, perhaps valued at some percentage of hte "sale price" referenced on the form.
I'd be inclined to base that on how this particular document works in your setting.
If it's just a written record of the sale of a Thrassian, then it may just be a plain document decribing the terms of the sale with the seals or marks of the buyer and the seller. Since the PC is the buyer there's really only one mark to forge, and unless there are restrictions on who can legally sell Thrassians there's no reason to forge a real merchant's seal when the PC can just invent a merchant and their seal. I don't really see how a "forgery" of this kind could ever be discovered.
If a sale has to be witnessed by a government offical, or only a few well-known merchants could have been involved in the sale, then things get more complicated. Perhaps the best way to do it would be to have a hijink or adventure to get a copy of a valid seal then have a character with an approriate Art or Craft proficiency make the forgery (no roll required). In terms of discovery, I would assume that a decent forgery would pass muster unless the authorities were already suspicious of the document, in which case it would fail when investigated.
[quote="James K"] If it's just a written record of the sale of a Thrassian, then it may just be a plain document decribing the terms of the sale with the seals or marks of the buyer and the seller. Since the PC is the buyer there's really only one mark to forge, and unless there are restrictions on who can legally sell Thrassians there's no reason to forge a real merchant's seal when the PC can just invent a merchant and their seal. I don't really see how a "forgery" of this kind could ever be discovered... If a sale has to be witnessed by a government offical, or only a few well-known merchants could have been involved in the sale, then things get more complicated. [/quote]
A really big question to ask is "What happens when your thrassian's legal owner turns up and demands his property back?" If the sales record doesn't bear that specific legal owner's mark, it'd be extremely easy for said legal owner to claim that the document is forged - or simply that the slave in question was sold without the owner's leave by a third party, brass bridge-style.
(Of course, depending on the legal culture of the area, the court's disposition towards both parties could play a bigger part in its decision than the document's quality. Oh, and remember that Thrassians get -2 to human reaction rolls...)
Good point, I hadn't even considered that. I had been assuming that Thrassians had no legal status in the region, so the papers of sale were to allow a free Thrassian to pass as a slave. But if we're talking about a liberated Thrassian, things would be a lot more complicated.
[quote="GMJoe"]
A really big question to ask is "What happens when your thrassian's legal owner turns up and demands his property back?"
[/quote]
I believe the answer involves some combination of "introduce him to my growing band of mercenaries", "pay someone off", and "leg it".