Rarity Overview

Some items are naturally more difficult to purchase than others, depending on where your characters find themselves at any given time. Of course, some items are rare no matter where one goes, and likewise, some items are always common and inexpensive.

Rarity in Genesys measures how difficult an item can be to find on a scale of 0–10, with 0 being the easiest to track down and 10 being the hardest. However, whether or not an item is available for purchase should never be solely a matter of rolling dice. Instead, your Game Master always has at least partial say as to whether an item is available in a certain location. Nevertheless, for simple items, rarity provides a simple way for your GM to determine whether something is available and to let you easily track items down. We suggest that you make a successful Negotiation, Streetwise, or Knowledge skill check to determine where your character can find an item.

Table I.5–1: Rarity lists rarities, the corresponding check difficulty to find items with those rarities, and examples of items with those rarities. The examples are all modern day examples; if you need to invent rarities for new items in different eras, check out our different example settings starting on page 138. Table I.5–2: Rarity Modifiers, on the next page, lists some general modifiers that can be applied to an item’s rarity, based on the technological status and general location where your character is looking for the item. We’ve kept the location descriptions very vague; they could apply to different cities or villages on Earth, or to different planets across a galactic civilization. Modifiers can raise an item’s rarity above 10. For rarities higher than 10, the difficulty remains at Formidable (d d d d d), but your GM may upgrade the difficulty once for every rarity beyond 10.