Crime Lores

The campaign focuses on action, and the saga of the strike team - the rise (and fall?) of its hero members. This is not a Sherlock Holmes story.

Crime Lore skills represent knowledge, investigative leads and connections within the various main crime divisions. Consider a successful check to be a shortcut to solving a case without having to go through the usual steps of making witnesses talk, busting heads, tracking down suspects in hiding… and so on.

Crime Lores
The main five Crime Lores are Homicide Lore, Patrol Lore, Robbery Lore, Vice Lore, and the gang lores (keep reading). Less prominent, but still acceptable, choices include Arson Lore and Fraud Lore.

Gang Lores
Note there is no single “Gang Lore” skill. Instead “Gang Lore” is subsumed into the ancestral Lores (Society for humans). For instance, take Goblin Lore to know details about goblin gangs operating in the city as well as notable goblin gang leaders.

Ancestry Lore skills (such as Dwarf Lore) still covers all the regular cultural knowledge, but in this campaign is expanded to also cover details about gang operations. For human gangs, Society is used.

Usage
You gain your first check when assigned a case (assuming you are trained in the Lore). This represents previous knowledge. A success gives you a clue useful to crack the case, or make progress, if it's large and complex.

You can then earn yourself a second check (whether you are trained or not) working the street, meeting with confidential informants etc.

If you still haven’t scored a success after two checks, and regular adventuring does not yield any other leads, the case goes cold - the DC increases by 5 after the second failure.

Cold cases
You can still earn more checks, but you must spend increasingly more time and effort to earn each one, and each failure keeps increasing the DC. You might consider temporarily giving up - turning it into a "cold case". You can still return to the case later when you’re a more experienced detective - you might find your chances of cracking the case have increased substantially by then.

Note the Additional Lore feat is in play as written. It is a great way to gain an extra skill, and to have that automatically reach higher than Trained without spending precious skill increases. https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=750 Note: Since Society is not a Lore skill, you cannot select it for Additional Lore.

Monster Knowledge
Since so many foes will be humanoid in this campaign, monster knowledge checks will use race lore skills for humanoid foes. So if you face three thugs in an alley - a dwarf, a human, and a goblin - you’ll use Dwarf Lore, Society, and Goblin Lore respectively to seize them up.

Optional rules
Ancestry Lores and Ancestry Feats: these effectively act as Additional Lore for that Race Lore. For example: if you are an Elf, and you gain the Elven Lore ancestral feat, you gain expert proficiency in Elven Lore at 3rd level. At 7th level you gain master proficiency, and at 15th level you gain legendary proficiency.

The purpose of this rule is to strengthen the identity of your race/ancestry.

Background lore: You may replace the lore specified by your Background with a Crime lore. For instance, a Dwarf Acrobat (the background, not the archetype) could choose Dwarf Lore or Patrol Lore instead of Circus Lore. A Goblin Acrobat could replace Circus Lore with Goblin Lore or Arson Lore.

The purpose of this rule is to make many more backgrounds useful.