Karma & Reputation

◆ Karma & Reputation ◆

Every pawn carries a conscience. Karma & Reputation adds a complete RPG morality layer to RimWorld: each colonist, prisoner, and visitor holds a hidden karma score from -1000 to +1000, shaped by what they actually do. Your colony's collective standing decides how the rim sees you, who raids you, who trades with you, and who you can call a friend. It augments vanilla social mechanics instead of replacing them, and plays well with a long list of popular mods. Harmony is the only requirement.

✦ A Conscience for Every Colonist

• Per-pawn karma: every pawn carries their own score, seeded at birth and earned through a lifetime of deeds.
• Colony karma: your settlement's standing is the weighted average of its free colonists, the name you carry on the rim.
• Augments, never replaces: vanilla thoughts and relationships stay intact; karma layers consequence beneath them.

✦ Five Tiers of Character

Karma runs from Corrupt to Saint, each tier with its own social standing and trade modifier.

• Saint (above +750): a beacon. The righteous flock, the wicked recoil.
• Good (+250 to +750): decent and well-regarded.
• Neutral (-250 to +250): an ordinary conscience.
• Fallen (-750 to -250): a reputation for cruelty precedes them.
• Corrupt (below -750): a monster, and the rim knows it.

✦ Deeds, Not Pleasantries

Karma is earned through acts with stakes, never idle talk. Chitchat, rapport, romance, and marriage carry no karma at all. You cannot socialize your way to sainthood, and a monster cannot chat their way clean.

• Grievous acts: harvest organs by force (-75), execute a captive (-50), butcher a person (-40), sell a captive (-35), attack a non-hostile (-15).
• Acts of mercy: release a prisoner (+20), win a convert (+12), bring a bounty in alive (+10), tend an outsider (+8), rescue the downed (+8).
• Cruel words and fights: insults, sowing discord, and starting a brawl all carry a small price.

Because positive karma flows only from real mercy, redemption is something you do, one meaningful deed at a time.

✦ Born of Trait and Past

A pawn does not start at zero. Karma is seeded from traits and backstory, so a psychopath begins the descent already underway and a kind soul starts with the benefit of the doubt. Every modded trait is auto-weighted by a keyword and behavior heuristic, so content from other mods slots into the system automatically. Both seeding sources are optional.

✦ Faith Reframes the Deed

The same act means different things under different ideoligions. A Cannibal feels no guilt at the feast; a Supremacist is untroubled by the slave market; a Raider is forgiven their conquest. Under a dark creed, a pawn's whole internal compass inverts, and living the harsh creed feels righteous while gentleness feels like weakness. The outside world, though, stays objective: cannibals are still monsters to everyone else.

✦ Animals and Diet

Slaughtering animals and eating meat carry no karma by default, so an ordinary colony is never judged for living off the land. They matter only for a pawn whose beliefs value animal life: an ideoligion that disapproves of animal slaughter or meat eating, the Animal Personhood meme, or a trait like vegetarianism or a love of animals. For those pawns, breaking their own ethics costs karma, and eating a venerated animal is a serious betrayal. It is optional and invisible to colonies that do not care.

✦ The World Answers Back

Karma is an output, not just an input.

• Mood and mind: a pawn's conscience weighs on or lifts their mood, a saintly or wicked colony colors the whole settlement, and the corrupt break violently far more often.
• The storyteller: a wicked colony draws more disasters and more righteous raids; a virtuous one, fewer.
• Felt in the moment: floating karma motes and messages mark meaningful deeds, bystanders remember extreme acts as lasting opinions, and colonists gossip about each other's reputations.
• Strategic and generational: a wicked colony's prisoners and slaves rebel more often, extreme-karma wardens recruit faster, and children inherit a fraction of their parents' standing.

✦ The Dark Path

Running a wicked colony is the hardest, most reactive way to play, and the most dramatic. Be an Honest Monster, paying full karma for every atrocity as the world turns against you, or a True Believer whose dark creed makes its endorsed cruelties cost nothing and feel righteous. Court pirate allies, recruit through fear, and raise a second generation born already corrupt, but brace for righteous raids, reckonings, prison breaks, and violent minds. The bundled field manual includes a full guide to the dark path.

✦ The Karma Tab

Select any pawn and open the Karma tab, a clean modern inspector that reads their conscience at a glance: their tier, exact score, a full meter, the colony's collective standing, and a scrollable log of every karma change with the deed, the swing, and how long ago.

✦ Compatibility

Karma reaches into a roster of popular mods through safe, optional hooks, each guarded so it silently does nothing if the mod is absent.

• Ideology Leadership Expanded and Leadership Expanded: Stability: coups, executions, and kidnappings of role-holders are judged.
• Grudges!: murders, animal cruelty, and abductions your colonists commit cost karma.
• Simple Warrants and World Domination: bringing bounties in alive is mercy; conquest weighs on those who take part.
• Spread the Word, Faction Territories, Vanilla Social Interactions Expanded, and RimJobWorld all feed karma.
• Any mod: modded memes feed the ideology framework and modded traits are auto-weighted.

Every integration is optional and detected at runtime, so nothing breaks without them.

✦ A Public API

Other mods can read and write karma, register their own events, seeds, and ideo rules, and subscribe to changes through a public API, with no hard reference and a simple mod-active guard.

✦ Everything Is a Switch

Every system has its own setting. Turn off what you do not want, dial in what you do, from seeding and world effects to the day-to-day motes and the storyteller's bias.

✦ Requirements

• Harmony (brrainz.harmony), the only dependency.

✦ Localization

Fully translatable. Every interface string is keyed, so a translation is just a new language file. English is included.

My Quality Commitment:

• Fully Tested: Every feature and line of code has been thoroughly tested in-game to ensure it functions as intended and integrates smoothly.
• Active Support: I am fully committed to maintaining this mod. If you encounter any bugs, compatibility issues, or unintended behavior, please report them in the comments or a dedicated discussion thread.
• No Abandonware: I will actively patch, refine, and update this mod to keep it working and up to standard.
• No Coffee: I will never ask for donations for AI created / assisted mods. I share these in the hopes they spark joy for someone, making AI generated content and then begging for money that could go to artists and people more deserving is NOT responsible AI usage.

Additional documentation: https://astryls.github.io/KAR/