Crafting Mechanic

The core principle of this crafting system is simplicity and specificity. Everything works with simple, easy to follow rules, but has enough depth to lift the burden from a GM having to fill in every blank by giving specific details for everything. While a GM is always the arbiter of what exists and if a crafting recipe works.

What Can I craft?

Anything! but this guide is made by Sig, and adapted from another source, and thus is limited in scope. This guide will provide the principles of crafting for many fields, from alchemy to engineering to woodworking.

The basis of how crafting works is similar between each field, but the recipes, material, and the results will be radically different. After all, a healing potion, a catapult, and a magic sword are all things you can craft, but the process for each varies quite a bit.

The goal of this is to get you started and provide the basics of what will get you on the way to crafting! Specific crafting recipes will be provided at a later time, either discovered, learned, or taught from the people and places in the world. If you don’t have a recipe for something that’s okay, just reach out to the DM and I am sure we can figure out how you can find or invent one.

Quick Summary

Each step will be outlined in more depth, but the following serves as a summary and reference for the proccesss.

• Select an Item. Find the item you wold like to craft!
• Check with the DM. They will confirm if the item exists, and if you have (or need to invent/find) the recipe for it. This system is to suppliment the world, not supersede worldbuilding.
• Gather the materials. Materials can be looted, harvested, purchased, or gathered . The specifics for materials and generally where they can be found is covered later/
• Begin Crafting! You can find the related tool and ability score on the table below. Use the related tool and skill to determine your crafting modifier.
  Crafting Modifier = your related Tool Proficiency Bonus + your related Ability Score Modifier
• You can make progress in 2 hour increments. For each 2 hours spent, make a crafting roll using the formula above and compare the result to the DC listed for the item.
• On failure, no progress is made. If you fail 3 times in a row, the crafting fails and all materials are lost.
• On success, 2 hours of progress is made, and you can mark your progress and put the craft aside, or continue crafting if you have the time.
• Once your completed progress is equal to the crafting time of the item, the item is complete.
• You are done! Enjoy your shiny new item

Crafting Time

All items have a crafting time measured in hours. Crafting is completed in 2 hour chunks. ome branches of crafting must
make all their checks consecutively (like Alchemy) while some do not (like Blacksmithing or Enchanting). A crafting roll is made every 2 hours of work on an item.
On success, you mark 2 hours of completed time. Once the completed time is equal to the crafting time, the item is complete. On failure, the crafting time is lost and no progress has been made during the 2 hours.
If you fail three times in a row, the crafting is a failure and all materials are lost.

Crafting During a Rest

During a long rest, you can make up to 2 hours of progress during a crafting project if you do nothing else during the long rest besides craft and sleep. During this time, you have disadvantage on any Wisdom (Perception) checks and a −5 to all Passive Perception checks as you are focused on your craft.

You can make 2 hours of progress on any crafting project by taking this camp action. For most projects, this progress can be banked completing the project 2 hours at a time. For some types of crafting, like alchemy, you can’t make incremental progress, but you can continue for 2 additional hours of crafting before or after a long rest in which you took the camp action “craft” to get 4 hours.

Crafting Rolls

Each profession lists the related ability modifier and tool used to calculate your crafting roll modifier. In many cases, attempting to craft without the applicable tool is impossible. Your GM may allow improvised tools, and in that case the check is made with disadvantage.
Beyond the tool, most branches of crafting require a heat source, and some require more infrastructure. These are generally approached logically and are at the discretion of the GM.

Here is a list of some of the additional requirements by branch:

• Blacksmithing can perform minor crafts with a simple heat source, but requires a forge and anvil to make new items.
• Alchemy and Cooking almost always requires a heat source.
• Tinkering, Jewelcrafting, and Poisoncraft sometimes require a heat source.
• Enchanting, Scroll Scribing, Woodworking, Wand Whittling, Poisoncraft, Leatherworking, Engineering, Runecarving rarely require anything besides the tools of the profession.

Bonuses

A crafting roll is a special type of ability check and you can’t add temporary bonuses to your roll (such as Bardic Inspiration or the spell guidance) as the crafting roll represents the entire time you spend working the item.

In general, the intention is that no external bonuses apply, unless they specifically state the apply to crafting rolls. This would include feats (such as ones that allow you to reroll certain rolls), class features (such as ones that allows you to add dice to certain rolls), etc. A GM can apply these bonuses, but they are not intended to work, and can result in checks becoming too easy.

You can gain can advantage if another player with proficiency in the related tool helps for the whole crafting time.

Workday

When a character is spending all day working, they make 8 hours of progress, and cannot exceed 8 hours working on a crafting project during a day. Players will occasionally want to work longer than 8 hours, but this fails to account for the limitations of mortals: player characters still need to eat, sleep, and will eventually lose their focus and ability to work.

Types of Materials

Without materials, there is nothing to craft from. Crafting does not make things from thin air, it makes more useful things from less useful things. Gathering the materials will be the essential first step in any job. Materials are generally found in three ways.

• Looting and Salvaging
• Gathering and Harvesting
• Purchasing

Reagents

Reagents are a huge range of things; most often they are plants that contain some magical essence, but almost as frequently they are harvested from various magically inclined monsters. The exact source of a reagent usually does not matter beyond defining its type, as the part of the reagent used is the fragment of magic contained within that is distilled out.

Magical Ink

While ink has many uses, crafting is mostly concerned with magical ink which has the power to hold the arcane words of scrolls. This is synthesized by alchemists from the magical properties of reagents, as it is concerned with extracting their magical properties, the exact nature of the reagents used do not effect the final ink beyond its potency.

Magical ink is not typically found or harvested on its own, though it may be found as loot, or purchased.

Essences

While reagents are substances that contain a glimmer of magical power that can be harnessed through refinement, Essences are more purified forms of magical power.
These come in four types: Arcane, Divine, Primal, and the elusive Psionic as well as in the five normal rarities (common, uncommon, rare, very rare, and legendary). These essences are the pure stuff of magic that makes things work.
You can get these by rendering down magical reagents, salvaging magic items, harvesting them from magical monsters (the best way to gather psionic essence), or through the hard work of spell casters. Or you can find them as loot from people that have already done one of those harder steps.

You also may be able to salvage magical essence from unwanted or broken magical items, though such a reclamation process can be difficult, and rarely results in more than a fraction of the essence infused into the original item.

A more approachable and incremental way is to combine several reagents to get an essence. You have to combine three reagents of the same rarity to gain one essence of that rarity. You can combine reagents in the following ways:

This process takes 4 hours, and requires alchemist’s supplies and a heat source.
Psionic Essence can’t be made this way.

Another potential source of an Essence is being created by a spellcaster. This process is long and arduous, and typically only suited to downtime. A creature with the spell casting feature can create 1 essence during 1 workweek (5 days, 8 hours a day); this process can’t be completed faster and for the duration they are considered to have spent all of their spell slots.

At 1st level or higher can make a common essence in this way, a caster 5th level or higher can make an uncommon essence this way, a caster at 11th level can make a rare essence in this way, and a caster at 17th level or higher can make a very rare essence this way. Legendary essences require special rituals, more casters, and take far longer; they are exceedingly hard to make.

The type of essence produced depends on the source of the spell casting levels as per the table below: (This is an incomplete list of casters)

• Only Monks who have learned how to channel their Ki into spellcasting can make Psionic essence
• Sorcerers produce a type based on their subclass; Dragon or Wild makes Primal, Divine Soul makes Divine, and Shadow makes Arcane.
• Warlocks likewise produce a type based on their subclass; Archfey makes Primal, Celestial makes Divine, and all others make Arcane.

Ingots

Ingots are chunks of metal that can be used to craft things. They are assumed to be relatively pure and weigh 2 pounds each.

Metal items can be converted back to ingots quite efficiently, but require a forge to do so. With a forge and 2 hours per item, a metal item can be rendered down into its component ingots. Advanced metals may require special tools to smelt.

Creating ingots from raw ore is largely out of scope for most adventurers, but you can create ingots from raw ore with a suitable facility.

Hides and LEathers

Hides, scales, and carapaces all tend to be harvested from monsters. Leather is a product of hides that can be processed from what it is harvested from the monster.

The GM determines if a monster provides hide, scale, or carapace. Hides do not come in different sizes, rather larger creatures simply provide more hides, and monsters that are not large enough to produce one hide provide only hide scraps.

Scales are likewise abstracted: each increment is simply an arbitrary unit of scales that the unit of scales covers. Scales can be much larger or small from different-sized creatures. The system does not attempt to say how many scales a creature provides or how many literal actual scales makes up scalemail, but rather provides a number that is then consistently used.

Creatures are harvested using a Survival check, with its DC listed below. If the DC check is failed, the harvest does not fail entirely, but instead they get 1d4 hide scrapes in place of any hides, carapaces of one size smaller, and half as many scales. Hide and leather materials can be assumed to be about 2 pounds each.

Parts

The term “parts” is used to refer to gears, wires, springs, windy bits, screws, nails, and doodads. Parts can be either found or salvaged or forged from metal scraps (or even straight from ingots by a Blacksmith for those that really want to be industrial about it). The exact nature of each item making up this collection is left abstracted.

In addition, metal scraps are collections of salvaged material that generally fall into the category of things “too small to track” which can then be used for the creations of tinkerers.

The other main way to acquire parts is to salvage them. What can be salvaged is determined by the GM, but in general common items provide parts, uncommon or expensive items may provide fancy parts, and esoteric parts are found only from esoteric sources at your GM’s discretion. Tools, vehicles, and complex items generally return 1d4 metal scraps and 1d4 parts for a Small or smaller item, 2d6 metal scraps for a Medium-sized item, 3d8 metal scraps for a Large-sized item, and more for larger items, though they may return less of rare types of parts.

Wood

Commonly available in its lowest quality (firewood), higher quality woods are often found in rather exotic locations. Wooden branches (including wood scraps) are assumed to be of a useful wood that can be worked, while firewood covers everything else, with more useful woods falling into categories such as “quality branches” or rarer options. Wood scraps are assumed to be scraps of common branch quality wood, and consequently can’t be salvaged from firewood.

For the most part, wood can’t be easily salvaged.

Harvesting and Looting

Harvesting and looting are two paths to the same place, but generally depend on what kind of foe was vanquished and you are now collecting the “stuff” of.

General rule, you loot humanoids, and harvest non-humanoids. We aren’t doing any cannibalism here. (This line gets strange with the non human but human-ish races like fairies, and we will deal with that if it comes up.)

Basic Harvesting

Beasts, Dragons, and Monstrosities can be harvested using Wisdom (Survival) for meat and hides. At a GM’s discretion, a Plant type creature can be harvested for food using the same DC and amount, but providing common fresh ingredients instead of meat. Basic Harvesting takes 10 minutes. At your GM’s discretion, it may take longer for larger creatures.

Exotic Creature Harvesting

Applicable Targets: Aberration, Constructs, Dragons, Monstrosities, Plants, Some Undead*

A random roll is performed to judge what can be harvested from the monster. For Dragons, Giants, and Monstrosities, a Wisdom (Medicine) check is required to harvest the material without destroying it, for Aberrations and Constructs, an Intelligence (Arcana) check is required, and for Plants an Intelligence (Nature) check is required. Exotic Harvesting takes 10 minutes. At your GM’s discretion, it may take longer for larger creatures.

Exotic Remnants

Applicable Targets: Celestials, Elementals, Fiends, Some Undead

Some creatures typically do not leave behind corpses. While these most often disappear without a trace, sometimes they will leave behind a fragment of the magical forces that powered them as a remnant, in the form of a reagent or essence. These are less likely to result in a crafting item, but don’t require any check to gather it successfully. Gathering remnants is simple to do, and requires only 1 minute.