Item crafting is perhaps one of the single most-wasted opportunities in D&D/Pathfinder. In theory, a good item crafting system would provide an extra layer of character customization, allow for the creation of magical items the party might not normally be able to find from the standard item lists, and potentially even be the source of the occasional adventure (e.g. the party hunting down rumors of an extremely rare crafting component they need to make a specific item they want). Unfortunately, crafting in most editions of D&D is an afterthought. Most of the time, it is just a way by which the party can acquire certain magic items at a slight discount in exchange for a large amount of in-game downtime and countless Craft checks. Mechanically, crafted magical items are no different from purchased or found magical items. They don’t feel unique or customized, and the actual process of creating them is tedious, boring, and slows down the game at the table. The end result is a system that most players and GMs don’t like and that many tables ignore completely.
Recently, one of my favorite GM bloggers The Angry GM started writing a series on designing a homebrewed item crafting system from the ground up that would address the problems with the standard crafting system and allow for the benefits of item crafting without requiring countless Craft checks that take time away from the actual game. If you haven’t read it, I would highly recommend checking that series out at https://theangrygm.com/king-angry-and-the-holy-grail/, as the system this article will be looking at uses Angry’s research from that series as a base. That series is also very well-thought out and looks into a lot of underlying game design principles that most of us never think about, so its a good read.
Now, I had an immediate problem with Angry’s series. Namely, the fact that it isn’t completed yet. Currently, I’m in the process of starting up an E6 Pathfinder campaign, and I wanted to having a more customizable crafting system to help give my players some more character customization options and make up somewhat for the loss of options from class abilities imposed by the E6 level cap. Since that game is going to start up within the next couple of weeks, I didn’t really have time to wait for Angry to finish his system. To get a functional crafting system ready in time for this upcoming game, I had to use the base he had made in the series thus far, adapt it to Pathfinder, and get it the rest of the way to a completed system.
System Basics
As I mentioned earlier, I began my work using the base Angry had made so far as a starting point. If you want to see the process that went into that base, I would again recommend reading his crafting series linked above, as I’m only going to give a high-level recap of it here.
Angry’s system is based off of the idea of using crafting recipes to turn components into items. These components can be broken down into three pieces – rarity, type, and descriptor. Rarity determines the quality and power of the magic item the component can be used to create, type determines what recipes it can be used in, and descriptors determine what special qualities or spell effects the component can imbue in an item. Component types are broken down into Metal, Precious Metal, Mineral, Gemstone, Hide, Plant, Fluid, and Essence. Using these more generic descriptors of components makes it easier to have multiple sources of the same component and prevents the party from having to track hundreds of different components – a party with 2 bars of iron and 3 bars of bronze, for example, functionally just has 5 bars of Common Metal as far as crafting is concerned.
After doing research into several different 5e sourcebooks, Angry also found the average range of magical item values at each character level and the number of magic items the party is expected to find, which provided some insight into how many awarded magic items during the campaign needed to be removed to make room for crafting components and the approximate power level of crafted items by rarity. This research found that there were effectively tiers of magic item progression: at levels 1 and 2, the party’s rarest magic item is worth 100 gp. At levels 3 and 4, the rarest item is worth 500 gp. From levels 5-10, the rarest item is worth 5,000 gp, and this pattern continues from there, with the rarest item value increasing by a factor of 10 every six levels up to a maximum of 500,000 gp for the rarest item at levels 17-20. Note that these numbers are for a party of 4 players, they are not per-player numbers.
This research also found that a party of 4 finds on average 4 minor items and 1 major item each level. Assuming each monster drops on average one component, each horde contains on average 3 components, recipes take 3-10 components to create, and magical items always require at minimum 5 components, crafted magical items can be substituted in party treasure at a 2:1 ratio. That is to say, we can award the party one less magic item per level in exchange for awarding them enough components to make two average magical items (10 components worth of magic items).
Pathfinder and E6 Adaptations
Though Angry’s system gave me a good base to work off of, there are still a lot of things needed for it to reach completion. Specifically, I still needed to use his basic rules and research to create the actual crafting recipes that players would use to make their items. Before I could do that, however, I had to consider the differences of the two game systems that we were using. Angry’s system was designed with 5e in mind, while my game was running Pathfinder, which handles magic items very differently. Pathfinder has a much greater focus on magic items, and thus tends to award more treasure per level than 5e with a lower average value of magical items, making them more commonplace.
That said, I wasn’t running base Pathfinder, but E6 Pathfinder. For those unfamiliar, “E6” stands for “Epic 6,” which in this case refers to the level cap. An E6 game caps level advancement at level 6, after which point players earn bonus feats (“epic feats”) at the rate of one feat per 5,000 XP. Every five feats gives players about enough power to approximate one level of advancement up to the equivalent of level 10, at which point the lack of hp, BAB, and save progression becomes too much of a hurdle for feats alone to overcome. Effectively, this meant that my game was very unlikely to see many magic items intended for use by level 11+ characters. On top of this, though, one of the main reasons I was using E6 was because this game was set in a more low-magic world. Because of this, I ultimately decided to keep using the magic item value and progression numbers Angry had found from 5e for my own system, since 5e was more conservative than Pathfinder when it came to magic items.
Because of the E6 system, my game would also never reach the highest tier of magic item progression, so my system would only need four tiers of rarity for components rather than five. To be honest, I also could have cut out the level 11-16 tier and only gone with three tiers, but since E6’s bonus feat progression couldn’t really get players past the equivalent of level 10, I opted to include that fourth tier to provide the party with some continued progression in the late game to make up for the reduced effectiveness of feats. In the end, these were the tiers I ended up working with:
Common (Lv 1-2): 10 gp/component; 100 gp max item value
Uncommon (Lv3-4): 50 gp/component; 500 gp max item value
Rare (Lv5-10): 500 gp/component; 5,000 gp max item value
Legendary (Lv11+): 5,000 gp/component; 50,000 gp max item value
Cooking up Recipes
With my base in place, it was time to turn to the question of crafting recipes. One of the main considerations here was approachability. The system needed to be intuitive enough for players to grasp easily without requiring them to search through hundreds or thousands of recipes to find a specific item they wanted. To help accomplish that, I decided to have the system’s recipes work in a modular fashion. In other words, players use a basic crafting recipe to make a mundane item or the base of a magic item, then add on additional recipes to add whichever magical effects they desire.
For example, say a player wants to make an +1 flaming shortsword. They would start with the base shortsword recipe, then apply a recipe to add a +1 enhancement bonus, then apply a third recipe to add the flaming quality. If they want a +1 frost shortsword, then they just replace the flaming recipe with the one for frost. This would both make the system more intuitive and also save us a lot of work on the GM side by only requiring us to make recipes for specific enchantments or abilities rather than for every possible magic item.
Mundane Items
The easiest recipes to start off with were the base items – the recipes needed to make mundane weapons, armor, unenchanted wands or staves, and other basic items. To make things a little easier, I grouped items wherever I could – for example, there isn’t a specific recipe for a shortsword, but rather a recipe for one-handed bladed weapons. That same recipe could be used to make a rapier, scimitar, or any other similar weapon. This would help cut down on the number of recipes considerably which was both less work for me and less effort for the players to search through to make the item they wanted.
I also applied some basic rules for creating recipes for base items to help me with the process. Namely, all mundane recipes would be made up of 3 to 5 components, with the majority of them having only 3. All one-handed weapons would have 3 components, while all two-handed weapons would have 4, with the exception of firearms, which would have 5. Light, medium, and heavy armor would have 3, 4, and 5 components, respectively. Many items could be potentially made of different types of components – for example, a blade could be made of metal, stone (mineral), or bone, but stone weapons would be heavier than normal, and bone weapons would be more fragile.
The recipes I ended up coming up with for mundane items can be found here: https://empiresfall-1.obsidianportal.com/wikis/crafting-mundane-items
Notably, the recipes I made didn’t consider rarity. The rarity of components used would instead determine the quality of the final item. Building a weapon, shield, or set of armor entirely out of Uncommon components or better would create a masterwork item, and higher rarity components could possess a descriptor indicating a special material (e.g. mithril), which would let the crafter create mundane items with special properties. For example, constructing a one-handed blade using a Rare Hide and two Rare Mithral Metal would construct a blade with the properties of mithral (plus any other enchantments that might be added during the crafting process).
You might note that potions/poisions and other alchemical items are missing from these tables. This is because the cost of consumable items like these is balanced differently than the cost of “actual” magic items. These consumables are considerably cheaper and easier for the party to gain access to, so they would not really work well with the component values we currently have – a Potion of Cure Moderate Wounds, for example, is a potion for a second level spell, which according to RAW should cost 300 gp. In order to make that with our component values, you would either need a recipe consisting of six Uncommon components, which is much more complexity than we want for a staple item like healing potions, or a single Rare component, which would overvalue the potion by 200 gp. To make it easier to balance potions and other alchemical items, I opted to have a separate “alchemy subsystem” dealing with Fluid and Plant components specifically that would be handled differently from our concept of “base item + enchantment recipes” for non-consumable magic items.
Adding Enchantments
Now that I had our base item recipes, we need to go about adding recipes for the various enchantments and other effects players can apply to their crafted items. When looking at this, I had trouble finding a single universal system that would work for all types of magic items, and it quickly became apparent that I would need a couple of different enchantment systems to be able to properly handle all of these different types of items. Specifically, I determined that I would need a system for handling magical equipment (weapons, armor, and shields), a system for charged magical items (wands and staves), and a system for wondrous items. Rods are in kind of a weird space in between charged items and wondrous items, but I ultimately determined that they could fit in pretty well with our wondrous items system, so I put them there.
At first glance, it seemed like this was a lot of different categories and that it would add a lot of complexity to the system that might work against my goals of intuitiveness and ease-of-use. Fortunately, however, there were some basic underlying principles I could use to provide some consistency between these different systems. I also found that the system for wondrous items and rods was really just an extension of the system for charged magical items, so I was ultimately able to combine those two systems through the addition of an extra layer.
All of these systems are tied together by the concept that any magic item requires three pieces: a mundane base item from our base item recipes above, a “focus” which helps channel and focus the item’s magical power, and one or more “enchantments” which are the actual magical effects. The form of these focus and enchantment vary a bit depending on magical item type due to differences in the value of various types of magic items, but this general formula remains true for any magic item crafted in this system.
Enchanting Equipment
Weapons, armor, and shields are perhaps the most straightforward example of the “base item + focus + effect” formula I wanted to follow, so naturally, this was the system I started putting together first. Mechanically, a magic piece of equipment is made up of the base item, an enhancement bonus (represented by the focus), and any number of additional magical effects. Since we can have many different combinations of enhancement bonus and magical abilities, it made most sense to split out the enchanting recipes for these into two parts – one for applying an enchantment bonus, and a second for applying abilities.
For magical item “focuses,” I decided to have two descriptors on components that indicate focus components – Arcane and Divine. Whichever focus component/s are used determines the source of the magical item’s power. This also makes determining the recipes for applying enhancement bonuses to equipment pretty straightforward – all I needed to do was find a combination of various component rarities to approximate the cost of an item with a particular enhancement bonus. I wanted to avoid overly complex recipes wherever possible, so I tried to get as close to the value of the enhancement bonus as possible using the smallest number of components.
Our basic item recipes are made up of 3-5 components with an average of between 3-4, so I made these calculations under the assumption of a base item with 4 components. Mechanically, this meant that more complex equipment would cost more to enchant, and one-handed or simpler equipment would be cheaper to enchant. That cost difference, though would really only be significant for Legendary quality items, and since the more complex base items were generally better on their own than the simpler recipes, this fluctuation was something I was okay with. For weapons, these focus recipes ended up looking like this:
+1 weapon: Rare Weapon + 2 Rare Focus (components 3,000 gp / actual 2,300 gp)
+2 weapon: Rare Weapon + Rare Focus + Legendary Focus (components 7,500 gp / actual 8,300 gp
+3 weapon: Legendary Weapon + Rare Focus (components 20,500 gp / actual 18,300 gp
+4 weapon: Legendary Weapon + 2 Legendary Focus (components 30,000 gp / actual 32,300 gp)
+5 weapon: Legendary Weapon + 5 Legendary Focus (components 45,000 gp / actual 50,300 gp)
For armor and shields, which have lower enhancement bonus costs, the recipes looked like this:
+1 armor: Uncommon Armor + 2 Rare Focus (components 1,200 gp / actual 1,150 gp)
+2 armor: Uncommon Armor + Legendary Focus (components 5,200 gp / actual 4,150 gp)
+3 armor: Uncommon Armor + 2 Legendary Focus (components 10,200 gp / actual 9,150 gp)
+4 armor: Rare Armor + 3 Legendary Focus (components 17,000 gp / actual 16,150 gp)
+5 armor: Legendary Armor + Legendary Focus (components 25,000 gp / actual 25,150 gp)
Though there is some fluctuation as to whether the component value of each of these enhancement bonuses is below or above the actual value, for the most part, most of these numbers are at least in the same ballpark and almost all of them only require two or less focus components. Since we are going to compose a maximum component limit on crafted items to avoid overly-complex items, this leaves us with plenty of component slots remaining to work with for adding actual enchantments. The notable exception to this is +5 magic weapons, which requires 5 focus components. This is both necessary to meet the high value of a +5 weapon bonus and intentional to prevent much extra from being added to these weapons. If you remember from earlier, the maximum item value for our Legendary tier is supposed to be 50,000 gp, so a +5 weapon with no additional enchantments is already at our limit, and as such we want to minimize players’ ability to add anything extra to these weapons.
Equipment Abilities
The next piece of this system was to create recipes for weapon and armor/shield abilities. I ultimately structured these recipes similar to that of enhancement bonuses: start with a base item, then add the desired enchantment. In this case, however, the base item isn’t the original, mundane item, but an item that has already had an enhancement bonus added. Unlike our “focus” recipes, however, there is a much wider range of component descriptors that will be used. This meant that I needed a basic list of descriptors to work with.
There were a couple of considerations to make with this list. The big one was complexity. A huge number of different descriptors would provide plenty of design space for unique recipes, but would also mean the party would have a much bigger list of potential components to track. A large list would also make it harder for the party to get the components they wanted and limit the number of uses each descriptor would have.
I ultimately settled on having around 20 descriptors. This list was enough to give me a reasonable amount of design space without being too complex for the players. To help aid with simplicity as well, some of the descriptors had specific purposes that they would primarily be used for outside of enchantments – for example, components with the Adhesive descriptor could be used to fuse two compatible magic items together, or components with the Adaptable descriptor could be used to give a wand the ability to have its stored spell swapped for a smaller component cost than just creating an entirely new wand for that spell. This list of descriptors ended up looking like this:
- Adhesive (mainly used for combining items)
- Adaptable (mainly used for wands/staves)
- Animated (effects dealing with life/animals or animating objects)
- Arcane (used for focus components or generic arcane effects)
- Benevolent (healing/positive energy and magical protection)
- Charged (electricity-based effects)
- Corrosive (acid and some earth/nature-based effects)
- Divine (used for focus components or generic divine effects)
- Empowered (used for spell effects involving commands or resilience)
- Energized (light and untyped energy effects)
- Flaming (fire-based effects)
- Focused (ranged attack or concentration-based effects)
- Frozen (cold-based effects)
- Holy (good-aligned effects)
- Imbued (melee attack or artifice-based effects)
- Infernal (evil-aligned effects)
- Malevolent (negative energy and debuff effects)
- Miraging (illusion, invisibility, or deception effects)
- Screeching (sound-based or sonic damage effects)
- Soul-Infused (incorperal/spirit-based and bane effects)
- Windswept (wind/air or speed-based effects)
For the sake of keeping the number of recipes reasonable, I limited the available enchantments to the abilities from the Core Rulebook only, and also excluded any abilities that would lead to a total item cost more than 50,000 gp, since that was the max value of my highest crafted item tier. I also imposed some basic rules on these recipes like I did with the enhancement bonus recipes – namely, I limited the descriptors used in a recipe to focus descriptors (Arcane/Divine) plus one other descriptor relating to the ability in question. This was to help create some separation between these weapon abilities and spell effects, and reserve some design space for the latter (which had a much greater range of effects that would need recipes).
I also tried to limit these recipes to three additional components – this meant that most magic equipment with only a single enchantment would be possible to make using at most 10 components (5-component base item + 2 focus components + 3 effect components). Ten components is a significant number because 10 components of the same rarity will create an item of the maximum item value for that rarity. This is the same reason why our system will limit the maximum number of components that can be used in a single item to 10 – we don’t want the party to be able to craft a magic item that is too “powerful” for their current tier.
Since all of the Core weapon abilities are priced by enhancement bonus, I was able to make some basic recipe templates for various enhancement bonus costs, which simply involved taking a weapon with an enhancement bonus of +X and adding enough components of various rarity to increase the value by however many points of enhancement bonus the ability in question costs. All the weapon abilities in Core had a cost of either +1, +2, or +4, so I ended up with the following templates:
+1 ability: +1/2/3/4 weapon + Legendary Focus (x0/1/1/2) + Legendary Effect (x1)
+2 ability: +1/2/3 weapon + Legendary Focus (x0/1/1) + Legendary Effect (x3)
+4 ability: +1 weapon + Legendary Effect (x5)
By making the recipes in this way, it makes it easy for multiple abilities to be applied to the same item – just calculate the modified enhancement bonus of the weapon after applying the first ability and use the appropriate recipe to apply the second ability to a weapon of that enhancement bonus. For example, if you have crafted a +1 holy longsword and want to add the flaming ability on top of that; you would calculate the modified enhancement bonus of the item with the holy enchantment (+3) then use the recipe for making a +3 flaming weapon.
Similar templates can be made for armor and shield abilities, with some modification to adjust for the lower cost of various enhancement bonuses compared to weapons:
+1 ability: +1/2/3/4/5/6 armor/shield + Legendary Effect (x1/1/1/2/2/3)
+2 ability: +1/2/3/4/5 armor/shield + Legendary Effect (x1/2/3/4/5)
+3 ability: +1/2/3 armor/shield + Legendary Effect (x3/4/5)
+4 ability: +1 armor/shield + Legendary Effect (x1)
In theory, some of these templates should be expanded further – for example, technically one should be able to apply a +3 ability to a +4 armor or shield for a modified enhancement bonus of +7, which has a value around 49,000 gp, just near our maximum value of 50,000 gp for a Legendary item. The problem, however, is that it isn’t possible to reach this value with the 5 component limit we’ve settled on for enchantments. In our previous example, a +4 armor or shield is worth 17,000 gp in components, and we would need 6 Legendary components in order to get close to that 49,000 gp value. With only 5 Legendary components, the final +7 equivalent item would have a component value of 42,000 gp, which is quite a bit less than the actual value of 49,000 gp. Rather than break this rule and revisit all of our balancing around component limits, I just opted to not have these higher level enchantments available.
There is an added level of complexity with armor and shield abilities in that there are some enchantments that simply have a flat gold cost rather than an enhancement bonus cost. These recipes I just handled individually, and like with most of our work done with crafting recipes so far, simply found the combination of components that best approximated the GP value of the enhancement using the fewest components possible. For example, adding the shadow ability to armor would just require a single Legendary Miraging component, while improved shadow would require 3 Legenday Miraging components.
The final list of recipes I decided on for equipment abilities can be found here:
https://empiresfall-1.obsidianportal.com/wikis/crafting-basic-magic-weapons
https://empiresfall-1.obsidianportal.com/wikis/crafting-basic-magic-armor-and-shields
To Be Continued
Originally, I was planning on covering all off the three major categories of magic items that could be crafted using this system (equipment, spell effect items, and potions/poisons/alchemy), but it very quickly became apparent that it was going to take considerably more space to detail all of these systems and the thought process that went into creating them. Because of that, this is going to become a mini-series of sorts. Next week, we’ll take a look at a system for handling items based on spell effects, such as wands, staves, and wondrous items, and the following week, we’ll dive into the alchemy sub-system for crafting potions and various other alchemical concoctions.