To create magic items, you need magic supplies worth half the base price of the item. What they are is unspecified. I mean, it makes sense that you need a cloak to make a cloak of resistance, and a stick to make a wand, but that's never going to add up to hundreds or thousands of gp.
Technically, the RAW sounds like you just need a pile of money, and as soon as you start crafting, *poof!* it disappears and you're now working on that wand or cloak. But that seems silly.
Of course when you're in a city, it doesn't matter much. A quick visit to Ye Olde Magick Shoppe is easily assumed. But what if you're trekking through the wilderness or deep in some dungeon, you've got a ton of loot, and you want to do something productive with it. Can you use it to craft, or do you need to hang on to it until you reach a city? In some campaigns, you could be several levels further before you enter the civilized world again. Can you use just any random stuff you find as magic supplies? Are all my wands made out of solid gold?
This area of magic item creation is not covered by the rules (at least that I could find in my research prior to writing house rules for this exact problem).
Is there no Paizo ruling on this?
In that case I'd love to know how people generally handle this. What are your house rules?
I would normally assume that these supplies represent magical reagents, precious materials, and special material components. These supplies would be sold in apothecary shops, magic shops, and other such places, which probably means that you would need to be in a decent-sized settlement to get them.
I think it is implied that a variety of special materials would be needed and the formula to make each magic item would require a different set than any other type of item. But since making magic items is a popular and profitable trade in the Pathfinder world, merchants will have a lucrative business selling them to crafters.
If you want something specific, you could call the pile of magical supplies one unnamed magic item, and then use the availability tables to find out how big a town you would need to be in to get that much supplies.
Peet
There is nothing official on this.
For my purposes I allow players to obtain amounts of gp in crafting supplies for a given item.
For instance, lets say a player knows he wants to scribe some scrolls and he is on his way into a dungeon, he can purchase Xgp in scroll making supplies, and then use that to craft over time.
If a player obtains an item that is rationally tied to the magic item, I allow that to be added in as value of crafting supplies. For instance, if a player finds as treasure a 500gp amulet, and he wished to craft an amulet of natural armor, the 250gp sale value of the amulet found as treasure could contribute to whats needed to craft the amulet.
Usually its enough to say 'i buy 5 thousand gp in magic item making supplies' in a town and bring it with you. If you are in the wilderness i would require specific checks to bring in amounts. For instance if someone wants to gather resources to brew a potion, I allow them to make a survival check out in the woods against the proffession dcs and add that much in gp worth of potion making materials.
I assume that the money is used to buy stuff like rare oils and unguents to soak into that length of lightning scarred oak that you plan on turning into a wand of lightning bolts, maybe some rune covered copper caps for the ends of the wand (of masterwork craftsmanship of course), perhaps a diamond or other clear crystal gem to place at the wands tip, ground to a specific specification... and so forth.
But since I have very little desire to get that heavy into book keeping (I am playing Pathfidner after all, not Accountant), generally all that stuff is in the background so if a character that wants to craft a wand of lightning bolts has the money to do it, then poof (assuming, of course that the character could reasonably access supplies in the time frame needed, no crafting if you are marooned on a desert isle no matter how much gold you have on hand for example).
I've had GMs use the Magic User's Guild as the source of such things, thus giving characters a reason to join. You go to the guild hall, plop down your money, and some (GM determined by the speed of plot) time later, the Guild will contact you to come pick them up. So long as the hamlet you're in is big enough to have even one Guild member, you can (eventually) get what you need, but it might have to wait for the next stagecoach/ferry/flyingcarpet/annual visit by the guildmaster/whatever for it to show up.
The guild can also be a source of plot hooks in that a notice might be posted saying that the Guild has an order for, say, owlbear feathers, so that if you encounter one, please collect the feathers or at least report the sighting so that others may. Remember, your material contributions offset guild expenses, reducing every member's dues !
This is, I think, deliberately left for GMs to create their own flavor.
On occasion I literally have the magic crafting require magical components. 4e has the concept of "residuum" which is magical raw material that is used to infuse magic items with the magic they need. I think that works pretty well actually and I have used similar concepts in 3.5 and Pathfinder.
I just think of supplies and raw materials as generic items needed to create or craft items. "Okay, you 200 gp worth of raw materials". You could go into specifics (wooden frames, 10 lbs. of iron ore, pieces of leather), but for me, I'd rather spend my GM time preparing in other ways.
If the players come across some certain types of loot, I tell them that they can sell it for half price, or use the full price as raw materials in crafting "________".
My players have a guy in their hometown, who kinda knows everybody and their uncle and simply knows who might want to sell what. He can procure almost all materials and/or magic items for them, but then again, they live in Sothis, so metropolis availability... (I introduced him on a whim to get them started on a sidequest but they have grown very fond of him and the rogue in the group regularly visits him for a game or two when they are in town. I'm always having a blast playing him, he's a very sterotypical oriental merchant, who always changes the amount of imaginary kids he has to feed when haggling for prices and so forth.)
Crafting anything out in the wilderness without bringing the supplies for it is nearly impossible, especially with magic items. If they would want to make a bow, fine, they can find the wood, I'll just handwave the fact that it would need to dry for a year or so before you could reasonably use it. But magic items? If they sacrifice magic loot of the appropriate worth, maybe. But just giving up the amount of gp, making it dissappear into thin air and then crafting away? Not a chance.
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The rules don't specify what these magical components are, just as they don't specify how much of your materials cost for a suit of full plate is cloth, padding, leather, or steel, or exactly what you're spending your money on when you craft a tanglefoot bag.
Ultimate Campaign introduces some sample materials for magic item crafting.
"Eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog"
The sound of a cat's footfall
The beard of a woman
The roots of a mountain
The sinews of a bear
The breath of a fish
The spittle of a bird
If you have access to it (I believe it is or was a free download on the WotC site) the 2e Forgotten Realms supplement Volo's Guide to All Things Magical has some good ideas to mine for in this regard.
Is there no Paizo ruling on this?
In that case I'd love to know how people generally handle this. What are your house rules?
My rules are similiar to...
For my purposes I allow players to obtain amounts of gp in crafting supplies for a given item.
Except I divide it into reagents (for potions), magical inks (for scrolls), and magical dusts (for magical items).
Players can buy these materials in settlements. I also seed them into adventures as rewards (such as in the lab of a crafter).
My house rules for the game I am currently running include a short document that details these substances as well as rules for converting between them, weight, availability, harvesting them at the source, etc.,
I would very much like to see an official supplement that gave rules and values for obtaining components from slain monsters. Nothing that would be REQUIRED by any GM, but a bonus, sort of like using various alchemical gear as foci and components in spell casting.
So... your party has just slain a black dragon. The fighter wants to use the skin for dragonhide armor. How much armor can you get out of a dragon hide of a particular age category? The Wizard is pretty sure that the teeth/claws/horns/etc. would be valuable in crafting various items. How much are they worth as crafting supplies?
You get the picture.
As for the original question... Our GM simply allows us to buy supplies in the city (major trade city). So far, we have used the city as a base of operations, so it has not been an issue. Soon, however, we will be setting out on a long journey to recover a lost artifact. I plan on spending every last piece of gold in my possession on crafting materials before we leave. I still have a lot of crafting I would like to do and will have many days aboard ship in which to do it.
After those supplies run out... I have no idea how he is planning on handling it. I suppose I need to sit down with him and have a talk.
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If my players butcher a corpse for crafting ingredients (they just did that with a nightskitter demon), I give them the cool and flavourful ingredients they want, assign a worth as crafting materials to them and substract this worth on the fly from the next possible loot. This way the fighter gets his cool magical set of full plate from the armor plates of a demon and I don't upset the WBL.
Our house rule is if you're going to be crafting in the wilderness that you'd better specify what item(s) you're going to get supplies for in town before you leave.
We also use the town economic limit in regards to supplies for crafting as well. If sandpoint has an 800 per item limit then you wouldnt be able to find supplies to build a 2000gp item because even the mundane supplies are 1000 and thats more than the entire town can put together for you...
Keeps people from crafting items far above the party level if they're stuck in a small town...
@ Johnlocke90
Oh it DOES provide an incentive.
1th: The new armor looks friggin cool.
2nd: the players don't KNOW I'm subtracting from furture loot, so they won't get frustrated
3rd: The new armor (or whatever they are making) has some little perks over a normal version. In case of the Demon Armor, I gave the armor spikes +1 DMG against good outsiders and the wearer has a +2 circumstance bonus to Intimidate.
I just substract from the furture loot, because otehrwise I would TOTALLY imbalance the campaign under the right/wrong circumstances. On top of that, the treasure for most enemys is not detailed at all, who says that these materials can't BE the treasure?
I already have to calculate CR with APL+2 for that group because of nonstandard races and high point buy, don't want to drive that even further by kicking their WBL through the roof. If they end up being so overpowered that I can't make good encounters for them anymore, everybody suffers.