Raw Materials for Crafting Magic Items

[Mathmuse]

The party in my campaign reached 7th level while traveling a long road with a caravan they own. For new feats the magus took Craft Magic Arms and Armor, the oracle took Craft Wand, and the sorcerer took Craft Wondrous Item.

I have no problem with them crafting while traveling. The party is currently under-equipped, and I would like them better equipped at the end of the road. Plus, crafting will add to the sense of time passing during travel for better verisimilitude. I looked up the rules for crafting while traveling and it will be feasible.

However, I am unsure how to roleplay the raw materials. The oracle anticipated gaining her feat and purchased 750 gold pieces of wand-making supplies in the last city they visited. The other crafting player characters did not plan ahead.

The Core Rulebook says, "Magic supplies for items are always half of the base price in gp." It describes the quantity of magic items that could be found in a thorp, hamlet, or village, which is as large a settlement as the party is going to see in a month. But it does not describe who sells magic supplies nor how much each settlement would have.

Any suggestions on how the player characters can find the supplies for making magic items?

My current thoughts are that hedge wizards, shamans, and alchemists in the villages will have a 50 gp to 200 gp of magic supplies to sell, and the party can gradually accumulate the raw materials.

Also, they might encounter the raw materials in native form. For example, last session they killed a bulette that attacked the caravan. The ninja cautiously retrieved some powerful acid for the corpse's stomach with her alchemical gear to see if she could use it as a weapon. Perhaps I should tell the magus, "You realize that that acid could etch magic runes in metal for enchanting metal armor and weapons. It would count as 200 gp of magic supplies. Perhaps you should negotiate with the ninja."

[FlySkyHigh]

I think you're going in the right direction. In the past I've gone with a simple base rule, using the thorp, hamlet, etc, because I believe it's likely that materials are often more commonplace than the people that use them, so they can buy as many GP worth of crafting materials as they would of completed items, effectively doubling their "output", but at the expense of extra time.

I've also done similar things to the Bulette, and my players often respond very well to it. It's a little touch that shows you're paying attention and doing some basic world conversions of what they might use to craft the magic items instead of just numbers.

[Ipslore the Red]

You're free to roleplay stuff how you want, yeah. Also, bulette hide is useful too. Check out Dungeon Denizens Revisited.

[Remy Balster]

The rules only use GP value or supplies as a balancing thing. So long as you aim to keep WBL around the right level range, where and how they find, buy, make, the materials is completely up to you, the DM.

These rules in particular are mostly glossed over, leaving a lot of room for interpretation. But there are a whole host of options.

Know: Arcana checks can be used if the party kills some sort of exotic, or even not so exotic animals.. to identify parts that make especially useful focuses, inks, leathers, or whathav you. Maybe a simple enough boar tusk is the perfect material for carving part of a wand, or maybe they need some exotic feathers for those winged boots. Etc.

Be creative, but sill use the standard treasure and WBL for guidelines, and your players will probably respond very favorably to it. It'll take a bit of extra work on your part.

Maybe you could ask them what they intend to make, have them make a short 2-4 item list of things they're intending to craft, and that their characters are keeping an eye out for any/everything that they could use for these items.

You sound like you are on the right track! Keep it up! ^.^

[Cyrad]

In my campaign, I just assume that they purchased the materials the last time they visited a settlement and that their inventory wasn't updated until the time they began crafting. I'm pretty sure this was the intention with the rules. It's handwaved like material costs for spells because it's too much book keeping.

[Zahir ibn Mahmoud ibn Jothan]

In our Runelords campaign we seem to never have "time off" and there's never decent stuff in towns, so we took to crafting as well.

We have taken the mysticism out of it, and we don't track "eye of newt" and "spleen of a dragon in heat" on our loot sheet in Excel. We have a line that simply reads "Magical Reagents." Whenever a new crafting project starts, we just decrement the Magical Reagents ledger the appropriate gp amount.

But really, we roll into a town, and we say, "we want to buy "Magical Reagents," and the GM says, "this town has 5k gp worth of such," and we buy it up and add it to our pile.

It's simply a bookkeeping thing for us. No quests to capture "the moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow" in order to make a frostbrand sword.

I think if we were wanting to make an artifact-like item, or a holy avenger, or other amazing thing, that it would get a bit more RPish, but making +2 armor into +3, is drudgery, in a game we enjoy, and we treat it as such.

[bfobar]

If you want, you could also allow PCs to forage using knowledge, survival, or spellcraft checks, either from the wilderness or off of dead magical monsters. Then you could count it into their WBL kind of like treasure.

Some PCs will love to be able to get a few extra bucks worth of treasure out of a monster by skinning it. Come to think of it, most of my PCs try to do this anyway. They have problems.

[Count Coltello]

I've heard alot of people take out craft and prof. And it sucks now how does craft any thing bards get?