Hi folks,
The wizard of my freshly started campaign has a knack for alchemy. So, he skilled accordingly: Craft - Alchemy, Knowledge Nature, Survival, the whole 9 yards.
The group is on a remote jungle island right now (Smuggler's Shiv) and he decided to look around for "interesting plants" and whatnot. Now, instead of flat out telling him: "Sorry, everything looks so unusual, you have no idea" and basically slapping his character creation in the face, I'd rather come up with something.
I'm unsure what to do at this point though. None of the skill descritions seem to cover "finding alchemical ingredients" so I would seem stuck with coming up with a value of ingredients he could find so that I would be able to allow him item creation rolls with his alchemy skill, possibly for things like smokesticks and smokepellets or Nushadirs (PRD)
Can anyone offer a bit more depth on this?
I came up with something that seems reasonable by repurposing existing rules, but due to the low GP values it's coming out as, it may not be very practical from a game-world time perspective, and might not scale well at later levels. But it should be a good starting point to get some ideas flowing:
Treat gathering materials from the wild as "day job earnings" check, as described in the Craft skill ("You can practice your trade and make a decent living, earning half your check result in gold pieces per week of dedicated work."). Assuming a first-level wizard with 20 int taking 10 on his check, that gives him 9 gold of alchemical materials per week to work with (11 gold 5 silver if using Crafter's Fortune). Then, you only need 1/3 of an alchemical item's value in materials to make something, so he can effectively make 27 (or 34.5 with the spell) gp worth of items per week using this method.
You may want to consider making the process easier by allowing him to divide the results by 7 to make checks by the day, for any day in which he spends a significant amount of time searching for materials. Or let him forage for materials while moving half overland speed, just like when foraging for food with Survival. Heck, you might even allow him to use high rolls on Survival to allow him to forage both alchemical materials and food at the same time, at the cost of lessening the number of people he can feed that way. (Really high rolls may still be enough to feed the whole party and get some materials.)
Lastly, unless you're focusing on core-only, I'd suggest using the d20pfsrd listings for alchemical items (here and here, and maybe some poisons for any rogues or alchs in the party) to give him greater options in what he can craft. There's a lot of interesting utility in there, and it's likely he'll need all the low-cost options he can get. And while it's not actually covered by Craft(Alchemy) (or any craft skill that comes to mind, for that matter), depending on how dire the situation on the island is, I'd also consider allowing him to make Healer's Kits from the local plant life, perhaps even in a per-use format, so he doesn't have to save up until he can make the standard 10-use one.
And again, all of the above might not get him enough stuff to use in any reasonable amount of time, so consider tweaking the above to make life easier, and/or allowing him to find sizable deposits of useful materials spaced as you would any other style of loot. Playing the whole thing by ear may be the order of the day.
I do like the approach to allow him to "earn" a certain gold value of ingredients daily / weekly. Very nice spin. That just might work.