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Hello! A player in my game has just started playing with a ninja in Return of the Runelords and he wanted to use poison to apply to his weapons... but then we realized they are too expensive for lvl 1 players. Given the AP, they obviously don't have weeks to craft these things. We were checking for options and decided he could get a few animals to milk them (black widows, scorpions, and a viper) but that made us wonder how much time he would actually use for the process of preserving the natural poison with Craft Alchemy. Milking the poison takes 10 minutes but it doesn't say about preserving it. Or maybe I'm missing something? Any ideas?
Here's the rules for preserving harvested poisons:
Preserving Harvested Poison: Poison harvested from a creature or hazard remains potent for 24 hours. If a character wishes to preserve harvested poison for a longer period, she must treat it alchemically, as if crafting the poison with Craft (alchemy) but using the poison dose as the raw ingredients normally needed to brew a dose of the poison and thus avoiding the gp cost to craft the poison.
The player's character would need to use Craft (alchemy) to craft the poison. Craft checks are made by the day or week. The time it takes to craft the poison is based on the gp cost of that poison.
Example: Oturan the Ninja kills a Giant Spider, successfully harvesting one dose of its venom with a successful DC 16 Survival check after 10 minutes of work. If Oturan wishes to preserve the poison, they will need access to an alchemist's lab to use Craft (alchemy), requiring a DC 14 check result. The cost of materials is waived as they're using harvested poison, however the time required will be based on the normal 150 gp item cost, with the result of the Craft (alchemy) check giving the progress in silver pieces towards this result.
If Oturan has a +4 modifier on their Craft (alchemy) and uses the Take 10 rule for their progress, they create (14 x 14) sp progress towards creating the dose per week. This means they can craft one dose of medium spider venom after 8 weeks.
If they had the Master Alchemist feat, they would produce poisons 10 times faster, and could produce additional doses at the same time, provided they had multiple doses of harvested venom to use as raw ingredients. They may well be able to produce a dose of medium spider venom with only 8 hours of crafting instead of 8 weeks, provided they can achieve a sufficiently high Craft (alchemy) result.