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Are there any rules (or suggestions) that cover:
- turning killed wild animals into food
- extracting poison from killed enemies
I have used survival for both with critical success being the number of food “rations”
And on poison a critical failure would be poison exposure .
Is it too generous to give PCs access to this kind of poison without feats / use of crafting?
And I assume someone applying poison would have to put themselves at risk of exposure (not sure what check that would be)
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Butchering is a subset of Lore.
Or use the rules for Subsist.
Poison would be a Crafting activity, and you could flavor the additional days to reduce the cost as coming from the raw ingredients they harvested.
Search archivesofnethys for "Poison" and you'll see the various rules and options available.
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There don't appear to be any explicit rules to harvesting materials from dead creatures.
Cleanest way to extrapolate it into the rules is probably a circumstance bonus to your Subsist checks to acquire food or your Craft checks to make items derived from the monster's materials.
Another possibility that comes to mind would be rolling on the 'earn income' table (challange level equal or lower creature level)
if you succeed you harvested material worth one day of work (or a fraction of that) that you can sell at most traders in most cities
Bestiary 1 has poison extraction for the Giant Scorpion. In Bestiary 2, check out the basidirond, cave fisher, Skrik nettle, and viper vine. While there are some more harvest ideas, these fit a nice build into making some decent rules.
Butchering is a subset of Lore.
Or use the rules for Subsist.
Butchering Lore enables earning daily income from butchering and answering questions about it. It provides an excuse for obtaining meat from a carcass, but no mechanic to do so. Subsist can create food, but it gains no advantage as written from having a carcass at the character's feet.
A creative GM could spin off numbers that take the carcass into account, such as, "You may attempt a 2-hour Subsist activitiy to butcher the dead boar. It would be a DC 0 Survival check, because you already killed the boar." However, even with a critical success, Subsist can feed two people poorly or one person well. It would be the same if the party had killed a woolly mammoth.
Adding more GM creativity would push into homebrew territory. Homebrew is what I did (Mathmuse's Houserules, Crafting, Snares, and Harvest). I made a downtime activity called Harvest that can obtain food and raw materials. It uses the Incoe Earned table. I added a variant that can strip a found object for materials in a 1-hour exploration activity. You can follow the link for the full homebrew, but here let's try to stick closer to the rules as written.
We have to determine (1) how long butching a dead wild animal ought to require, (2) the DC for the butchering, and (3) the quantity of food obtained. The internet can answer question 3; for example, Butcher & Packer says a 180-pound mature buck deer yields 72 pounds of venison meat (my deer-hunting relatives usually share the meat). Assuming a meal takes 1/2 pound of meat, the deer could yield 144 meals to feed 48 people for one day. Table 6-16, Services, PF2 Core Rulebook page 294, says a square meal costs 3 cp, so 144 meals would be worth about 4 gp. Table 4-2, Income Earned, says that a 10th-level trained character can earn 4 gp per day. Thus, I figure that a 10th-level character could butcher 4 gp of meat off of a mature buck deer in a single day. If we have a 3rd-level trained character, who can earn 5 sp per day, I would say that the character can obtain 5 sp of meat off the deer in a successful 8-hour Subsist, or twice as much on a critical success, but the carcass is reduced to bare bones once 4 gp of meat are extracted. The DC would be the level-based DC for the level of the character, since a higher butchering level gives faster butchering.
For context I am currently running a converted Souls For Smuggler's Shiv game and my player's are obsessed with extracting poison and butchering the wild animals (any they kill)
The scorpion venom extraction rules straight up don't seem viable. Unless I have misunderstood them they seem straight up ridiculous in that a character would need to spend days making poison from what they extracted.
It seems like the rules suggest (for the giant scorpion venom):
- A formula is needed
- You need to be higher level than the item
- The item level is level 6 (but the creature is level 3)
- It is 40 gp
- Level 3 task is 5 sp a day
So you spend 4 days and contribution 2 gp. Then either pay 38 gp to finish the poison or spend another 76 days?
Is that really the correct reading of the rules for crafting? That is utter madness. Why would anyone craft anything, ever?
Even 4 days doing nothing but crafting is too much in the scope of this adventure
So do I just say they can't extract poison?
There seems to be a verisimilitude issue here. Even if I take a spear frog poison and take it as a level 1 task that seems like it is 15 days to craft from raw materials alone without paying money. I am pretty sure the Amazon tribes using blowguns did not spend two weeks on a single dose of poison
Have I really misunderstood these rules?
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For context I am currently running a converted Souls For Smuggler's Shiv game and my player's are obsessed with extracting poison and butchering the wild animals (any they kill)
My wife played a halfling sorceress in Souls for Smuggler's Shiv; in fact, her current halfling rogue in Trail of the Hunted is the cousin of that sorceress. She said the party and other shipwreck survivors were stranded on an isolated island and had to search the island to survive.
My PF2 Ironfang Invasion campaign has a similar beginning in Trail of the Hunted. The party and some villagers they rescued are hiding in Fangwood Forest from the Ironfang Legion that occupied their village. That is why I created houserules about gathering materials from the wild. They cannot go to a store to buy goods. And spending gold to craft items makes sense in a town where the gold could be spent at a shop to buy materials, but makes no sense in a wilderness with no shops nor merchants.
The scorpion venom extraction rules straight up don't seem viable. Unless I have misunderstood them they seem straight up ridiculous in that a character would need to spend days making poison from what they extracted.
It seems like the rules suggest (for the giant scorpion venom):
- A formula is needed
- You need to be higher level than the item
- The item level is level 6 (but the creature is level 3)
- It is 40 gp
- Level 3 task is 5 sp a daySo you spend 4 days and contribution 2 gp. Then either pay 38 gp to finish the poison or spend another 76 days?
Is that really the correct reading of the rules for crafting? That is utter madness. Why would anyone craft anything, ever?Even 4 days doing nothing but crafting is too much in the scope of this adventure
My characters still have not used the homebrew crafting rules I wrote, because they have not had time to settle down for crafting. I dropped the initial 4 days, but those rules are still designed for downtime. The player characters rushed through several encounters in 8 days that the module expected would take several weeks. They are too busy for downtime.
Lanathar has the Craft activity calculations slightly wrong. Craft says.
You must supply raw materials worth at least half the item’s Price. You always expend at least that amount of raw materials when you Craft successfully. If you’re in a settlement, you can usually spend currency to get the amount of raw materials you need, except in the case of rarer precious materials.
Since Giant Scorpion Venom alchemical poison cost 40 gp, the crafter must start with 20 gp of raw materials, not 2 gp. And that leaves 20 gp of work to finish, which would require 40 days at 5-sp progress per day.
And the crafter can be equal level to the item.
So do I just say they can't extract poison?
There seems to be a verisimilitude issue here. Even if I take a spear frog poison and take it as a level 1 task that seems like it is 15 days to craft from raw materials alone without paying money. I am pretty sure the Amazon tribes using blowguns did not spend two weeks on a single dose of poison
Have I really misunderstood these rules?
Despite some slight errors, the real problem is that Craft is designed for downtime in a well-equipped town. Being able to swap a rune from a runestone to a weapon in the wilderness without a supply of raw materials nor formulas nor tools requires improvisation not covered in the PF2 Core Rulebook.
The only way stated in the rulebook to obtain raw materials is buying them in town. However, the treasure rules easily justify giving raw materials away as treasure, "The fletcher's shop contained 3 shortbows, 1 longbow, 1 composite longbow, six quivers with 10 arrows each, and the raw materials for making 20 more arrows."
A bigger stretch of imagination would be treating the dead giant scorpion as a body to loot. Forget the rules I imagined above about using the Income Earned table to take food from a carcass. Instead, treat meat or poison on the dead animal as loot on defeated enemy. Maybe for versimitude require a DC 15 Survival roll to extract it. The player passes the check and pulls 100 gp worth of raw giant scorpion venom from the dead scorpion. That 100-gp value counts as part of the treasure for the encounter, as if it were a +1 striking sword or a gemstone necklace worth 100 gp.
However, raw giant scorpion venom is not an alchemical injury poison to apply to a weapon. That venom is injected by a scorpion's sting. It will require a 6th-level formula to convert it into something that will stick to a weapon and dissolve in blood. Right now, it is a raw material. And if you have raw material in equal value to the final product, crafting takes only 4 days. If you have raw material equal to 4 times the value of an alchemical item, you can make a batch of 4 doses in 4 days.
The 6th-level formula and the 6th-level crafting requirement are the main problems. You could claim that they can figure out a formula by trial and error that makes the raw giant scorpion venom act like Giant Centipede Venom or a 3rd-level alchemical poison instead, so that the product is 3rd level or lower. The trial and error will use up raw materials equal in value to the formula price.
You could count the corpse/venom sac/etc. as X g.p. worth of raw materials toward Crafting or g.p. toward buying off for quicker production.
I'm not sure I'd put this under Survival though, since using poison or venom in the field isn't something you'd find in a survival manual. Nature or specific Lores would seem more likely, maybe Alchemical Crafting. I'm torn, since it is a hunting technique in some real world cultures.
Such rewards would have to be accounted for in the treasure budget, which seems a bit unfair since the PCs would get the same amount of treasure elsewhere if they hadn't had the gumption & prowess. Yet some poisons really are potent & expensive if allowed.
Hmm...
It's a toughie.
Oops, I forgot another detail about crafting an alchemical poison: it requires the Alchemical Crafting feat. At least that feat provides 4 common 1st-level formulas for free.
I like your idea of the GM choosing to permit characters to develop a formula of certain things they choose to let the players find. I like the idea of allowing the spending of the raw venom materials as part of the cost to generate the formula. They can work 4 days and use 100% cost in raw materials, or they can take longer to be more careful use of materials to have more raw venom for future production.
Limiting it to a weaker level venom, and/or lower DC venom make very viable options to keep it from being unbalanced. And you can make it clear it is being considered an exception, not a rule. Just because you allow them to make scorpion venom this way, doesn’t mean you will allow them to do the same with the giant widow spider they encounter next episode. So the GM may choose to exempt a particular formula from the required alchemical crafting feat. Or perhaps if you get exempted, but it lowers the DC of the poison? Which makes investment still meaningful.
I also see the potential linking of lore skills to potential other exceptions. Maybe your backgrounds Local Lore one of the characters has allows the ability to craft and make a local scorpion blade venom due to how common and known such beasts are in the area. (Perhaps the venom is even a known export)
I think a game with a survival aspect to it can and should definitely allow creatures being defeated could certainly become a form of raw materials to solve certain objectives. (In character/encounter hunting for instance. If you have to defeat a dire boar for instance)
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There are a few monsters that explicitly talk about harvesting their poisons. I believe Shulns are among them. I'd say you could look at those rules, and then apply similar rules to any creature whose poison can be purchased, like the purple worm.
Or if you want to be more ambitious use the ideas Mathmuse has.
Viper vine:
“While viper vine pollen degrades quickly after it is harvested carefully from the plant, a character who has a set of alchemical tools can gather and preserve 1d6 doses of pollen with a successful DC 33 Crafting or Nature check and 10 minutes of work. A single dose of viper vine pollen is worth 300 gp as raw materials for crafting any alchemical or magical item that creates an incapacitation effect” (Bestiary 287).
Level 13 creature: 33 is a hard DC. 10 minutes is basically an exploration activity. Looking at GMG page 85, the price of a level 13 consumable is 400 to 600 GP, but harvesting gives raw materials which is half. A permanent level 13 item is worth 2400 to 3000 GP. The above check does grant 1d6 doses of 300 GP pollen.
Seems like there is some useful info from the viper vine.
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Viper vine:
“While viper vine pollen degrades quickly after it is harvested carefully from the plant, a character who has a set of alchemical tools can gather and preserve 1d6 doses of pollen with a successful DC 33 Crafting or Nature check and 10 minutes of work. A single dose of viper vine pollen is worth 300 gp as raw materials for crafting any alchemical or magical item that creates an incapacitation effect” (Bestiary 287).
Level 13 creature: 33 is a hard DC. 10 minutes is basically an exploration activity. Looking at GMG page 85, the price of a level 13 consumable is 400 to 600 GP, but harvesting gives raw materials which is half. A permanent level 13 item is worth 2400 to 3000 GP. The above check does grant 1d6 doses of 300 GP pollen.
Seems like there is some useful info from the viper vine.
Thanks. So would it stand to reason that if 2 doses were obtained they could make 1 consumable poison?
So I follow the above logic of Hard DC of Level = Level of creature providing 1d6 doses of "raw materials" totaling 50% of the value. I am still not keen on the 4 days minimum of crafting time for one item regardless of value
But it is less prohibitive than the strict rules...