first a note. it help if you link or copy the information you ask about.
i think one must first read the items information. even the flavor text.
there are some items that started being made by a specific religion but then spread out and can be found made by others. and others that have specific extra abilities when used by believers of a specific religion.
even some say in the items creation information that the maker must follow a specific god etc.
as for myself i would:
1 allow anyone to craft anything they can get the requirements to craft done. if he is not a follower of a specific god and the item require it then he can add +5 to the dc (or have the help of one. maker doesn't have to be the only one supplying the demands).
2. an item that has extra abilities when used by a believer of a specific religion will only allow said believers to use that ability (in some cases a UMD check with high enough dc can be substituted. again a house rule of mine). im talking about using the made item. not making it.
3. an item that is used by a specific religion but has no special powers granted to it's believers nor has a special requirement stating the belief of it's creator - can be made and used by anyone.
in some cases i might demand a knowledge religion or arcane before allowing the creator to make a very obscure item that he should not have known about without said roll.
the item in question mostly fit into the 3rd option as it say nothing about the religion of Shelyin in it's information. i rather believe this mean that while it is very common to find in the hands of believers of Sheylin -who's favored weapon is the glaive, ever since she took it from her brother, and has a thing for performance. but it's not strictly restricted to them
Unless he's an evil bard, Shelyn and her church would probably be perfectly happy with him using the item anyway. It's not like most gods need worshippers. Most just want to enjoy like-minded individuals.
Also, most "worshippers" in Golarion aren't specific to just one god. A normal character might worship or at least pay respects to a whole group of gods for different aspects. It's mostly only the divine classes that are loyal to only one god, and even then there can be exceptions.
In the case of the Blade of Three Fancies, nothing seems particularly broken about it.
For all it's worth the player could craft a slotless item that gives a +4 competency bonus to perform. While sacred bonuses are less common to come by, it probably isn't going to break anything. I mean sure, he's a bard and he get's a lot more mileage out of perform than others, but it's only to one type of perform so even with Versatile performance it's still not breaking a whole lot.
...stuff..I like this approach. My only question is, how does the PC have the knowledge of the item he/she wants to craft or the requirements to craft said item? Does everyone just have knowledge of all magic items and their requirements?
again, i wrote that i would ask for a check if the item was'.. a very obscure item that he should not have known about without said roll..."
so unless the item's info call it a rare\restricted\only one ever etc i would not ask for a check. the same way i wouldn't ask for a knowledge check if a blacksmith was to try and make a kettle.
the fact he has invested feats and skills (spellcraft etc) before making it mean he did his research. it's only when the item information itself call it unique and rare would i think about asking the check.
as for the check's dc. i guess i would look at the same dc as identifying it only using knowledge religion\arcane for it. (if im not mistaken identifying a magical item with spellcraft, if one observe it with detect magic has a dc of 15+ caster level of the item's creator).
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Blade of Three Fancies is from Inner Sea Gods. The spells and magic items (other than altars) from that book are thematically tied to a specific deity but mostly function for everyone - even an agnostic or worshiper of another deity. I don't see any reason any crafter, regardless of religious affiliation, upon seeing the effects of such an item couldn't say "ooh, that looks useful. I think I'll make one." Of course the wielder runs the risk of being associated with that particular religion. IRL, if you wear an inverted pentagram necklace there's a decent chance someone is going to assume you are a Satanist, even if you just liked the design.
(Some items, particularly the wondrous items, have increased effects for worshipers of the associated deity. For those items I would say the creator would need to worship the deity. But Blade of Three Fancies is not one of them.)
So the question is then - could he know of the Blade of Three Fancies? Probably. Also from Inner Sea Gods: "This section focuses on relatively inexpensive weapons that low-level characters can afford." In other words fairly common weapons. So pretty easy to have seen the weapon, at which point the construction requirements should be fairly easy for a good crafter to discern.
Long way to say: I'd allow it.
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He would love to make the weapon out of singing steel but apparently that material is hard to find outside Tien Sha and even if you can find it you’d need a special forge to smelt work with the mythril. I should probably mention that I’m running the Kingmaker AP.Look at Special materials. Singing steel in particular.
A weapon needs to be (+1) before any weapon qualities are added.
Spell storing would be a nice addition... Holy is good but it is +2.
That's reasonable. According to Adventurer's Armory 2, "the secrets of working singing steel" have only spread to a few regions in Tian Xia. He probably doesn't know how to work it.
Needing a "special forge" I'm a little bit more hesitant about. There's nothing specific about that in AA2. While in a detailed simulation you'd probably need a unique special forge for any special material (adamantine, mithral, cold iron, etc.), that's not something a playgroup usually fusses about. The assumption is that if you know how to work the metal you can make any forge work for you.
Even if you did allow him to make singing steel, it is worth noting that when creating magical weapons, you need to have an already complete weapon to work on. In other words if he wanted to make a singing steel Blade of Three Fancies he would have to buy/craft a singing steel glaive first. Crafting such weapons can easily take far more time than enhancing them with magic abilities. (Hooray for the fabricate spell.)
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I feel you need to seperate use and make here. A deity specific weapon may be limited to followers or worshipers of that diety alternatively it might be spread more widely and just give worshipers more benefit. However not every weapon is going to be made by a worshiper of that deity and could be made by a non-believer (as it were) in order to provide a favour for a friend or because they're the only person locally with the skills and training to make magic items. So you need to ask yourself first why they want this specific weapon and would Shelyn be ok with them using it. Secondly you need to look into how they would know to craft it and whether it would be something the church in question would keep secret like the sun orchid elixir recipe is kept secret.
I, the actual GM, think that's it's completely ridiculous that as soon as someone takes a crafting feat that they automatically know how to create every single magic item in existence that falls under that feat's blanket.
I guess that's a fair opinion, but it's the generally agreed upon way the game works. Pathfinder has a lot of automatic information that is a bit odd. Take a level of fighter? Learn how to use dozens upon dozens of martial weapons. Learn about dragons with knowledge(arcana)? Then you automatically know all about constructs too. Learn to speak a language? Then you automatically know how to write in that language too. Heck, if you learned the language with linguistics, then you just automatically got better at forging documents too.
So, learning how to craft a specific magic weapon from taking a feat isn't very odd at all in Pathfinder.
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Considering I had already told him I didn't mind just going ahead and crafting the stupid weapon, I'm not sure exactly what the reason for the thread was.
End of thread (or at least the original purpose).
I was interested to read of carbauxine gas; that’s the first time I’ve ever heard of it. The only references to it I can find are in the first book of the Second Darkness AP and Into the Darklands. Both of which are at little vague as to whether carbauxine is the only way to forge skymetals or simply a way. SD Book 1 is explicit that the carbauxine-fueled forges in Riddleport are the only place in Varisia “capable of smelting adamantine and other high-hardness metals.” Which, in addition to implying that there are places in other lands to smelt them, still leaves an open question - smelting and forging are two different activities. Blast furnaces for smelting iron ore, for example, run at much higher temperatures than is required for working the pig iron produced. It could be that the ingots require carbauxine but forging does not.
Even if it was clear I’m a bit hesitant about enforcing “rules” from “lore” sections of books, especially softcovers. For example did you know that spells that make a target harder to detect (invisibility, misdirection, etc.) are illegal in Absalom? (Guide to Absalom p.48). Two-thirds of the PFS adventures I GMed in Absalom would have ended with most of the party in jail if that was enforced. It always feels like a “too many cooks” situation. There were literally hundreds of authors who wrote material for PF1, and it was all too easy for someone to write something to give their work some flavor that ended up blocking or contradicting something else published. There’s a blog post from back in 2013 or so where a newly hired Paizo intern introduced herself and stated that her first job was going to be to making a database of all the rules published to that point. Because Paizo didn’t have one and no one person at the company knew them all!
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One of the main issues of just using things like the srd and aonprd, they don't tell you those things there. So, invariably people just assume that everything they come across is just fair game, and then get upset when a material they come across is rarer than they'd like.
I haven’t GMed a (non-PFS) PF1 campaign in a while. But when I did I would usually institute a “PFS-preapproved” rule. In other words: if you could use it in PFS you could use it in my game. Anything else required my approval.
Most things I did approve, but having the rule explicit from the start meant people got far less upset when I did not allow Leadership (for example).
Or requires something specific to be worked in the first place, whether it be a special forge or a specific recipe for an alloy or, honestly, whatever. I mean, most skymetals are rare, and I mean, really rare. They literally are tiny chunks of rocks that fell from space. Most of that rock is going to be just rock. It's supposed to be hard, outside of very specific places to find fragments of the metals to work with in the first place.
I don’t intend this to be mean-spirited, but you may want to rethink your interpretation of skymetal crafting. (Mithral is not a skymetal, it is mined in the Darklands.) It sounds like you’re expecting the crafter to go from raw ore all the way to finished weapon. But no one expects the person crafting a steel rapier to be the same person who smelted the iron ore, removed impurities, and added the right amount of carbon in the first place. She bought the steel from someone else.
Yes they are very rare. But that rarity is priced in. It is 3000 gp for enough adamantine (the most common skymetal) to make a dagger! There are plenty of things that are relatively rare in the real world, but are available if you are willing to pay.