geniuscodemonkey |
So there is a Shuln in Abomination Vaults and the bestiary states that it's bones are infused with adamantine. It's a hugh creature. A chunk of adamantine is worth 500gp and is light bulk. So removing all the skin and just taking the bones, claws and teeth how much bulk is that? How much could the party earn from that one animal?
Yes I know it won't be pure adamantine, but still an expert crafter can extract the metal...
Castilliano |
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As much as suits your narrative & economic balance. It could be beyond reuse no matter the craftsman or a simple procedure anyone could perform. How much treasure do you want to drop in that encounter? That's really all to it, and Paizo itself would avoid determining that for your table, much less should we do so.
Personally, while I like the idea of monster bodies having worthwhile treasure, I'm not sure it makes for a good game mechanic as a norm. It leads to some peculiar "heroism" if players think they need this income. And I wouldn't want whether a party has a craftsman or not to determine if the party gets a spike in treasure.
Plus, obviously there's no straightforward answer.
Finoan |
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Yes I know it won't be pure adamantine, but still an expert crafter can extract the metal...
A Shuln is a level 12 creature. So I would say that extracting the adamantine could be a level 12 Earn Income task.
So a PC could earn between 6 and 10 GP worth of adamantine crafting raw materials (depending on skill training) per day of Downtime on a successful check.
Tarlane |
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I think treating it as an earn income task that you can do with Nature or crafting is a pretty fair way about it. The bones being infused with Adamantine doesn't mean they are significantly adamantine- A beaver's teeth are coated with Iron rather than calcium but you would have a hard time converting that into something usable for a weapon. Breaking it down isn't going to give you much, but rewarding the players by giving them the ability to earn income at a level above what the local towns provide is a small reward that isn't going to break balance.
James Jacobs Creative Director |
I stumbled into this thread at about the point I was looking to take a break from doing an art brief for an upcoming unannounced Adventure Path, and was intrigued! My suggestion and take on this question is getting spoiled, because it's a wall of text.
The shuln encounter in Abomination Vaults is a Severe 9 encounter, so according to the table on page 81, a level 9 Severe encounter should reward 860 gp. So thats the benchmark for how much gp the PCs should be able to get by sucking the adamantine out of the shuln's bones. This does mean that a "chunk of adamantine" at 500 gp feels about right for treasure comparison reasons.
That said, the encounter doesn't expect this, and thus doesn't list this 860 gp payday as "Treasure" for the encounter, so in doing so you're boosting the gp reward for the PCs beyond the intended amount. That's probably okay, to be honest, but you should still keep an eye on the overall PC wealth to keep things at a level that's comfortable for your table.
It also sets a precedent for your players that they can suck gold out of dead monsters all the time, so they might start clamoring for harvest yields for all slain creatures. The game works fine like this, as long as you keep to the wealth-by-level numbers that you're comfortable with as a GM (these numbers don't HAVE to be identical to the suggested ones in the rulebook; those are baselines that take into account average expectations), otherwise you'll find your PCs are getting too rich too fast, and that can translate into overlevling their gear and thus rendering encounters less and less satisfying (both from a combat feel and from a "that's all we get as treasure?" feel).
Scrounging body parts from monsters for resale is also a gameplay element that a lot of folks aren't going to be comfortable with, since that way could put you in the potentially uncomfortable position of deciding how much elephant tusks or shark fins are worth, or human souls for that matter!
The game itself and the adventures we publish generally assume this is NOT the case, and when you read something like "the shuln's bones are infused with adamantine", but there's nothing in the shuln's stat block or its sidebar to indicate that this is a valuable resource that can be claimed as treasure, you should treat that text more as flavor than rules. The shuln is a great example here, because it's entry in Monster Core DOES have a treasure sidebar; but it talks about using shuln spit as a potential ingredient for the crafting of poison, and says nothing about its adamantine infused bones, further suggesting that it's just flavor and there's not enough in there to be worth the struggle to scrape out.
In the end, I think the best way to present an option for how to do this for a group is what folks have already suggested—the Earn Income activity. This helps to make the process of extracting the adamantine from the bones take time and perhaps feel more grueling and boring than just going adventuring, and doesn't overwhelm the income the PCs are getting by throttling the gp amounts of adamantine they can gather. I agree that this should be a level 12 task. This solution ALSO dodges the weird situation you'd get by linking its gp value to the encounter level (like I suggest above), since that weirdly means that the higher level your PCs are, the less money an equal sized level 12 shuln's bones would grant. Keeping it at a level 12 task standardizes that amount, regardless of encounter level.
And now, back to my regularly scheduled work day!
dirkdragonslayer |
Judging by the creature's level and what level the party probably is, I think some crafting or downtime checks to try to extract it seem fair. Though as Tarlane said, just become a creature has a material infused in it's bones doesn't mean it's easy to extract or it has a meaningful amount to extract. It would probably take a lot of time and a crazy chemistry set with plenty of solvents to render these adamantine-laced rat bones into a usable quantity. It brings me back to Organic Chemistry class, and trying to provoke specific chemical reactions at specific temperatures to extract just a little bit of pure acetylsalicylic acid or caffeine from a mix of pills.
But in situations where the players could have access to the material before they should have access to the material, there are other things to do. I've noticed a lot of adventures present rare materials to the players before it's mechanically available. Rusthenge has Noqual trinkets lying around the dungeon, Crown of the Kobold King has all sorts of Darkwood furniture and trinkets from level 1. In these situations maybe the players or local smiths lack the expertise to work with these materials, so it's an expensive trinket for now. This Darkwood is everywhere, but maybe you can't cut it without an adamantine sawblade, or if it's not chemically treated in a certain way it's too brittle for armor. That Darkwood bench you found might seem like it's basically solid gold at level 2, but it's been dry rotting in a forgotten monastery for at least 2 centuries.