harvesting and crafting
Harvesting
Before you can craft something you need the ingredients, and most of these ingredients will come from the corpse of a monster you’ve recently killed. Not only can this create tense moments where you’re trying to extract the volatile poison gland of a Giant Frog before it bursts, but it can also create entire quests encouraging players to venture far and wide to track and kill the monsters needed to craft an item they desire.
The process of harvesting these organs is nor something that just anyone can do with ease, so your character actually has the opportunity to specialise into this skill set and become an expert, able to save more of the carcase before it spoils.
Recepies
Every magical item in GnG has a recipe with unique ingredients, these are provided to help GMs create their own magical item recipes or even with players who’s characters want to experiment with creating a brand new item.
We don’t have hundreds of pages listing the effects of every single monster item part, instead each ingredient is broken down with different categories and tags showing its general effect, strength, and any specific/unique exceptions. This also means that when creating a new monster GMs can easily categorise the tags/effects of their parts too.
Crafting
Crafting an item is something that takes time and effort. In GnG crafting is also not something that anyone can just do wherever and whenever they want, you need skills, tools, and often a building built for it. This might sound too limiting but it actually provides pathways for your character to become better at crafting over time.
Each time you attempt to progress when crafting you can succeed or fail and failure throughout the crafting process can actually change the item itself. When you fail you can either lose some ingredients or bite the bullet and gain a fault.
Cooking
1 element of crafting that is often overlooked is cooking. This form of crafting is different from creating items because it happens in 1 small sitting.
Most of the time when cooking you’ll be creating meals to consume when resting, these can be basic rations or exquisite cuisines that come with their own unique benefits. However you can also cook snacks, these don’t help with resting and provide much smaller bonuses but they can be saved and eaten later (and much quicker) if needed.
And just like crafting there are many pathways that your character can progress as a chef becoming better at cooking means you may make more portions out of the same ingredients or the effects may become more potent/last longer.
Magical Items
Magic items are the most common things that your characters will be attempting to craft, they range widely in their power and can completely change the abilities of your characters. A character who progresses through the levels and crafts/collects magical items throughout their journey will be much more powerful than a character who starts at that higher level. This is something we intentionally integrated into GnG because we want your character sheet to show off not just what your character can do but what they have done.
Inventory
How you transport items is almost as important as the items themselves, most of the time tracking encumbrance can become tedious if it is just simple maths. So instead with GnG we focused on special inventory. Items still have weight but they also have a size and shape, this makes it much clearer visually what you can and cannot carry. Another advantage of having the items be visual is that it serves as a reminder to the players what they have available every time they look. They can actually see the 30ft of rope rather than having to scroll through a list of text.
Homebrew
Making your own unique items outside of the game-world is something that we wanted to make as easy as possible, which is why we share the formulas we used ourselves when making the official items. Whilst it is easy to ignore these they provide a good guideline for you to ensure that they are balance with the rest of the system, which is usually the biggest concern when creating homebrew.
Faults
As mentioned above, failing when crafting doesn’t destroy the item entirely, instead it can create a fault. Faults, especially in magical items, can change how the item functions and create interesting interactions throughout the campaign. They serve a similar purpose to wounds for your character, where, rather than acting as a punishment, they can help you to tell an interesting story. And just like wounds these faults are not necessarily permanent, but they are difficult to remove.