Characters can collect material (Ingredients) in their travels, which are used mainly to craft new equipment, create alchemical/herbal concoctions and finely cut gemstones. To get new materials, the character must expend the whole process without major interruptions (like a combat). There're three material categories, and each one has a special way to collect them: Creatures, Minerals and others and Plants and fungi. Also, depending of the type of material and the place where it is, there might be modifiers to the skill check made for collecting the materials. Franz can add more than one of the modifiers (a quick possible example could be, if the party is traveling at normal pace on a rainy day, the DC could be +11)making them realistic towards the situation.
Creature parts can be used as alchemical/ herbal materials and for creating armour and weapons, which some of them may give special features. Others take some of the creature parts as trophies and decorations for their armour and houses. If you want to extract parts of animals and creatures, you must make an Intelligence (Nature) check for common creatures, Intelligence (Arcana) or an Intelligence (Religion) check for rarer/ magical creatures. A Wisdom (Survival) instead an Intelligence check when harvesting parts should be used for certain character classes ie Ranger/ Barbarian/ Huntsman etc. On a failed check, the part is destroyed or damaged. It's up to the DM to determine which check is made depending on the creature type and how common is that creature in the world. A separate roll should be made for each part the character is hoping to gain for sale or use.
DC: 15 + 1/2 of the creature's CR (Creatures with a CR less than 2 don't add the CR to the DC)
Harvesting Meat: While the characters can forage to survive on the wilderness, they also can hunt down and kill a creature to harvest the meat and use it as food. The meat they yield spoils after a single day if uneaten or not cooked/preserved. Eating spoiled meat might require a Constitution saving throw to avoid throwing up the food or getting diseased. A character can make a Wisdom (Survival) check to try to collect meat as food. The DC for the check is typically 15, but it’s up to the Franz to modify the DC. The amount of meat harvested is determined by the creature size, as shown below. Characters specially just harvesting for meat only make one roll of Wisdom (Survival) to Dress a Carcass which means a passed roll gains them the meat but all other parts are of subpar value sale wise. It takes one hour for a single character to dress the carcass of an average deer and in the extreme end it would take a single character several days to completely dress the carcass of a woolly mammoth.
|| Creature Size | Meat Yield*||:
|| Tiny | 0.5 - 2 lb.|| || Small 4 - 8 lb.|| || Medium 16 - 32 lb.|| || Large 32 - 64 lb.||
* Greater sized creatures are left to Franz but just as an example a Woolly Mammoth may yield from 1000 lb. to 8000 lb. in fresh meat or to the extreme a Blue Whale could yield up to hundreds of thousands of lb. so Franz will deal with things on a case by case basis. Both examples however would benefit from multiple harvesters.
Following is a list of creature parts (Ingredients). Some parts(* , depending on the creature, may deal damage if characters fail in their roll to extract it. The elemental damage can be any type of damage, and it's defined by Franz (for example, a character takes fire damage on a failed check to extract the essential organ of a pyro-hydra). generally the damage dealt should be a small percentage of the actual damage the part might cause if it was used in an attack by the living creature.
Blood/ Bones/ Chitin/ Claws(*)/ Ectoplasm(*)/ Elemental essence(*)/ Essential Organ(*)/ Fangs, teeth(*)/ Fins/ Feathers, Wings/ Horns, antlers(*)/ Organ/ Slime, mucus(*)/ Sting(*)/ Tail.
An alternative to crafting is to sell the harvested part to a collector, alchemist, apothecary, herbalist or any NPC Expert (Smith etc) that can utilize them. An approximate guide for the value of a particular monster part is given in the Monster Part Value table, below, assuming the monster part is preserved appropriately or fresh.
|| Monster Part (CR) | Value (GP) ||:
|| 0-1 | 1-10gp || 2-3 | 10-50gp || 4-5 | 50-100gp || 6-7 | 100-200gp || 8-9 | 200-500gp || 10-11 | 500-1000gp || 12-13 | 1000-1500gp || 14-15 | 1500-2000gp || 16-17 | 2000-5000gp || 18+ | 5000-10000gp ||
Minerals are earthen materials used (mostly after smelting) for making armour, weapons, and gaining special effects for those armours and weapons. Minerals can be divided in two types and each type has a unique way to acquire them. Either way this is a time consuming task with the character having to get permission at an existing mine or source of the minerals, sometimes a character might be lucky enough to come across a mineral vein in their explorations or find a map to a hidden/ forgotten one.
Ores are extracted with the use of a Miner's Pick and a Strength (athletics) check DC15. On a success they collects 1d4+1 x 100 lb. per hour of mining.
Gemstones, which are obviously extracted as rough gems or mineral ore, are extracted with the use of a much smaller hand pick and Dexterity check DC15. Franz determines the amount of the gemstones found, or he can roll a d20 and compare the result with the table immediately below. Franz will determine the kind of gemstones found.
|| d20 | Gemstones found ||
|| 1-15 | 1 gemstone (10gp) || || 16-17 | 1d4 gemstones (10gp) || || 18 | 1 gemstone (50gp) || || 19 | 1d4 gemstones (50gp) || || 20 | Roll twice ||
There're also other materials which are not ores or gemstones, such as wood, stone and coral that can be also used to craft weapons or pieces of armour. For collecting those materials, you need to make a Strength (Athletics) or a Dexterity check, depending on the material (DC 15). On a success you collect a number of pounds equal to 2d4 + your Constitution modifier. For example, if a character wants to collect some units of Darkwood for an armour, he must make a Strength (Athletics) check to cut down the tree with an axe and get the material. On a success, he collects a number of pounds of Darkwood equal to 2d4 + his Constitution modifier every hour of harvesting.
When average characters, ones without nature or survival skills, are searching for herbs a Wisdom (Perception) check should be made. Further, they are only capable of identifying and harvesting common variety herbs. However if looking for a particular herb in a specific location Franz may find that an Intelligence (Investigation) check is more in order. Also if the player is on a designated Quest/Request to gather particular herbs normally a detailed instruction would be given to the character with pictures; description and likely places to find it so this would give the searching characters a +5 to their roll. Characters who have the appropriate skills of nature and survival, Intelligence (Nature) or Intelligence (Survival) should be rolled making sure to include all bonuses be they class or @Herbalism Field Kit proficiency. If the player is searching while on the move this check should be made with disadvantage. The time used for gathering equals to 1 hour for each check, and you can make a number of checks per day equal to your Intelligence modifier (minimum 1).
Franz should first determine the rarity of the plant which may be found by rolling on the Plant Rarity table below. Then Franz can choose a plants of that rarity from the appropriate Gatherable Plants & Fungi LORE pages to see what type of plants the player can find in their location. Based on the rarity of the plant Franz can determine the needed base DC to locate that plants.
|| Rarity of Plant = 1d100) ||:
|| 01-40 | Common || || 41-70 | Uncommon || || 71-90 | Rare || || 91-100 | Very Rare ||
On a successful check at gathering/ foraging for Plants & Fungi the GM rolls to see the individual numbers for each type using the following:
|| d20 Roll | Number of plants gathered* ||:
|| 1-10 = 1 || 11-15 = 1d4 || 16-18 = d4+1 || 19 = 1d4+2 || 20 = Roll twice ||
*This number is modified by the number over the DC that the character makes the roll. For example: a character makes a combined Intelligence (Nature) roll (bonuses included) of 21 then rolls a 18 on the d20 for number of plants gathered which equals d4+1 on which he rolls a 4 (+1) and his roll was 6 above the DC so the amount gathered now equals 6+5 so he finds 11 plants.
You can buy and sell the plants and herbs in the market as shown in the following.
|| Ingredient Rarity| |Base Purchase Price| |Base Sell Price ||
|| Common | 5gp | 2gp 5s || Uncommon | 10gp | 5gp || Rare | 50gp | 25gp || Very Rare | 150gp | 75gp || Legendary | 500gp | 250gp ||