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There’s a special appeal to homemade goods that carries over to when those homemade goods are wielded by fictional characters. Many players inDungeons & Dragonswill be interested in how to forge their own swords, armour, or magical items. It’s also a way of tying legacy characters into a homebrew setting by having their handmade goods reappear as powerful relics.
The rules for crafting items can be confusing, they’ve changed over the release of different books and supplements. Thankfully the result is still less convoluted than having to spend experience points and potentially level down the way previous editions implemented the system.
How To Craft Items
The most commonly used crafting rules are the ones provided inXanathar’s Guide to Everything, which branch out from the base rules provided in the Dungeon Master’s Guide and Player’s Handbook. Craftable items are divided into three big categories:Non-magical items, magic items, and consumables.
Crafting times, measured in days or weeks, assume aneight-hour workday without interruptions. Characters with no social life or need for sleep, such as warforged, may be permitted by their DM to craft faster.
Crafting Non-Magical Items
The crafting of non-magical items is unchanged from what you’ll find in the player’s handbook and DMG.
Crafting Magical Items
Magic items follow a more complex ruleset, that takes into account the item’s rarity and is also reliant on adventuring work. There are a greater number of requirements that you need to meet, but it is designed to bemore interactive with the adventuring part of the game.
Magical Ingredients
Magical ingredients for items now need to besourced from adventuring.
A battle against a CR16 Phoenix might yield themagically infused gemstonesthat form the tip of a staff of fireballs.
Mundane Ingredients
Instead of using the item’s market price, it now uses a genericitem cost dependent on the item’s rarity.
A rare item, +1 half plate, will require2,000GP worth of raw materials. Using the trade goods table in the player’s handbook this translates to 20,000lbs of raw iron. Somehow.
Time
The time is now measured in weeksinstead of days and is dependent on item rarity.
Heward’s Handy Spice Pouch, as acommon item, can be crafted in one week.
Crafting Consumable Items
Spell Scrolls and Healing Potions follow a simpler set of rules. The earliest tier of items can be crafted with one day of downtime. This makes them theonly magic items that can be crafted during an adventure: A DM might permit consumables to be crafted as part of a long rest if the character has a relevant ability or trait that limits the amount of sleep they need versus their group.
The higher tier versions of these items follow a time and cost scaling chart similar to other magic items, with discounts due to their consumable nature. Most often, you’ll want tofocus on crafting the lower-level potions and scrolls.
Best Classes For Crafting Items
Two classes perform thebest on item crafting, the artificer and wizard.Both use intelligence for their key attribute which is also the standard for crafting skill checks, and have specific features that allow them to outperform other classes.
Artificer gains expertise in all tools they are proficient in, a naturally large amount and expanded further by subclasses. At tenth level, they gain the ability tocraft common and uncommon items in a quarter of the usual time and at half the price.
Wizards have exclusive access to the spell Fabricate. This allows you to craft non-magical items in ten minutes as long as you have the raw materials and proficiency. There isn’t a large amount of elaboration on how this interacts with the other crafting rules, beyond stating that the quality of the product scales to the quality of the materials.
This means a wizard smith could craft plate armours (which normally cost 1,500gp to purchase) for nothing more than the cost in materials (750gp) and a fourth-level spell slot. Don’t worry about this breaking the economy: If a player invested seven levels into a very specific class-build concept for the end goal of producing cheap goods and flooding the market, you should allow them to do so.
Just keep in mind thatfew people will have 1,500gp to throw at a suit of plate armoureven if they add some wizarding discounts to undercut the competition.
There aren’t specific rules forhow the two classes and their features interact.An artificer 10 / wizard 7 multiclass could hypotheticallyfabricate items using half the raw materials they would otherwise need, or you could allow a level 10 artificer and wizard to work together, with one sourcing and preparing the materials while the second fabricates them in a matter of minutes.
This is a level of teamwork that doesn’t always appear when people are planning their builds so try not to discourage it.
Selling Crafted Items
Items crafted by the player use only half the market price in raw materials, leaving the possibility ofmaking an income from selling crafted gear. Not every DM wants to run an economics-focused game so if this is something you should ask approval for ahead of time. Downtime activities are often handled between sessions, which requires DMs to invest additional time.
Selling magic items is a separate downtime activity that requires charisma (persuasion) checks to turn a profit. One way of letting the party share the spotlight is tohave the party members not involved in making stuff be in charge of selling it.Charisma-focused characters such as bards are less likely to be invested in making items but will be well suited to the persuasion checks needed to find a buyer.
Crafting With The Bastions Unearthed Arcana
This more experimental ruleset offers a new way of crafting a limited set of magic items. It doesn’t require your character to retire from adventuring or take a sabbatical to craft a single item and has alternative routes for crafting scrolls and potions that do not require the player’s supervision.
800gp
14 days for simple weapons.
21 days for martial weapons.
The smithy reintroduces the concept of ‘masterwork weapons’ from earlier editions. These are artisan-crafted items that can be thought of as plus zero magic items: They have the durability and properties of a magic weapon but do not provide an attack or damage modifier.
When they have magic weapon cast on them,the spell is made permanent and they become +1 weapons.
Seven days.
Xgp dependent on rarity.
The scroll crafting features of bastions are less generous, only being available much later. Additionally, you can only commission scrolls you already have learned and at up to half the level you’re able to cast yourself.
The normal discount for consumable magic items is also absent here. The advantage is thatscrolls of all types are completed in seven days of work, instead of scaling to item rarity.
Level Five
Free!
The herb garden can producepotions of healing, basic poisons, or antitoxins. None of these cost money to produce, providing a slow but steady supply of useful items.
Level Nine
This is an upgrade to the greenhouse’s offerings. It can producegreater potions of healing and a selection of named poisonsfrom the Dungeon Master’s Guide.
