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Archives of Nethys

Archives of Nethys

Pathfinder RPG (1st Edition) Pathfinder RPG (2nd Edition) Starfinder RPG

Rules Index | GM Screen | Player's Guide
Secrets of Crafting

Nature Crafting

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Growing Items

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In an ancient forest, an elf plays a haunting melody on a flute among the trees, growing entire buildings seamlessly from still-living wood. Elsewhere, a fungus leshy holds a conversation with the mushrooms of an underground cavern, convincing them to twine together into a latticed armor to defend the cavern against a new threat encroaching from the Darklands. The traditional methods of crafting items tell the story of a crafter retrieving the necessary raw materials and then working those materials via forging, woodworking, tailoring, or other such means; however, this is but one of many ways to create magic items. In a primal setting or adventure, or in a campaign taking place in a natural region like the fey forests of the First World, it might fit your story better to grow an item from a living thing instead. While most such stories take place in a natural environment, they can just as easily occur in a hidden laboratory, where an alchemist might form magical oozes into specific shapes before curing them with magical reagents, producing a sword as durable as any steel.

Mechanically, the process of growing an item uses the same principles as Crafting it normally, though the details and the story differ. Use the Grow activity, a variant of the Craft activity. This activity has the rare trait; it's only available if you've decided to use this variant in your campaign.

Grow

Rare Downtime Manipulate 
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You can grow an item from a living thing, most commonly a plant. You need the Alchemical Crafting skill feat to Grow an alchemical item, the Magical Crafting skill feat to Grow a magic item, and the Snare Crafting feat to Grow a snare. To Grow an item, you must meet the following requirements.
  • The item is your level or lower. An item that doesn't list a level is level 0. If the item is 9th level or higher, you must be a master in Crafting, and if it's 16th or higher, you must be legendary.
  • You have the formula for the item; see Getting Formulas for more information.
  • You have an appropriate set of tools for growing the item. While cultivation and gardening tools are typical for plants, you might also use a different technique that requires a different set of tools. For instance, if you play music to help your plants grow, you might use a musical instrument instead.
  • You must supply special fertilizers or other magical nutrients worth at least half the item's Price. You always expend at least that quantity of fertilizers and magical nutrients when you Grow successfully. If you're in a settlement, you can usually spend currency to get the amount of magical nutrients you need, except in the case of rarer precious materials. You can also bring them with you in advance or forage for them with a skill like Herbalism Lore, gaining an amount of value based on the rules for Earn Income.
You must spend 4 days at work, at which point you attempt a Crafting check. The GM determines the DC to Grow the item based on its level, rarity, and other circumstances. Depending on the specifics of the type of item, it might be easier to Grow than it is to Craft, or vice versa; typically, the GM can represent that by making an easy or hard DC adjustment.

If your attempt to create the item is successful, you expend the fertilizers and other magical nutrients you supplied. You can pay the remaining portion of the item's Price in additional growth accelerants to complete the item immediately, or you can spend additional downtime days cultivating the item. For each additional day taken, reduce the value of the accelerants you need to complete the item. This amount is determined using Core Rulebook Table 4–2: Income Earned, based on your proficiency rank in Crafting and using your own level instead of a task level. After any of these downtime days, you can complete the item by spending the remaining portion of its Price in accelerants. If the downtime days you spend are interrupted, you can return to finish the item later, continuing where you left off.

You also have the option to allow the item to grow mostly untended, only stopping to supervise it occasionally, though the pace is much slower without your direct intervention. At the end of each season in which you spent at least 1 day of downtime to Grow the item, roll an additional Crafting check and reduce the value of accelerants you need to expend to complete the item by the corresponding amount.

Critical Success Your attempt is successful. Each additional day spent Growing reduces the materials needed to complete the item by an amount based on your level + 1 and your proficiency rank in Crafting.
Success Your attempt is successful. Each additional day spent Growing reduces the materials needed to complete the item by an amount based on your level and your proficiency rank.
Failure You fail to complete the item. You can salvage the raw materials you supplied for their full value. If you want to try again, you must start over.
Critical Failure You fail to complete the item. You ruin 10% of the fertilizers and nutrients you supplied, but you can salvage the rest. If you want to try again, you must start over.

Example

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If Lini wanted to Grow a suit of leaf weave armor, she would spend 2 gp on initial fertilizers and nutrients and allow four days for the armor to grow, attempting a DC 14 Crafting check. At the end of the fourth day, if she succeeds, Lini can choose to either use accelerants to complete the growth right away or to instead spend more downtime to cultivate the armor over the course of a few weeks. She has time to spare and finds this kind of task soothing, so even though a level-0 task doesn't provide profit at an especially fast rate, she decides to spend 5 additional days growing the armor. She's quite fortunate and rolls a critical success on her Crafting check, allowing her to make 2 sp of progress per additional day, for a total of 10 sp (or 1 gp). This reduces the remaining amount she needs to pay to 1 gp, so she spends that amount on a magical additive that promotes plant growth, at which point she is finished growing her new armor. This new armor, which Lini grew herself and is in accordance with her principles as a druid, provides much greater satisfaction than anything she could buy in a shop.

Adjusting Skills

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In a game or setting where the act of creating new items happens primarily or exclusively through careful cultivation of living organisms, GMs can choose to have Grow use Nature instead of Crafting. In worlds or settings where this ruling is in play, inventors are likely nonexistent, or at least rare, while druids serve an even more central role in their communities, going beyond spiritual guidance roles to also serve as innovators and economic leaders. Such a change should be made carefully and intentionally, with an eye toward the type of story being told. There's little point in allowing a hybrid system where you can choose between Crafting or Nature to craft items, since Nature has many other uses and thus can easily make Crafting obsolete by comparison. Instead, consider a hybrid version where players use Nature to Grow items and Arcana to craft items the normal way, cutting the Crafting skill entirely.

Bestowed Gifts

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In fairy tales and folklore, stories abound of heroes receiving special items out of gratitude, friendship, or simply a desire to assist them on their quest. A nymph might grant a token of their favor and agree to act as an artist's muse, establishing a long-term relationship that will ripple out through that mortal's life for years—or perhaps even generations, as the nymph continues to look over those who came after. On the opposite end of the spectrum, an aging unicorn approaching their end might willingly sacrifice their horn to grant a hero great powers at the cost of their ebbing life.

From these two extreme cases, a pattern emerges: in each, the gift establishes a lasting bond between the giver and recipient. For this reason, a bestowed gift is like the proverbial goose that laid the golden eggs: giving the gift freely grants it power, meaning those who would attempt to wrest it through theft or violence are doomed to fail. The connection between the giver and the recipient plows a magical furrow and plants a seed that can grow with time. For this reason, relics are a perfect way to tell this type of story. There's even a shared nomenclature that hints at this connection: the abilities relics gain are called “gifts.”

However, even if your group isn't using relics (or introducing one would be too complicated or long-term for the situation at hand), a bestowed gift with the powers of an otherwise-normal magic item can still make an especially meaningful moment in a campaign, far more so than simply purchasing such an item from a store or finding it in a hidden cache. A player is likely to remember a scene where a faerie queen spins a suit of autumn's embrace armor for them out of the plants of her domain, surrounding their character's body and protecting them from incoming harm for years to come, more than if they bought the same type of armor during downtime.

Bestowing Gifts in Your Game

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Even if you're granting a PC a gifted item based on an existing magic item's statistics, consider tweaking it in certain ways to make it more distinct without requiring an entirely new item and stat block. For one, gifted items typically only work for the creature that received the gift, or perhaps an heir or protegee of the initial recipient if the gift is passed down. As when the gift is initially received, the intent remains important; a bestowed gift keeps its power when earnestly given to an heir as a true inheritance, but it loses its power if transferred for a sale, quid pro quo, or other attempt to cheapen the gift into a commercial exchange. Beyond that, consider adding an item quirk or two that you choose specifically to match the nature of the creature gifting the item, rather than rolling completely at random.

If the creature granting the gift is especially beloved by your player, or the whole group, but you'd rather not have them tagging along everywhere, another option is to make the gifted item an intelligent item with an imprint of the creature's personality, or just a conduit to speak with the creature from afar. Be careful when exercising this option, as you would with any intelligent item, as this adds another NPC to roleplay into the mix. Intelligent items are people, not possessions, even though they take the form of objects.

While a bestowed gift is more memorable than most treasures, you can easily take them into account using the normal method for treasure distribution. Keep track of bestowed gifts just like you would any other magic item using Core Rulebook Table 10–9: Party Treasure by Level, counting them among the items that the party received as treasure during that level.

Bestowed Gifts as the Baseline

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If your group particularly likes bestowed items, you can use them to replace most or all other forms of treasure in your campaign. In that case, you're establishing a narrative where pacts, connections, and friendships with supernatural creatures are extremely important for adventurers and other creatures hoping to unlock the power of magic items. This has several interesting implications on the world at large. For one, since bestowed gifts aren't usually transferable by violence, theft, or monetary trade, it would mean that looting magic items or buying them at a store are off limits. Count any bestowed gifts against the party's treasure for that level and consider adding an additional handful of consumables to their treasure allotment to counterbalance the lower flexibility in their treasure. Alternatively, consider presenting them with a consumable garden or similar option.

Depending on who and what are capable of bestowing a gift in your campaign, PCs with significant power could use the Crafting skill to bestow gifts of their own unto their fellow adventurers, which could limit the necessity of binding ties with magical creatures. Regardless of the variation, a campaign where most or all magic items are bestowed gifts tends to either be lower magic in general or else have an extreme degree of interconnectedness, full of magical creatures that bond with heroes to an extent greater than most settings. For a lower-magic feel, you can also use the automatic bonus progression rules to handle all the item bonuses for you so that you can focus on handing out gifts that are more thematic and meaningful to the PCs.

Gardens of Wonder

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A toxicologist alchemist walks through a carefully tended garden, its medicinal and poisonous plants growing and blooming in neat, colorful rows, each separated from the others and meticulously labeled. Elsewhere, a druid explores a wild grove welling with primal power, using their knowledge and intuition to choose exactly the plants they need for their latest poultice. Whether cultivated or purely natural, a garden of wonder is a location where an herbalist, poisoner, or other character interested in plant-based concoctions can gather ingredients with ease.

As the Game Master, you should handle the tending or exploration of such a garden using the downtime rules for Earn Income to represent the construction of an artificial garden or exploration of a natural garden, as well as the harvesting of ingredients to make herbal concoctions. This is the simplest method and the one that fits most easily into the existing structure of downtime. Note that while this section focuses on gardens in the traditional sense, these rules are equally applicable to a variety of different endeavors and structures (see A Garden by Any Other Name).

Another method would be to use the ritual garden of death to gather up poisonous creatures in the area and establish such a garden right away. Ritualists more interested in healing others than harming them can develop a garden of healing ritual that has the same costs and effect, but for creatures and plants that provide medicinal benefits rather than deadly toxins.

Establishing a Garden

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Using a ritual or spending personal downtime are two ways to establish a garden, but your group might be interested in establishing a garden, orchard, or other location that grows consumable items for them as a shared party resource within the campaign. For such a scenario, GMs should use the following guidelines, which are based on the cost differences of a magic scroll and a magic wand. A player can't establish a garden unless the GM and the group have agreed to use this variant together.

Essentially, a garden is a living item or collection of items that produce herbal alchemical items, poisons, or similar consumables at a steady rate (typically one per day) without the need for additional downtime. These consumables are only temporary, however, typically taking the form of a short-lived fruit, flower blossom, or other perishable good. As such, they expire at the end of the day; since characters with a garden can't stockpile their bounty, they're encouraged to use the consumable items each day. Even magical and other extraordinary means of preservation have no effect.

To seed the garden with enough plants or animals to produce sustainably, the PCs must pay a cost equal to the maximum cost of a permanent magic item that is 2 levels higher than the consumable's level. For example, it costs 2,000 gp to plant sufficient antidotal herbs to obtain a perishable greater antidote each day, because greater antidotes are 10th-level consumables and the maximum cost for a 12th-level permanent item is 2,000 gp. PCs with skill in herbalism or gardening can attempt to use Earn Income to help defray the setup costs of a garden, using Lore skills such as Gardening Lore as normal. If you are also using the variant for growing items from this chapter, a character could use the Grow activity to grow a garden. Additional gardens can be used to increase the number of daily consumables the PCs have access to, but the PCs should have enough space to accommodate the expanded gardens. A given group of PCs shouldn't maintain more gardens than half the number of PCs in the party, rounded down.

Using Gardens as a Reward

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Some players tend to wait for the perfect moment to use a consumable item, which can ironically lead to them not using any of their items unless the situation is extremely dire, since they're always anticipating that the next encounter might be a better time to drink that potion or elixir. Unfortunately, this can sometimes mean the party never has the fun of trying out a strange consumable or seeing the bit of variety it can introduce. Gardens are a great reward for groups that are hesitant to use consumables because they feel more permanent, reliable, and safe, and since gardens' rewards need to be used each day or lost altogether, players are incentivized to find creative uses for the consumables each day. Since the garden is located at a specific location, that means the group needs to be able to return to that location to retrieve the consumables. If you give the group an especially elaborate garden capable of producing multiple consumable items each day, the group can become more invested in setting up roots nearby and establishing a base of operations organically. This can be a perfect incentive to get players invested in the local area.

A Garden by Any Other Name

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While a garden is especially narratively attractive to characters like herbalists, druids, poisoners, leshys, and the like, these same guidelines are perfectly capable of describing locations far different than a natural location lush with plant life. Here are a few examples.

Bakeries and Kitchens

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A fighter sponsors a bakery with her tournament winnings, and in return, the baker agrees to bake a fresh magic pastry for her each day when she stops by on her morning run. This “garden” is likely tended by a friendly NPC who the PCs have assisted in some way. Perhaps the cost of founding the garden was an investment in the baker or chef's startup, or maybe the PCs were granted the land on which the bakery sits as a reward for services rendered to the local community. If the land and buildings are a reward for services rendered by the PCs, the reward itself might cover all or a portion of the costs of creating the garden.

When using Earn Income to help defray the costs of creating this kind of garden, Accounting Lore, Baking Lore, and Society are all appropriate skills.

Haunted Churches and Sites of Power

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A cleric creates a living scroll factory from parchment scraps won from contract devils and mummy wrappings, producing eerie-looking (and presumably evil) scrolls each midnight that explode into black flame the following midnight. Any of a variety of undead or extraplanar creatures might serve as the central seed for a “religious garden” that supplies the character with scrolls, catalysts, or other thematically appropriate consumables. This type of garden is most likely to be appropriate at higher levels, where a PC has the power to compel service from the undead or extraplanar entity who powers the garden. However, a PC who dedicates themself to the service of such a creature might be able to create and benefit from this type of garden as part of their tenure.

When using Earn Income to help defray the costs of creating this kind of garden, Architecture Lore or a lore skill related to a type of creature tied to the site (such as Devil Lore or Mummy Lore) are appropriate skills.

Ooze Farms

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An alchemist from the ooze-loving city of Oenopion establishes a laboratory of strange oozes, generating a beaker-full of odd, mutagenic gloop each day that can be used in the creation of almost any alchemical consumable of an appropriate level. Ooze gardens are most appropriate for generating alchemical consumables, particularly bombs and elixirs, though they might also be used to generate alchemical foods. This garden requires a full alchemist's lab in addition to the other requirements mentioned previously, though the alchemist can still make use of that lab when generating alchemical items that aren't part of the daily consumables produced by the garden.

When using Earn Income to help defray the costs of creating this kind of garden, both Crafting and Ooze Lore are appropriate skills.

Rock Gardens and Stalagmite Caverns

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A deep gnome druid carefully tends a cavern where the slow drip of limestone grows a forest unlike anything born from soil and sunlight. Gardens of stone and gems are actually more common beneath the surface than gardens containing flowers and herbs, and they can be an excellent source of consumables like talismans, mineral-based alchemical items, and other consumables crafted from gems and stones. Such subterranean gardens are most common among drow and svirfneblin, though any ancestry or species that makes its home in the Darklands might have the necessary skills to manage a garden of stone and gems. These types of gardens are particularly good for creating consumables like gadgets or talismans but require a repair kit in addition to the normal creation costs for establishing a garden.

When using Earn Income to help defray the costs of creating this kind of garden, Crafting, Engineering Lore, and Mining Lore are appropriate skills.

Wildlife Preserves

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A grizzled big-game hunter has grown attached to the animals she once poached and has retired to create a walled green space with carefully tended grasslands, ponds, and other habitats. Animals roam free, safe from the outside world. A wildlife preserve could operate as a zoo, an animal safe haven, or a private hunting ground for a noble, but at their core they all need to maintain a stable population of wildlife. The animals in one might produce resources like milk and eggs, and can be hunted or slaughtered for meat, pelts, feathers, and components for items like alchemical foods and bottled monstrosities.

When using Earn Income to help defray the costs of creating this kind of garden, Hunting Lore, Fishing Lore, or a lore skill related to creatures on the preserve (such as Canine Lore or Dinosaur Lore) are appropriate skills.

Additional Materials

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While many materials are covered by the Core Rulebook, some relatively mundane crafting materials not fully described there can be appropriate for use in weapons and armor produced from gardens or similar nature-oriented sources. Materials made from alchemically nurtured oozes (as described in Ooze Farms on the previous page) can be as strong as iron or might emulate more fragile materials like bone and stone. Bone and stone aren't precious materials, and as such don't impact the number or type of runes that can be placed on a weapon or suit of armor crafted from them.

Variant Materials

Many weapons traditionally made from wood or metal might be made from alternative materials instead, covering the gamut from stone and ice to more esoteric materials like refined essence of ooze. For most campaigns, metal weapons can be treated as interchangeable with weapons made from these alternative materials without requiring significant changes or adjustments. Armors should generally not be crafted from materials other than those they are presented as being made from, since accessibility to stone and wooden armors directly affects the balance and progression of various classes. Rather than allowing a character to craft a suit of full plate from a non-metallic material, direct the character towards the non-metallic armors presented here.

GMs looking to add a greater sense of differentiation between weapons and armor made from nonstandard materials can find the statistics for differing materials here, particularly the statistics for bone and stone equipment. Generally, this shouldn’t significantly change the price of the crafted item (particularly for magic weapons) as long as you are sticking to basic materials. While a stone sword might be slightly more fragile than an iron sword, it’s also less prone to damage from effects like a rusting grasp spell or the predations of a rust monster.