Weapon and Armor Crafting

You can buy plate armor exactly where it's sold, and for exactly fifteen hundred gold. The trouble is that an adventurer rarely finds themselves in the right shop with the right purse — but almost always finds themselves knee-deep in the carcass of some beast whose hide is tougher than any steel, two days' travel from the nearest forge. This guide is about turning the latter into the former.
We'll talk about ordinary weapons and armor — the very ones listed in the Player's Handbook — and, at the higher tiers of mastery, about their enchanted versions too, from +1 up to +3. Let me say at once what won't be here: mithral plate. Mithral, adamantine, and other wondrous metals are never the primary material in this system, at any tier of mastery. A pinch of mithral goes only into the alloy of an enchanted piece, as an additive, and nothing more.

Tools and Proficiency

Anyone can become a smith — barbarian or wizard alike; none of this "warriors this way, rogues that way." Just one thing matters: whether you're proficient with the right tool.

The carpenter is the only one who covers their whole chain end to end: the same tools serve both to pick and fell a suitable tree and to carve a bow from it. In every other branch, gathering and working require different kits — the miner breaks the rock, but it's the smith who forges it.

Three levels of access, and the difference between them is tangible:

No tool at all — the stage is unavailable. You can't pry out ore, skin a hide, or forge a sword with your bare hands. Full stop.

You have the tool but no proficiency — you can work, but you roll d20 + your ability modifier, and that's it. You're holding the hammer, but only vaguely picture what to do with it.

You're proficient with the tool — d20 + your ability modifier + proficiency bonus. That's the difference between "trying" and "knowing how."

Grade of Materials

Before we talk about gathering, we need to settle the main thing. All materials in this system have a grade from I to IV, and the grade does exactly one thing: it changes the DC of the forging roll. The finished item doesn't change with grade — a sword is a sword, armor is armor, per the Player's Handbook. The difference is how hard that item is to forge.

Grade of Materials

Wretched material crumbles, warps, and cracks — it's simply harder to forge anything from it. A DC of 25 is a death sentence: at the first tiers of mastery, bog iron will yield nothing at all but wasted material. Good material, by contrast, all but lays itself under the hammer, though the head start is modest — it won't make up for clumsy hands.

The only thing grade decides beyond the roll is the enchantment ceiling: you can't hammer magic into wretched or common iron — it leaks right back out.

An item's grade equals the lowest grade of material used. Mix a single unit of wretched stock into superb steel, and it counts as wretched. A chain breaks at its weakest link — and so does a hauberk.

Mining

Mining

"Your time starts now"

One procedure covers both ore and timber — only the material and the tool in hand differ. In suitable terrain, the player declares a gathering attempt. They make a Survival (Wis) or Nature (Int) check against DC 15, adding their proficiency bonus if proficient with the right kit: the miner's for ore, the carpenter's for timber. Gathering takes 4 hours; on a success the player rolls a d4 and gains that many units of material. On a failure — nothing: there's rock all around, but you didn't find the vein, and you never spotted a usable trunk.

Bare hands won't manage either. Ore requires a miner's kit (pick, wedges, crowbar) — 15 gp; timber requires carpenter's tools (axe, saw, adze) — 10 gp. A miner in the forest and a carpenter in the mine are equally useless.

The grade of what you gather is set by how much you beat the DC, and the terrain sets the ceiling. Roll exactly 15–19 — Grade I. 20–24 — Grade II. 25–29 — Grade III. 30 or higher — Grade IV. But if you're digging in a bog, where nothing decent lies in the first place, it won't give you above Grade I no matter if you roll a thirty-five. This same scale works for hunting too — see below.

There's a pleasant, deliberate side effect here: tiers of mastery lower the DC, and so raise the grade of what you gather on their own. A Lodemaster at DC 12 pulls fine ore from the very spot where a novice at DC 15 scraped up wretched stock.

Example. A level-5 character is prospecting for ore in the mountains; the terrain's ceiling is Grade III. They're proficient with the miner's kit: proficiency bonus +3, Wisdom modifier +2. They roll a twenty on the d20 — 20 + 2 + 3 = 25, beating the DC by ten. That's Grade III. They roll a d4 for quantity and gain 3 units of Grade III Black Vein ore.

Metal

Wood

Wood isn't only about weapons, and that's worth keeping in mind. From it people raise houses and palisades, lay bridges, mend carts, build and patch ships. The material and its grades are the same: if the party takes on repairing a village's palisade, cutting a log cabin on their own land, or caulking a breached hull — use this same table; grade decides how sturdy it comes out, and the DM gauges the scope of the work on the spot.

Towns and shipyards buy up ash and oak more eagerly than any ore — you can build a whole trade line on that, if the party is interested. The one thing wood can't replace is the blade and the armor.

Forge consumables — coal, flux, rivets, pitch — aren't tracked separately: count 1 gp for each unit of material being worked.

Skinning

"The hide's still warm"

A separate mechanic — the material is just as wild, but the trigger differs: not a vein in the rock, but a body that has to be dressed. Two paths to a hide.

Hunting works the same as mining, only the target is alive: the same check (plus proficiency bonus if proficient with the skinning kit), the same 4 hours, the same principle of setting grade by how much you beat the DC, with a ceiling by terrain. Ordinary hunting can't get you above Grade III.

Skinning a carcass is the shorter path. From a fresh carcass — whether fallen livestock or a monster just slain in battle — the hide is taken directly, without any searching: it's not the roll that sets the grade, but the creature itself. A Survival check against DC 15, an hour's work, a skinning kit — and d4 units of material of the grade the creature was: a dead cow gives Grade I–II, a wild predator Grade III, a monster Grade IV. Failure — the hide is ruined.

This is a combat party's main path to Grade IV without a seasoned Lodemaster in the group: killed a wyvern — dressed in wyvern.

Both paths require a skinning kit — knives, scrapers, hooks, 10 gp.

Leather

Monster scale, shell, and bone serve in place of leather or in place of metal — whichever fits the situation, the DM decides.

Additives: Mithral and Other Rarities

A pinch of mithral is gathered by neither mining nor skinning at all. It's a story resource: a find in the ruins, a reward, a gift from the dwarves, a purchase from whoever will even agree to sell — from 250 gp per pinch, and the DM is entitled to simply say "not for sale."

A pinch on its own gives nothing in the alloy — it's needed only to unlock enchantment. Without a caster's word over the forge, it's just a rare, prettily gleaming metal. Adamantine dust, star silver, and other rarities work the same way — the DM is free to replace mithral with them, changing only the additive's lore.

Forging

"Strike while the iron's hot"

A player who has gathered materials, has the tool, and has access to a forge declares a forging attempt. They make two checks at once, both against DC 15, to which the grade modifier is added.

The first — Strength for the heavy: plate, mail, two-handed weapons, shields. Or Dexterity for the light and fine: leather armor, daggers, rapiers, bows, arrows. The hammer, the forge, and the draw are the body's work, and no amount of book-learning can replace it.

The second — Intelligence, always. Temperature, carbon, geometry, the moment of quenching. Off by fifty degrees, and you've got brittle rubbish.

To each check is added the proficiency bonus, if the character is proficient with the right tool: smith's — for metal, leatherworker's — for leather, carpenter's — for wood. Without proficiency the roll is bare: d20 + modifier. One item — one material and one tool: there are no composite items in the system; a shield is entirely wooden, and studded leather counts as leather.

Both checks succeed — the item is done, its grade set by the lowest-grade material. Even one failed — a botch, and the material is lost for good.

For metal, tools alone aren't enough — you need a forge: renting a town smithy costs 5 gp per post; your own smithy costs 500 gp plus somewhere to put it. On the road you can't forge anything heavy. Leather and wood need no forge — they can be stitched and whittled even by the campfire at a rest stop.

Crafting Time

In a shop you pay for someone else's labor, delivery, and markup; at the forge you spend ore and time — unrelated quantities. That's why both the material and the posts are set by the table according to the item itself: by its size and complexity, not by its price tag.

What a "work post" is. It's a counter, not consecutive messages: each post in which the character is shown working on this specific item advances the counter by +1. Between them you can head off into quests, fights, and conversations — the work simply sits and waits. If a post covers a long stretch by montage ("for the next week and a half you never left the forge"), the DM may count more than one.

When the counter reaches the required number — then and only then are the two forging checks rolled.

Exactly how many posts depends on the tier of mastery. Each tier takes its own share of the base time: the Apprentice — the full base, the Smith — three quarters of the base, the Weaponsmith — half, the Master Weaponsmith — a third, the Forgemaster — a sixth. Fractions round up, minimum 1 post. No need to do the math at the table — it's all worked out in the table below.

Materials and work posts by tier

Plate: sixty posts for a novice against ten for a Forgemaster. Small stuff like a dagger doesn't speed up at all — even a genius can't forge one faster than a single post. A composite item splits its units between materials; the DM decides how, and when in doubt, halves them in favor of the base.

Enchantment

"It shall slay!"

An optional fourth stage, an add-on to forging rather than a separate pillar.

The main gate is neither gold nor mithral, but the tier of mastery. Only a smith who has reached Tier 4, "Master Weaponsmith," in the "Blacksmithing" branch can enchant a weapon or armor — before that tier, enchantment is wholly unavailable, no matter how much mithral and money the party has. Tier 4 unlocks a ceiling of +1; Tier 5, "Forgemaster," a ceiling of +2 (see "Tiers of Mastery" below).

You can only enchant what you're forging right now: the additive goes into the alloy together with the metal — a finished sword can't be enchanted. The magic here isn't laid on top, but hammered inside.

There's only one additive here — mithral (or its analogues: adamantine dust, star silver).

On top of the usual two forging checks comes a third — a spellcasting ability check by whoever speaks the word over the alloy.

The result is the ordinary +1, +2, or +3 to attack and damage for a weapon, or to AC for armor and shields, and the item counts as magical for overcoming resistances. Fail the enchantment check — the mithral burns away, the item remains, but mundane. Fail the forging check — everything burns, additives included.

A finished item can be reforged one step higher: the mithral from the old alloy stays in play, and you need only buy the missing pinches.

Tiers of Mastery

The counter is completed actions, and it resets to zero upon gaining a new tier: it's not one running tally from the start of your career, but a separate threshold for each tier. Three separate branches instead of one shared: mining, skinning, and blacksmithing level up independently of one another, each with its own counter.

Mining

Skinning

Blacksmithing

And +3 is never unlocked through the counter at all. It requires the fifth tier and a special forge — volcanic, draconic, or dwarven under the mountain — which the DM grants as a story reward. The tiers carry a smith to +2; the last step the party must earn, not grind out.

Optional: Magic and Craft

Everything described above rests on one assumption: gear is made by hand, slowly and at risk. In D&D there are spells that sweep that assumption clean away — why sixty posts at the forge if a 7th-level wizard conjures plate in six seconds?

Item Crafting (Fabricate)

The chief offender. By the rules it's an action that turns raw material into a finished thing — meaning the whole system is bypassed with a single 4th-level slot. In this campaign the spell works differently:

• It becomes a ritual lasting a full day. Not an action, not a minute — a full day of uninterrupted work that cannot be broken off and cannot be done in combat, on the road, or in a dungeon. The caster is occupied exactly as a smith would be.

• It lowers the material's grade by one tier. Magic drives the process by force, not patience: superb material gives a fine result, fine gives common, common gives wretched. From wretched material (Grade I) the spell yields nothing — the material crumbles to dust.

• The checks don't go anywhere. Both of them, by the usual rules, with a DC based on the final (already lowered) grade. Failure — the material is lost, just as in ordinary work. The spell can't do for you what you can't do yourself.

• Tool proficiency is mandatory. No proficiency, no proficiency bonus, exactly as at the forge.

A consequence worth saying out loud: an enchanted item can never be made with this spell. Enchantment requires at least Grade III, and after the one-tier drop you'd need Grade IV for it — the same grade needed for +2, which would itself drop to +1. A magic item is made by hand alone.

Other Creation Spells

• Creation (Creation) — the created matter vanishes when the duration ends and cannot serve as crafting material: you can forge something from it, but the item will melt away along with the material. No separate ban is needed — it's enough to remember its impermanence.

• True Polymorph (True Polymorph) — turning an object into an object works by the same rules as Item Crafting above: a full day, a one-tier drop, a check.

• Wish (Wish) — beyond any limits, as befits 9th level. If the party has reached Wish, let them have their plate: the price has already been paid by the mere fact of possessing the spell.

Spells That Bypass Gathering

These don't create an item, but they skip the gathering stage — and that stage is a full part of the system.

• Stone Shape, Move Earth, Transmute Rock, Passwall — they open up the rock, but they don't replace the gathering roll: you still have to find the vein and take it properly. Grant advantage on the check if the spell is aptly used, but don't waive it.

• Locate Animals or Plants (2nd-level ritual) — finds game and the needed kind of tree, but doesn't gather: advantage on the roll, not an automatic success.

• Plant Growth — doesn't hasten the growth of an ancient yew. A wood's grade is set by its species and age, not by being spurred on with magic; the spell grants advantage on the gathering roll in the treated area, and only once per area.

Hides from Summoned and Transformed Creatures

A particular loophole that parties find quickly.

• From summoned creatures (Conjure Animals, Conjure Woodland Beings, any summon spell, undead, and constructs) no hide can be taken at all. The creature dissipates along with its hide — there's nothing to skin.

• From a transformed creature (Polymorph, Wild Shape) the hide is taken from its true form. Turn a rat into a tyrannosaurus, kill it and skin it — you get a rat's hide. The reverse works exactly the same: a transformed monster's true form remains its own.

Temporary Enchantments

Magic Weapon, Elemental Weapon, Holy Weapon and the like grant a bonus for minutes and require concentration. They don't count as enchantment in the sense of this system; they don't take its place and don't interfere with it: you can cast magic weapon on a forged +1 sword, the bonuses don't stack — take the larger.