Some Skin in the Game

"With the Miasma Men dead, the criminal executed by The Deadnight Warrior, and the Miasma receding from the area, you all are now safe to rest. What do you do?"

"I wanna skin all 20 of the mutants and use their flesh to fix our equipment. Plus, can I harvest their prophet's brain?" - Player of Jedediah Krunch

"...most definitely! Make some Saves."

With this act of post-combat barbarism, the Crafting system of Miasma and Monsters was born! Inspired by the rules for gathering monster essences from Perdition by Courtney Campbell (very interesting game, I recommend checking it out), this system has three parts to it:

- Harvesting materials

- Performing Field Repairs

- Upgrading equipment

Let's first talk about Harvesting. In order to harvest materials from a dead creature, a successful Save with an Ability and Difficulty dependent upon the material type is required. A harvest attempt requires 1 Turn. The number of HD the creature has determines how many times it can be harvested and each success provides d3 components (except for Brains!). Each material type has its own value in silver (again based on HD). For some materials, if the creature took damage from a particular source, the difficulty of the Save is increased. If you killed a Flyguy with a maul and wanted to harvest bones from it, the Difficulty of the required Skill save would be 16. If you wanted to try and harvest poison sacs from a creature, you can do so with a harvest attempt for Viscera. Like an attempt to harvest a brain, this requires a Mind Save instead of Skill. A success for Brain and Viscera harvests only provides 1 component. If you fail your attempt to harvest Viscera, you may turn that failure into a success by succumbing to a Condition for d6 Turns (based on the viscera's properties). For example, you punctured an acid gland and got it into a cut on your hand, but you managed to scoop it into a jar.

The Crafting system also has a means to mitigate the continual degradation of weapons and armor through the Field Repairs rules. As long as a player has the materials, time, and is uninterrupted, they can repair their gear using materials. Flesh can be used to make repairs to armor Quality, bone can be used to increase the Quality of weapons at the price of increasing the range they lose Quality at, and brains can be eaten or made into ink. Flesh and bone should be self explanatory, but brains are a bit more interesting. If you consume a brain you can gain advantage on the next Save you make against a magical effect and if you mash a brain into ink you can then write over every marking in a single spell book to give it another usage. This requires a Mind save that gets more difficult every time you perform this act and it can be done no more than 5 times in a day.

Finally, we move onto Upgrades. These provide semi-permanent to permanent improvements to equipment such as improving Quality, reduction in movement penalties from armor, providing damage reduction (DR), and improving the efficacy of potions brewed (more on that in a later post!).

All of these rules have been made with considerations for a balance between fun game-play and a semblance of realism. Obviously just tying bone to a sword wouldn't prevent it from breaking, but I didn't want to have my players carry around sharpening wheels or have to go mining for ore, that's not very fun. 

There will probably be some changes to the rules eventually, we still haven't rigorously play-tested crafting yet, so expect some possible shake-ups!

 

All these rules can be checked out in the Core Rules for Miasma and Monsters here!