Residuum and Magic Item Crafting

The idea of crafting magic items has slowly evolved from 1st edition D&D. Originally, it was very ill defind and basically left to the DM. I remember having my wizard collect various bits of magical creatures he fought. It was a lot of fun to later forge rings of fire resistence from hell hound tongues I had gathered. In fact, this was the funnest item creation that I can remember in a game and I have had thoughts about how to bring more of this kind of thing into the game. Right now, magic item creation seems to be more focussed on reading through a boatload of supplements and dumping a pile of gold. Most of this reason for this is expediency. If you want your characters to be able to create items and not have that be the focus of the story it is easy to get into this situation.

Anyway, 3rd edition introduced crafting. You spent experience and gold in order to create items. I assume the idea behind experience was because they wanted item creation to involve a serious sacrifice, but as game experience showed that gold acquisition was the real limiting factor the whole experience thing was tossed out by both 3.75 and 4.0.

One thing I really don't like about crafting is that it can get flavorless. You simply expend time and money and you have an item. The alternative is that you add some requirements like possessing an outfitted laboratory or being able to buy rare ingredients. This is much cooler in my mind, but can often place unplanned limitations of item creation that is often required for balanced play.

So what do I like and dislike in various rules? I think abandoning experience costs is fine. I like the fact that 4.0 allows you to craft items quickly. Taking months to craft an item in 3rd could get irritating and limiting in terms of plot. I like the whole notion of Alchemical Reagents, Mystic Salves, Rare Herbs, Sanctified Incense, and Residuum introduced by 4.0. I liked the idea of deconstructing magic items in order to acquire their essence for use in crafting other items. Of course that may be cause I play World of Warcraft where this is common practice. Speaking of Warcraft it has a fairly nice crafting system where you need to purchase or acquire a list of rare materials and this can often be difficult or time-consuming. Unfortunately, such a system does not translate well in a pen & paper game.

The game Ars Magica used to have a system where you could find raw magic. Since the game was based around powerful wizards who could just conjure up gold the whole raw magic system was basically the treasure they could receive. I really like this idea. It combines well with a more fiction based concept of forging magic items from rare materials like a dragon's hide. Frankly, dragon's hide just being plate mail a druid can wear in 3.5 is kind of disappointing. It also is like the MMORPG way where some monsters may drop magical materials useful in crafting.

So going back to my old wizard who collected body parts of various monsters. I would institute a system where Residuum could be gathered from defeated foes or could be taken as treasure from interesting places. For example, if your adventure takes you into the heart of a volcanno you might be able to collect some of the primal energy of the volcanno to use in crafting items. This Residuum could also be 'typed', meaning that you would record where you got it. This typed Residuum could possibly have a greater effect when creating a magic item. Blood from a doppleganger might be more useful crafting a hat of disguise. Or the types of Residuum could have unforeseen effects on the item you created, to help turn items into possible story elements and interesting game effects. For example, suppose you craft your +3 Sword from the bones of demons, perhaps the sword retains some demonic properties and unnerves animals and children or something or maybe it drinks it the blood that it spills always remaining clean.

One effect from this is that more things will drop treasure. Sometimes it doesn't make sense for a creature to have treasure and a long string of these can cause the players to be unusually poor. But if Residuum can be taken from every creature then monsters always supply some form of reward. One danger in this is the possibility of killing massive numbers of weak creatures in order to harvest Residuum, but this could also theoretically be a story element. If you can gain 1gp of Residuum by murdering a farmer this opens the reason for bad guys to really be very bad....

Another part of item creation in 3.5 is feats. I think the dizzying array of feats required is kind of annoying. In one game I replaced these feats with 3 feats in a chain. If you have the first you could make items up to a certain powerf level and subsequent feats allowed you to create better items. I felt like this worked much better than having crafters who could make wands but not rings. But the total removal of feat requirements is fine by me also.

Varying requirements was something also removed by 4th edition. In 3rd edition to create a ring of feather fall you needed to be able to cast feather fall. Fourth edition did away with this. Anyone could craft anything. Frankly I like the requirements. It makes the act of creation seem more story like and less like buying something at a shop. You need to actually do something or have some power to create an item.

One thing I tried in the past was to have a skill roll involved in magic item creation, but I wasn't crazy about how it turned out. The expenditure of materials made it too much of a big risk and players became very cautious.

So that is what I like and dislike. I might make a more full-fledged system later on.