Runarcana’s Crafting System

Introduction

Crafting is one of the coolest systems in Runarcana. It really allows a character to feel more alive and create their own gear, potions, castles, vehicles, and more. It is also extremely useful for making money during downtime. That said, the crafting system, like many systems in Runarcana, is quite complex if you try to take in everything all at once. So let’s break it down piece by piece.

This guide is still quite long, but I tried to make the wording more new-player-friendly and include a bunch of actual examples of things. If you want to only look at examples to learn that way, check out the “Understanding Crafting Through Examples” guide. It takes out all of the commentary and general discussion in favor of just giving raw examples and a bit of explanation. Future articles will go into further depth on specific crafts, but for all of the examples in this article, we’ll say that we’re a level 5 character with level 2 in the Apothecary craft and Wisdom and Intelligence modifiers of 2. 

In short, crafting is the system of a character selecting and improving at a trade or trades to bolster related skills and create items ranging from health potions to giant mecha suits using formulas. A formula is like a recipe you follow to create an object using your craft, but it represents the actual skill and experience needed to create the item.

Before we jump in, here is a video guide to the Crafting System that I made a while back that has both more breadth and depth, but if you prefer a video format that is even more conversational, check it out here.

Crafting Basics

Major and Minor Crafts

Crafting is divided into two parts: Major and Minor. Major Crafts are complex systems with multiple levels and formulas to use and range from Level 1 to Level 6. Minor Crafts are much simpler, each with different disciplines within them, instead of formulas.

The Crafts

Each craft has a much more in-depth explanation on the Wiki, but I’m going to give the one-sentence sales pitch for each, because they’re all awesome.

Major Crafts

• Alchemist: Create substances like elixirs, synthetic potions, Shimmer (yes, the thing from Arcane), and even the rare materials needed for advanced crafting in other crafts, such as dark weave and luminar weave.
• Apothecary: Create antidotes, health potions, and extremely powerful poisons
• Armorer: Create magical and rare armors
• Brewer: Create alcohol (seems to mostly be to make money)
• Cook: Create foods with huge healing and other benefits
• Enchanter: Magically infuse items and create magic scrolls and mana crystals
• Fashionista: Create magical and rare clothing items
• Fletcher: Create bows and arrows…or automatic repeating crossbows
• Gunsmith: Create firearms and firearm modifications
• Jeweler: Create jewelry that can be sold for a huge profit or enchanted
• Mason: Literally creating buildings from houses to entire Arcologies
• Techmaturge: Combine magic with technology (See this article for a deep dive into Techmaturgy)
• Trapper: Create, identify, and disarm traps
• Vehicleright: Create vehicles from carts to war chariots
• Weaponsmith: Create magical and rare weapons

Minor Crafts and Their Disciplines

• Artist: Makeup, Painter, Musician, Tattoo, Scribe
• Collector: Biologist, Tanner, Lumberjack, Miner
• Forger: Magic Items, Art, Jewels, Books, Chemicals
• Guide: Cartographer, Navigator, Pilot
• Handworker: Carpenter, Sculptor, Musical Instrumentator, Potter, Glassmaker
• Player: Tellstone, Cards, Chess

How to Learn a Craft

The following Origins, Pasts, and Heritages allow the player to learn any craft, but many other sources allow the player to learn a specific craft. A GM may also grant craft proficiencies as rewards or just as a part of character creation, since it’s their game.

Crafting Level

Your crafting level starts at one. For every 4 character levels gained while you learned that craft, your crafting level goes up by 1. So if I learn the Apothecary Craft at level 1, I will have Apothecary Crafting level 2 once I reach character level 5. If you have a minor craft, instead of leveling it up every 4 character levels, every 4 character levels, you just choose another discipline in the craft. For example, if I am a Forger with the Art discipline at level 1, when my character reaches level 5, I can choose to learn the Magic Items discipline of Forgery.

Attribute, Set, and Supplies

Each craft is connected to an attribute— Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma— which are used for the skill check to create your items. Each craft has a “set” with the tools and equipment used to create it.  Some formulas require supplies that can usually be found, created, or purchased.

Formulas

A formula is the collection of knowledge and information required to create something using a craft. By default, a character cannot just create any potion just because they are an Apothecary. They must learn it through acquiring a formula (most of the time, but we’ll discuss exceptions later). From the Wiki: “When you gain proficiency with or advance in a craft, you can learn a number of formulas from that craft equal to your Intelligence modifier (minimum of 1). These formulas represent what you can create with the craft.”

Formulas look a little bit like spells. They tell you what it’s called, what you need in order to do it, what it does, etc. Let’s take a look at a Healing Potion, something an Apothecary craft at Level 1.

What are the parts of the Formula?

• Formula Name: Obvious, this one is called Healing Potion.
• Prerequisite: If there are any. The word Ingestion just tells us that to use the potion, we have to consume it.
• Craft: What craft or crafts do we need and at what levels? This formula requires Level 1 in the Apothecary Craft
• DC: The target DC of the roll to perform the formula. This one has a DC of 15. The rolling for this will be explained in the “Creating Items” section
• Component: What do you need to perform the formula? We need some herbs, which our GM might say we need to purchase, or maybe we just passively gather them while adventuring; and our Craft Set, which we assume we always have unless it’s taken from us.
• Value: The market value of the finished item, which we’ll use in the Creating Items section. Health Potions have a market value of 50GP
• Description: This tells you what the item does and might give some narrative/lore context. The important part of this item is that the character drinking it heals for 2d4 + twice the Apothecary’s Craft level in HP. Note that if you’re above level 1 Apothecary, this is actually better than your basic health potion, which is just 2d4+2.
• Natural 20: Tells you what cool thing happens if you roll a Natural 20 on the Creating Items roll. On a Natural 20, our health potion would now heal for 2d6+triple our Apothecary Craft level, so as a Level 2 Apothecary, we’re looking at a potential 2d6+6. Which is crazy good for just spending some time and a resource we likely collected passively on our adventure.

Creating Items

To create an item using your craft, you must “execute” the formula. We do this by having the required components and completing a skill check. The DC of the skill check is whatever is stated on the formula. Your modifier for the check is called your Preparation Modifier which is the following:

Preparation Modifier = your craft level + ½ proficiency bonus + attribute modifier

So for our example, we have +2 from our crafting level, +1 from our Proficiency Bonus (Half of 3 rounded down) + 2 (Our WIS Modifier). This means our Preparation Modifier is +5.

Possible Results of the Skill Check

• Failure by up to 5 points (meaning we get >10 on our DC 15 check) means you do not create the item, and half of the value and time invested are lost.
• Failure by more than 5 points (meaning we get < 9 on our DC 15 check) means you do not create the item, and the value and time invested are lost.
• Natural 1 means you always fail, additional bad things can happen (case-by-case)
• Natural 20 does not guarantee success. You still need to meet the DC.
  • If you did not meet the DC, half the time and resources can be spent to make a new roll with a +5 bonus. If you fail again, invested resources are lost.
  • If you do meet the success, it becomes a masterpiece, receiving additional benefits described in the Wiki.

Cost and Time

Creating formulas costs money, resources, and time. We describe the time investment as Working Days, which are days in which at least 8 hours are spent crafting (partial days are okay!). We calculate the number of days needed to create the item based on several factors, starting with the market value of the item. This is called our “GP/Day.” If you don’t work a full 8 hours, you don’t get the full “GP/Day.” So if I work 4 hours, I get half of that value.

The cost of components is half of the GP/Day value, which really means ¼ the Market Value. However, if you have the resources from some other source, your GM may say this reduces or eliminates the need to pay any other cost. For example, if we have an herb garden that grows the necessary herbs for a health potion, our GM may say that covers the component cost.

GP/Day

The rate at which we complete work with our crafts is in terms of the value added to the complete product. The total value of work that needs to be done by the crafter is half the value of the item. For our example, a health potion has a value of 50GP, so we need to do a total of 25GP worth of work. If we have a working value of 5 GP/Day, it would take 5 days to complete the Health Potion.

GP/Day has several contributing factors listed below:

• The base GP/Day is 5GP/Day for all characters proficient with the craft.
• +1 GP/Day for every relevant crafting level above 1
• If you’re being instructed in the creation, take +1 GP/Day for every 2 extra levels the instructor has
• +1 GP/Day for having blueprints for the item
• If you have a workshop, you get +1 GP/Day for each level of the workshop in addition to some other bonuses.

Important Notes:

• Multiple characters can combine their work by each contributing their GP/Day to the total
• If one of the factors only applies on some days, it is only used for that day’s calculation. For example, if I don’t get my blueprints until day 2, I would not get the +1 from blueprints on the first day’s GP/Day, but I would get it for the rest.

For Example:

If we need to do 25GP worth of work, how long will it take us to make our health potion? To show lots of options, let’s say the following are true:

• Level 2 Craft
• We have an instructor guiding us
• We have blueprints
• We have a level 1 Workshop

So for our Level 1 Health Potion formula, our GP/Day equals… 5 (the base) + 1 (Our Level 2 Craft, bonus is +1 per level above 1), +1 (Instructor Bonus), +1 (Blueprint Bonus), +1 (Workshop). This gives our final GP/Day value at 9! So it’ll take us about 3 days to complete the health potion (25GP needed divided by 9 per day is ~3).

Note that this is pretty slow, but as we level up our craft and improve our workshop, we’ll get faster. Plus, if we have a friend with Level 2 in Apothecary as well, and we did a group crafting session, we’d complete it twice as fast.

To reproduce an item without a formula, you increase the time to create it by half (two days becomes 3). Your preparation check also takes a -2 penalty for each craft level below the Craft level required for the formula.

Aside from that, you don’t actually need a formula if you have the item itself. So in our example, 

Learning a Formula

You can learn a formula from a teacher, notes, etc., to recreate it in the future. The process for learning is similar to the process for crafting, using that GP/Day system, which assumes 8 hours of work per day. However, instead of half the market value being our goal, it’s only 1/10 of the market value. The cost is 1/10 of the learning value. So 50GP market value becomes 5GP Learning Value and 0.5GP cost to learn.

• Base is 5 GP/Day
• Add Craft Level -1
• Multiply by 2
• Then add your INT modifier.

So if we wanted to learn this formula, our GP/Day would be 2(5+1)+2, totalling 14. Comparing the 14GP/Day to our Learning value of 5, We can learn this formula in just under 3 hours. 

There is also a skill check to learn the formula. The DC is the DC of the formula – your intelligence modifier. So for us, the DC is 15-2 = 13.

The Learning Modifier = Crafting Level (2) + ½ Proficiency Bonus (1) + Attribute Modifier (2), so ours is +5

Additional bonuses include +2GP/Day for every crafting level above yours if you have an instructor, and +2GP/Day for learning per workshop level.

Creating a Formula

You can create an original formula for 25GP/Formula Level per day of work, but the number of days needed is determined by the GM. Each day, you make a check with a DC set by your GM. Success yields a day of progress; failure sets you back a day. There is no specific system for what the formula must include or how to balance it, as it’s essentially homebrewing formulas.

So if your GM said, “This is a pretty easy formula to create. It takes five days’ worth of work and will be a Level 1 Formula, and the DC will be 15,” you would need to do 25GP/Day of work for 5 days, totally 125GP worth of work.

If our GP/Day is 9 (which we calculated earlier), it would take 14 (125/9) days of progress to create this new formula. But remember, if we fail the DC, we don’t just fail to make progress; we actually lose a day of progress.

Conclusion

Obviously, this is a lot to take in, but I hope the commentary and examples made it more accessible. If you’re interested in JUST looking at examples with the equations and modifiers for quick reference, check out Understanding Crafting Through Examples here.