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Level Up (A5E) crafting consumables, required resources, & meta-currency vrs "liquid" coin... why not blood?

tetrasodium

Legend
Supporter
Epic
Coins are a liquid asset that can be spent at any time & trade goods are effectively the same in nearly every case. non-liquid assets are things like that tavern the party won in a bet & most plot items, in the real world you might call them stocks/bonds, political favors, & any number of things. Having only liquid assets d&d winds up with players quickly moving from trying to afford basic gear to dropping the entire GDP of nations they sourced from what was practically their own backyard on a single item leading to much mocking over the years. It doesn't really matter if trying to avoid the mocking was involved in the logic behind leaving out crafting, but it seems like a crafting system for magic items is important & likely allowing for a way to tie nonliquid assets to adventuring alongside gold rather than the whims of story & plot using the crafting system.

While that's great for rare & special magic items where questing to go get the corrupted unicorn's horn or whatever to craft an item that's going to be around a long time, but consumables are less questworthy & often just turn into a reduced cost. Blood magic has been around in d&d for ages where it's usually involved in horrible rituals for capital E Evil, but is it really any more awful to make a potion of healing from the blood of a magical creature like a blink dog or hellhound than it is to skin a dragon & wear their scales as armor?

If there was a simple ritual/cantrip/whatever that allowed a player to extract the blood of a freshly deceased magical creature into an easily portable & trackable object like a "cr 1/4 bloodstone: or something from a cr1/4 blink dog as an example it could make both something players could sell back in town as well as allowing something like a potion of cure wounds to need 5CR worth of blood stones+$time/gold/whatever while a potion of greater healing might need 100CR of bloodstones that are CR5 or better in quality & so on as seems reasonable for a particular item. Meanwhile that really nice staff of whatever might need a chestfull of good quality bloodstones on top of that corrupted unicorn horn the party needs to quest for to make crafting something a little more involved than stopping at the blacksmith& dropping off a mountain of gold it turns into regularly checking in to
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& feel like they made some progress towards a goal if they squeeze some out of a trade while having the side effect of potentially not having adventurers spending the entire gdp of entire nations on a regular basis as sort of a secondary currency separate from the coins used to buy normal & not so rare magical stuff.
 
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