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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Libertad" data-source="post: 8666923" data-attributes="member: 6750502"><img src="https://i.imgur.com/hR5z9gB.jpeg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /><a href="https://www.dmsguild.com/product/292369/Gheshs-Guide-to-Making-Things--A-System-for-Crafting-and-Modifying-Equipment-in-5th-Edition-DD" target="_blank">DM’s Guild Page</a>A lot of video game RPGs incorporate a progressive crafting system where existing equipment can be enhanced, with additional properties based on the user’s talents as well as the appropriate ingredients. While optional most of the time, the creation of one’s own gear often gave the player more powerful items than the kind found in shops and dungeons.The base rules of 5th Edition for crafting take a rather long time, with even simple daggers taking at least a week. The bulk of rules focus on magic item creation, which are overall brief in detailing time and money based on rarity and required monster parts based on Challenge Rating. And there’s nothing mentioned about adding enhancements or alterations to existing items.Ghesh’s Guide to Making Things is a short and rather specialized sourcebook in spite of its name. It applies to weapons, armor, and alchemical bombs which are detailed in a chapter of their own. Crafting time for nonmagical weapons and armor is greatly sped up overall, with simpler weapons such as clubs, javelins, and spears taking 4 hours while more complicated schematics such as crossbows, greatswords, and the like take at least a day. The highly metal armors such as breastplates take at least 10 days with plate armor 30. The advantage of crafting is that making things yourself costs half the base price as purchasing it. Certain tools are required based on the weapon and armor’s material, with leatherworking applying to leather, smith’s tools to metal, and woodcarver tools for wood.All weapons and armor have 4 levels of Quality, each corresponding to a Tier of play at which they’re expected to be found. Basic is your default, and items of higher Quality both cost more and take more time to create. Quality determines how many slots an item has as well as the level of those slots. For example, a Basic leather armor has 1 Basic slot, an Intermediate Longsword has 2 Intermediate slots. Slots represent allowances for craftsmen to make modifications to the weapon; some modifications have differing levels which allow them to be upgraded, but otherwise a modification must be removed if a crafter wants to replace such a property with a new one. Modifications have prices and crafting time of their own for adding to an item. We also have a brief section on Additional Materials, which allow you to turn Intermediate level and higher items into things such as adamantine, cold iron, and mithral which is independent of the Quality and modification system.All crafting processes in this book, from crafting the items to upgrading their Quality to adding and removing modifications, require a tool check with a DC depending on the item’s Quality. Magical modifications use Arcana instead, and differ from their nonmagical counterparts in that once they’re added to an item they are permanent and cannot be removed. But magical modifications also treat the item as being magical for the purposes of damage resistances and immunities.There’s no mention of if magic weapons and armor such as Flametongues and Dragonlances have Quality levels as well, or are considered to be powerful enough that the rules in this book cannot apply to them. As there are modifications in this book that can give a weapon or armor a +1 to +3 bonus to attack/damage/AC, I can see some powergamers seeking to break bounded accuracy by having their master craftsman turn a Holy Avenger into a godly +6 sword.<img src="https://i.imgur.com/bRYsBlY.png" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />There are 49 Armor Modifications in this book, 5 of which can only be applied to shields. At the basic level we have some useful features such as Bashing which lets you use a shield as a 1d6 bludgeoning weapon, Burnished which makes your armor shiny and can blind a creature attacking you in bright light if they fail a Wisdom save, Climbing Spikes to grant advantage on checks made to climb, Finned which grants you a swimming speed of 30 feet, and the potentially abusable Skill Checker which adds +1d4 to the rolls of a certain skill chosen at the time of the modification’s creation. Intermediate modifications include Attracting which “aggros” attacks from a single monster type chosen upon creation if they fail a Wisdom save, Hardened which lets the wearer turn a critical hit into a normal hit as a reaction once per long rest, Heavy which reduces your movement speed by 5 feet yet grants advantage on checks and saves vs the prone condition and being forced to move against your will, and Wound Closing which automatically stabilizes you if you are dying and doubles the number of health restored when spending Hit Die. Advanced modifications include Glamoured which can make the armor look like mundane clothing via a command word, Speedy which increases movement speeds by 10 feet, and Transfusion which grants temporary hit points whenever you target an ally with a spell. The Masterwork modifications include such powerful abilities as Duplicit which can create an illusory double who can cast your spells from its position, Invulnerable which makes you resistant to nonmagical damage and once per day makes you immune to such damage for 10 minutes, and Protected which provides the wearer with a constant Protection From Evil and Good spell.The Basic modifications are overall cheap, ranging in price from 10 to 100 gp and taking a day to make barring one exception. Intermediate is a slight increase, averaging around several hundred gp on average and taking several days to as much as 2 weeks for the most expensive ones. By Advanced you’re almost guaranteed several thousand gold to spend and 2 weeks to a months’ worth of crafting time. By Masterwork you’re looking at requiring significant time expenses of 100 days and five figure sums. <img src="https://i.imgur.com/B1NUK5w.png" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />There are 41 Weapon Modifications, with quite a few being specific to certain types or classes of weapons. The Basic modifications include things such as Composite bows which add your Strength modifier on top of Dexterity to damage once per turn, Illuminating which makes the weapon shed light, Tripping which makes a reach weapon allow you to knock prone a target if they fail a Strength saving throw as an attack action, and Venomous which can deal 2d6 additional poison damage once per short or long rest. Intermediate modifications start providing a lot of interesting features, such as Blazing which can set up to 3 arrows or bolts on fire via a magical command word to deal 1d6 bonus fire damage, Scoped which increases a crossbow’s range increments by 30 feet, Staggering which can reduce a target’s speed to 0 on a failed Constitution save via expending a magical charge, and Tranquilizer which can turn an arrow or bolt into a non-damaging effect that can knock a target out if they fail a Constitution save. Advanced modifications are overwhelmingly magical and include things such as Blessed which deals 2d10 bonus radiant damage to fiends and undead, Bloodied which restores 2d6 hit points to the wielder whenever they reduce a target to 0 hit points, Grappling which imbues a piece of ammunition with a magical tether that allows the wielder to reel in a struck target, and Wondrous which can transform into a friendly living monster with the right command word. The Masterwork modifications include such things as Dancing where the melee weapon can levitate and attack on its own, Holy which radiates a 15 foot aura granting advantage on saves against magical effects to those within, and Switching where a creature hit by an arrow or bolt fired switches places with the shooter on a failed Wisdom save.For time and prices most Basic mods take 1 day to create and cost anywhere from 10 to 200 gp. Intermediate modifications average 3-6 days with 2 being 10 or more and cost at least several hundred gp. Advanced mods average around 2 weeks to a month and may cost 1 to 3 thousand gp. Finally, the Masterwork mods are few in number, usually taking a month to a month and a half to make and cost anywhere from 3,000 to 9,000 gp.Interestingly, the modifications which add bonuses to attack and damage or AC are the most time-consuming and expensive for their tiers by leaps and bounds. For Armor, Mithral Weave (for clothes) and Shielded add +1 to +3 depending on Quality. They cost 1,500 gp and take 16 days to craft at Intermediate +1 or 15,000 gp and 100 days at Advanced +2. Only by Masterwork does it become in line with the others, at 100 days and 30,000 gp at +3. The Precise modification for weapons adds +1 to +3; it takes 14 days and 1,300 gp at Intermediate +1, 50 days and 10,000 gp at Advanced +2, and 70 days and 25,000 gp at Masterwork +3. Amusingly, the most boring and straightforward options require the greatest investment to apply.<img src="https://i.imgur.com/zfSLBf0.png" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />Crafting Bombs and Grenades provides us with 20 new explosive weapons and rules for making them. They too have Quality levels which determines the overall effectiveness of the explosion, increasing factors such as damage and area of effect radius. We have two new pieces of equipment relating to explosives, Bombmaker’s Tools which are required for crafting them as well as setting fuses; and the Grenade Launcher, which is basically a specialized crossbow designed for increasing the range of bombs to 80/160 feet rather than the 20/60 feet that comes with throwing them normally. Crafting explosives is risky, for there are chances for mishaps of an ill-crafted bomb exploding randomly as you light it on a failed result. Bombs can be timed to blow up via a longer fuse, although said fuse can be cut as an action to disarm it.While a character can only craft up to 4 bombs a day, there are optional rules for DMs who want to avoid stockpiling of explosives via the adding of a cumulative percentage chance of bombs exploding every day after a week past their creation date.There are 20 different bombs, each with their own Quality levels, and are quicker to make as they can be crafted during a short rest rather than over a period of days. 16 of them have entries for boosted traits when they are crafted at higher Quality levels than their base. For a few examples, we have the typical Incendiary Grenade which deal fire damage in a radius and ignites flammable objects and creatures; Concussion Grenade that deal thunder damage, halve speed, and make it impossible for targets to concentrate on spells if they fail a Constitution save; the Healing Grenade which releases a steam that restores the hit points of creatures standing in its area of effect; Ram Rockets which are missiles that deal bludgeoning damage and can knock a target prone on a failed Dexterity save; Smoke Bombs which can release a cloud of thick gray smoke; Spellstoring Shells which instead of exploding cause a spent prepared spell to go off; and a Vortex Grenade which creates a damaging gravitational field that pulls creatures in its area of effect towards the center of the explosion.Thoughts: I like how this book adds some versatility for weapons and armor without the cumbersome process of making new magic items for each one that is the standard for most sourcebooks, and gives a large degree of player control in how exactly they wish to improve their gear. And as it incorporates tool proficiencies as a crucial factor in the use of this sub-system, I’m also a fan of it. But it still allows parties lacking such proficiencies to make use of the system by buying such modifications, albeit at higher cost. The granting of expensive things for PCs to spend money on to increase their personal capabilities will make this a very attractive supplement.Now onto the negatives. The book needs to be explicit about the adding of Qualities onto existing magic weapons and armor, and the abusable nature of stacking Shielded and Precise modifications with +1 to +3 magic items. I’m also unsure on how to feel about the new explosives. Although the text mentions Bombmaker’s Tools, the rules only say that you need it in your inventory rather than having proficiency, and given that alchemist’s supplies already exist the additional item feels superfluous. I also tend to be wary about limitations such as “critical misses” given that it’s likely PCs may find ways to get around defective bombs. What’s preventing a character from deciding to light its fuse via Mage Hand from a safe distance, for instance? The optional rules of bombs exploding after a week also feel like they’d add additional book-keeping. A simpler solution would be to limit the amount of bombs a character can have at once by a level-based factor, and have them be regained at the end of a short rest via the proper expenditure of gold pieces.</blockquote>

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