FrankenFourth: Waste Not, Want Not

I've recently finished Mad Max (fortunately picked it up on a sale for only $10, but still bleh) and started up Final Fantasy 15. One of the things I noticed about it is that, similar to Final Fantasy 12, when you kill monsters you get parts instead of gil. For example, reapertails (one of the first enemies you run into) can drop scorpion barbs. Dunno what they're for besides selling, though.

We're doing a similar thing for FrankenFourth, as exemplified in a previous Age of Worms play report where I presented an invisible stalker stat block that mentioned invisible stalker essence in the treasure line. Some monsters will leave stuff behind, or have materials that anyone can harvest (like dragon's blood), but certain things will require skills (like Survival for skinning creatures).

I can also see talents making this easier or better, like a ranger being able roll twice and take the better result when harvesting from creatures that he has the relevant Hunter talent for.

In addition to being able to sell monster bits, you can use them for crafting. In A Sundered World I added a section on materials that could be used to make various weapons and armor. So, if you had the money and/or parts you could, say, whip up an adamantine sword, ironwood armor, or a shield made of astral essence. It's a simple system that adds to the base item's cost and some tags (ie, adamantine adds 500 coins), but it gives the GM a benchmark on how much coins worth of something the PCs will need to make something on their own.

Crafting in FrankenFourth is similar to 2nd Edition Dungeons & Dragons. You don't need to devote a bunch of skill ranks into a craft skill, or make a bunch of d20 rolls to see if you ruined it at some point, and there isn't a formula to determine how long it takes to make something: if you want to, say, make a suit of leather armor, it's gonna take you 4 days, and it's gonna need 15 sp worth of raw materials. Want to make a suit of hellhound leather? That's still gonna take you 4 days, but you need 15 sp worth of hellhound hide.

We're not going to predefine everything, though we will give some examples, and GMs are obviously free to come up with other things PCs can get off of monsters and uses for them. The idea is to provide a simple system that allows for creativity and builds upon material that we've seen before (such as parts of 2nd Edition intellect devourers being usable in potions of ESP and mind control).

Announcements

If you're curious about FrankenFourth and/or Dungeons & Delvers, you can find public alpha documents here and here respectively.

A Sundered World: Player Fragments, the first supplement for A Sundered World, is finally out!

Hot on the heels of The Blackguard, The Troll is out! The Rogue is up next: we should have an alpha draft ready soon.

By fan demand, we've mashed all of our 10+ Treasure volumes into one big magic item book, making it cheaper and more convenient to buy in print (which you can now do).