Stoneage arts and crafts

[liquidformat]

Hey All, I have been looking at running a stoneage game and as such people making their own stuff is going to be more important. I was even thinking of providing extra skill points reserved for crafting to support this. Also crafting in stoneage requires a different set of skills since no one is going to be doing any blacksmithing for example. Here are some of the ideas I had for craft skill, let me know your thoughts:

Craft (rope): make rope.

Craft (weaving): make baskets, shoes, nets, ropes, mats...

Craft (Napping): Weapons and tools made from sharpening stones
(may or may not cover methods to haft)

Craft (weaponsmithing/weapon making): napping, heat tempering, hafting, and other methods of attaching one thing to another to enhance ability to kill/maim/injure more efficiently!
(maybe making bows, and other tools covered by napping.)

Craft (armorsmithing/armor making): all processes involved in making leather/hide armor (scraping, boiling, tanning) making armor out of other things (rope, bone, bark,shells, leaves, chitin, wicker)
(maybe covers making other products with above items)

Craft (leatherworking): making leather products of all kinds including leather/hide armor, tents, and clothing.

Craft (woodworking/carpentry): housing, wood bows (maybe not the sinew for string?), heat hardening wood, making wood shafts and hafts for weapons and tools, wood tools.

Craft (Bower): making bows out of a variety of materials, bow strings, and arrows. (possibly glues, halfing, and napping, leather working to make bow string and sinew for arrows).

Craft (trap making): pit traps, snares, swinging log/boulder, deadfalls...
(maybe making sub-components like ropes, sharpened/hardened sticks... which might open up trap making into a super craft skill)

Craft (herbalism): mixing herbs together to make tonics, medicine, balms, poisons, and antitoxins.
(maybe identifying herbs and how to handle them, make some alchemical items)

Craft (apothecary): mixing ingredients together to make tonics, medicine, balms, antitoxins, and poisons. (maybe identifying ingredients (such as herbs, materials, venomous, and poisonous animal and how to handle them), make some alchemical items)

Craft (poison making): making and extracting poisons and venoms as well as identifying poisonous/venomous plants, animals, and materials, and how to handle them. As well as making antidotes/antitoxins.

Craft (pottery): making and firing of pots and other such items.

[TheYell]

A very good list, but I would simplify.

APOTHECARY keep this skill, fold Herbalism and Poisonmaking into it with different DC scores for poisons and drugs.

CRAFT CORDAGE and roll ropes, sinews into that category with different DC scores.

Drop Craft Weaponsmith and Bowyer and Armormaking as separate skills, have a specific list of weapons and armors with various DC scores. Like for instance, a bow requires a Craft Carpentry skill roll for the body of the bow, and Craft Cordage for the Sinew. A stone axe with haft requires Craft Carpentry for the handle and Napping for the warhead. Wicker armor requires a Craft Wicker DC roll with Craft Cordage. A clay helmet requires Pottery.

[Maat Mons]

I feel like like the stone age was a time of generalists, not specialists. As such, I'd make a sort of generalist Craft skill. It would cover more things than standard Craft skills, but to compensate, all the DCs would be higher.

[Khedrac]

If it is the stone-age then I don't think "heat tempering" is a thing, charring the end of a stick is the best you get. I think you have a huge overlap between weapon making and carpentry - I think they are effectively the same skill, and it should include lashing stuff together.

Similarly everything you have under armor making is probably covered under leatherworking - only cultures without much leather are likely to be using other materials.

As for "knapping" (not "napping") this makes tools in the early stone age but tool parts (blades mainly) in the later stone age.

You might want a more generic stone-crafting skill - something not many people realise about stonehenge is that for the trilithons (two verticals with a crossing top) the verticals have a carved lump on the top and the crossbar has carved holes for them to fit into.
(One of the Stonehenge top stones that isn't in place has the two holes carved into opposite sides of the stone - oops!)

[EisenKreutzer]

Generally, stone age people would not specialize in a particular kind of craft, but know enough about all of them to get by. You would probably get the occasional expert knapper who was better at it than other members of his group, but in general its safe to assume that all these skills were common and everyone knew how to do them and practiced their skills fairly regularly.

[TheYell]

Well we don't KNOW what stone age cultures were like.

we have modern cultures that use stone tools, but they have several dozen thousand years of development from the neanderthals.

If you want to approximate a general knowledge of craft in your game, you can

--allow use of Craft untrained

--lower the DCs to achieve things so that the average person can do them.


what's the magic level of your campaign? you may want to make it easier for people to make a magic bow because a mild spirit-magic is commonly employed.

[Gallowglass]

I think your list is fine.

I think you need to determine, in your own mind, and in the players mind what you want the game to be and feel like.

This world does not have markets, does not have magic shops, does not have coin based economy, you will never be on the scale of WBL.
All weapons have breakage scores. You use them, they'll likely break every time you use them. So you should expect to have to make new weapons often.
All equipment wears down easy, so again, you should expect to have to make new pottery, new rope, net etc with moderate use.
You should expect to, between the lot of you, have to make everything you'll end up using. Or at least find it hard to trade for it.
Because there is no monetary economy, the economy is all barter based. What you craft will BE what you trade to others for other crafts.
Even as you go up in levels, starvation is an issue. There is no expected level of wealth.

What spellcasters are available? Any? What spells do you have to take away like endure elements, to make this game feel the way you want it to feel.

DCs for survival and some other skills are much harder than normal in order to keep them relevant.

Because this is the kind of game where you WANT the player to be excited when they kill that owlbear not because of the XP but because of the meat, and the hide to use to make armor, bags and a cloak.

[Duff]

If it is the stone-age then I don't think "heat tempering" is a thing, charring the end of a stick is the best you get. )
Wooden spears are were often "Fire Hardened", which is no doubt what was meant here.

Also, I like that there's a fair bit of crossover in the craft skills as a way of capturing the "somewhat speicialised" nature of crafting archaeologists think was common.
Maybe if a person has ranks in more than one relevant skill give a synergy bonus?
For example, a person with Weaponsmithing 6 and Knapping 6 could get +2 on knapping spearheads (if you wanted to separate out the manufacturing process that much) or making spears (if you want to simplify it).

[Ashtagon]

Hey All, I have been looking at running a stoneage game and as such people making their own stuff is going to be more important. I was even thinking of providing extra skill points reserved for crafting to support this. Also crafting in stoneage requires a different set of skills since no one is going to be doing any blacksmithing for example. Here are some of the ideas I had for craft skill, let me know your thoughts:

Craft (rope): make rope.

Craft (weaving): make baskets, shoes, nets, ropes, mats...

Craft (Napping): Weapons and tools made from sharpening stones
(may or may not cover methods to haft)

Craft (weaponsmithing/weapon making): napping, heat tempering, hafting, and other methods of attaching one thing to another to enhance ability to kill/maim/injure more efficiently!
(maybe making bows, and other tools covered by napping.)

Craft (armorsmithing/armor making): all processes involved in making leather/hide armor (scraping, boiling, tanning) making armor out of other things (rope, bone, bark,shells, leaves, chitin, wicker)
(maybe covers making other products with above items)

Craft (leatherworking): making leather products of all kinds including leather/hide armor, tents, and clothing.

Craft (woodworking/carpentry): housing, wood bows (maybe not the sinew for string?), heat hardening wood, making wood shafts and hafts for weapons and tools, wood tools.

Craft (Bower): making bows out of a variety of materials, bow strings, and arrows. (possibly glues, halfing, and napping, leather working to make bow string and sinew for arrows).

Craft (trap making): pit traps, snares, swinging log/boulder, deadfalls...
(maybe making sub-components like ropes, sharpened/hardened sticks... which might open up trap making into a super craft skill)

Craft (herbalism): mixing herbs together to make tonics, medicine, balms, poisons, and antitoxins.
(maybe identifying herbs and how to handle them, make some alchemical items)

Craft (apothecary): mixing ingredients together to make tonics, medicine, balms, antitoxins, and poisons. (maybe identifying ingredients (such as herbs, materials, venomous, and poisonous animal and how to handle them), make some alchemical items)

Craft (poison making): making and extracting poisons and venoms as well as identifying poisonous/venomous plants, animals, and materials, and how to handle them. As well as making antidotes/antitoxins.

Craft (pottery): making and firing of pots and other such items.

I'd tighten that list up a bit...

C/weaving: Roll C/rope into this.

C/leather: Anything made of leather or animal skins, whether armour or not. Note that for actual Stone Age cultures, cuir bouilli boiled leather (i.e., conventional leather armour) is outside of their technology levels.

C/wood: Anything where the major component or load-bearing element is wood. This includes fire-hardened spears and bows. Note that at Stone Age levels, only short bows historically existed.

C/stone: Anything where the major component or load-bearing element is stone. Since the material properties have a lot in common (at least at tech levels where it's a relevant material), you could roll into this anything where the major component is bone. This includes all forms of stone-knapping. The number of things a heroic character might want to make with pottery are sufficiently limited that you can reasonably roll pottery into this as well.

C/herbalism: Roll C/apothecary into this, and include poison-making too.

Trap-making it's an odd one here. Depending on the trap, it might be a Survival roll (disguise a reed mat to look "natural" when placed over a pit), C/weaving (snares that will catch when walked into), or possibly something else. Since a lot of "traps" are really just the hunter watching and waiting with a prepared "heavy weapon", they may just be an attack roll with planning.

[DrMotives]

Trap-making it's an odd one here. Depending on the trap, it might be a Survival roll (disguise a reed mat to look "natural" when placed over a pit), C/weaving (snares that will catch when walked into), or possibly something else. Since a lot of "traps" are really just the hunter watching and waiting with a prepared "heavy weapon", they may just be an attack roll with planning.

I dunno, your comment is making me think that trapmaking in this context is using the Ewok's playbook from RotJ. Readied action to loosen a battering ram, or an artificial rockslide, etc.

[Ashtagon]

I dunno, your comment is making me think that trapmaking in this context is using the Ewok's playbook from RotJ. Readied action to loosen a battering ram, or an artificial rockslide, etc.

Well, yes. Truthfully, even at conventional D&D tech levels, a lot of non-magical traps operate at that level. Without either magic or some kind of sensor and motor (i.e., modern tech), all unmanned traps effectively fall into the hidden pit/counterweight/snare category.

[Telonius]

Stone-Age cultures would have some basic dye- and paint-making crafting, but that might be better rolled into a Survival check. (Gathering the right plants to crush for cave painting, that sort of thing). Craft (jewelry) would also be a thing, but it would use materials other than metal. (Bones or talons, pretty or smooth rocks, cords to hold it together).

Woodworking might include creating a dugout canoe.

[liquidformat]

Ya there was purposely a lot of overlap which we were scratching our heads about, the list I provided was what our group brainstormed. I wanted to get some extra feedback to make sure we were thinking about things correctly. We were looking at untrained being allowed, and just not sure if we wanted to have a large number that give each other bonuses or just a small number that cover a lot of things.

One good example is making something like a stone tomahawk, should you use c/weaponsmithing with a +2 bonus because you have 5 points in c/stone and another +2 for making and tempering the wood shaft; or instead make it two craft checks, maybe three since you are most likely are also preparing and using sinew to hold the pieces together.