Razorfeather Arrows price check

[Ryabede]

was looking up these arrows and found the mm5 entry, but didn't manage to come across any price.
trying to figure out craft time and what not... or if its just better to buy them :p

[Firebug]

Google tells me 50gp for the razorfeather + normal arrow costs in this thread and this thread.

Not exactly official, but good enough for guild business.

[Lilapop]

Assuming one feather is enough material for one arrow, the raw material costs for one arrow are 50 gp. Based on the normal crafting rules, that is then a third of the final price. Masterwork seems to be included in that calculation (just like you need 1000 gp of raw adamantine to make one weapon that ends up being effectively-masterwork). That makes the market price of one finished arrow 150 gp.

[Doctor Awkward]

Okay so I did as much digging as I could conceive of and here are my results:

The short version is there are no written rules governing the market price of Razorfeather Arrow ammunition. The only rules that are present on page 169 of Monster Manual V are that 350 individual razorfeathers can be removed from the body of a dead steelwing. Such feathers have a market value of 50 gp each and can be used as fletching for special arrows. These arrows are created in bundles of fifty that require a DC 30 Craft (weaponsmithing) check to create. Such arrows are nonmagical, are treated as adamantine (thus automatically masterwork), and are considered to have the keen property.

It is unclear how many individual feathers it takes to make this bundle of fifty arrows, thus everything else must be estimated.

According to the rules for skill checks found here, in order to craft an object you must find the market value in silver pieces. This is where it gets confusing as you pay a third of the market value for the raw materials, but the razorfeather is clearly intended to be a raw material used to produce special arrows and each individual feather has a market value of 50 gp. It's difficult to judge the author's intent from the text, but the general consensus seems to be that a razorfeather should count as a "special material" for crafting purposes, and as it is a raw material the 50 gp should be tripled to get the proper market value for a finished product. Going by real-life examples of arrow making it's not unreasonable to assume that a single feather provides enough fletching for one arrow. Thus a single Razorfeather Arrow would have a typical market cost of 150 gold and 5 copper pieces-- 1 gp divided by a bundle of twenty (20) arrows is 0.05, or zero gold, zero silver, 5 copper, plus 150 gp for the special material.

Estimating the time needed to craft this yourself using this same method you would treat it as a "special material" and can use the listed costs in the DMG as a guide. The table in the DMG lists the cost of adamantine as 60 additional gold pieces for a single unit of ammunition, which works out to 60 gold and 5 copper pieces for an ordinary arrow. This tracks with the rest of the book as a bundle of 50 arrows is considered to be the same as one masterwork weapon for pricing purposes in the Common Ranged Weapons table. You'll note the "base cost" there is exactly the price of two and a half bundles of twenty arrows (2 gold and 5 silver pieces) plus 300 gp for the masterwork component for a weapon. Likewise, the 60 gp cost for adamantine ammunition thus multiplies with fifty arrows to the cost of an adamantine weapon at 3,000 gp. You would pay 1/3 that cost in raw adamantine (1,000 gp) in addition to one third the cost of 50 arrows (a very ugly repeating fraction that requires rounding), or approximately 8 silver pieces and 3 copper.

Following this logic for razorfeathers, a bundle of fifty arrows would be 2.5 gp, plus 150 for each arrow for a total market value of 7,502 gold and 5 silver pieces, or 75,025 silver pieces. The crafting rules state that you multiply the results of your craft check by the DC of the item and that is your progress in silver pieces each week. The actual time required will vary based on the skill of the weaponsmith, but assuming they meet only the minimum necessary DC 30 for 900 silver pieces of progress each week, it will take 83.3 weeks to craft a single bundle of fifty razorfeather arrows, or roughly one year and seven months. This time can be shortened by utilizing the epic crafting rules and voluntarily increasing the crafting DC by blocks of 10. Increasing the DC to 40 will take 47 weeks, and making it 50 will take 30 weeks and so on.


Compare that a bundle of fifty +1 keen adamantine arrows which would have a market value of 11,002 gold and 5 silver pieces and each such arrow would cost 220 gold and 5 copper each. The time required to create them would be seven and a half weeks to smith the fifty arrows, hitting the minimum DC 20 check each week plus an additional eight days to enchant them with the +1 and keen properties for a total crafting time of approximately three months. If you factor out the +1 enhancement bonus normally required to apply the keen property in order to better compare them to razorfeather arrows, keen adamantine arrows would be 5,002.5 gp per bundle or 100 gp and 5 sp per arrow. So per the relevant written rules, a razorfeather arrow would cost 50 gp more than its magical equivalent with added benefit of functioning in an antimagic field, and would take almost ten times as long to actually create. In my opinion, this is not unreasonable.