Andórë Crafting System

The Andórë Crafting System, or ACS, is a campaign-level rules framework for turning time, skill, materials, labor, salvage, magic, and infrastructure into lasting results.

At the smallest scale, ACS covers the crafting of adventuring gear, poisons, magic items, harvested components, distilled essences, herbal reagents, metals, woods, gems, and other useful materials.

At the largest scale, ACS supports civilization-level projects: bastions, strongholds, workshops, settlements, fortifications, roads, ships, guilds, civic institutions, resource sites, supply chains, and other long-term works that shape the world around the characters.

The system is built around a simple idea:

Crafting is not just spending gold. Crafting is converting resources into consequence.

Core Principles¶

ACS is built around several principles:

Materials matter. A metal, wood, gem, plant, monster part, tool, workforce, or location is not interchangeable merely because it has the same gold value.
Scale matters. Crafting a vial of acid, a suit of armor, a magic weapon, a fortified bastion, and a city district are related activities, but they do not use the same assumptions.
Tools reveal mastery. Proficiency represents practiced knowledge, not just access to equipment.
Essence abstracts magical function. Once a material is distilled, it no longer remembers its exact source. It retains potency and tag.
Raw components retain identity. A basilisk eye, troll heart, dragon scale, sprig of Wizard’s Friend, saintly relic, rare timber, or named gemstone matters when a recipe requires that specific material.
Cost represents consumed resources. Gold is only one way to measure fuel, salvage, labor, reagents, tool wear, workshop access, favors, infrastructure, and waste.
Labor creates scale. A character can craft a dagger. A crew can raise a wall, haul stone, salvage ruins, build facilities, and keep civilization moving while the party adventures.
Crafting creates campaign hooks. Rare materials, skilled artisans, hostile territory, damaged infrastructure, guild politics, legal restrictions, supply chains, and formula research are part of the system.

ACS at a Glance¶

ACS has two major branches.

Branch	Scale	Core Question	Use These Pages
Item Crafting	Character, workshop, recipe, component, and item scale	What can this character make, repair, refine, preserve, distill, or carry?	On Tools and the Practice of Craft, Crafting Cost Without Coin, Material Values and Weights, Magic Item Recipes
Civilization Crafting	Bastion, stronghold, settlement, workforce, and infrastructure scale	What can this community build, support, defend, and become?	Civilization Crafting, Material Acquisition, Labor Management, Bastions, Strongholds

Item Crafting¶

Item Crafting covers things characters can make, carry, trade, wear, consume, wield, or use directly.

This includes mundane equipment, poisons, adventuring gear, magic items, harvested creature parts, plant materials, distilled essences, metals, woods, gems, formulas, and item recipes.

Item Crafting Core Rules¶

These pages explain how tools, proficiency, time, cost, material value, salvage, essence, collaboration, ordinary crafting supplies, and poison components work at the item scale.

Tools, Cost, and Material Value¶

Use these pages when the question is about whether a character can craft something, what proficiency applies, what the item consumes, or how much a raw or distilled component is worth.

On Tools and the Practice of Craft explains tool proficiency, improvised tools, assistance, collaboration, magical crafting requirements, and the limits of equipment without skill.
Crafting Cost Without Coin converts magic item cost into resource burden and Crafting Supply Units for ruined, isolated, or moneyless regions.
Material Values and Weights gives default values and weights for raw monster units, plant units, and distilled essence.
Crafting Common Items covers nonmagical adventuring gear, practical supplies, Spirit Paper, acids, oils, inks, paper, containers, rope, locks, lanterns, and other ordinary equipment.
Crafting Poisons covers poison types, toxic components, Poisoner’s Kit use, essence values, component burden, and poison crafting time.

Materials¶

These pages describe the major material categories used in item crafting: metals, woods, gemstones, plants, creature parts, and distilled essence.

Use these pages when characters gather, harvest, refine, preserve, identify, value, distill, substitute, or rule on materials.

Metallurgy covers metals and alloys, including rarity, value, refined forms, uses, substitutions, and inherent magical properties.
Woodcraft covers woods, timber, bark, resin, cane, bamboo, fruitwood, magical woods, and wooden crafting suitability.
Gemsetting covers gemstone type, quality, value, maximum rarity, gem dust, fragments, and enchantment-bearing stones.
Herbalism covers magical plant discovery, identification, harvesting, preservation, plant units, biomes, foraging, picking, and plant-to-essence conversion.
Creature Harvesting covers appraising and harvesting defeated creatures, mundane and magical materials, harvest DCs, potency, yield, spirit remnants, and raw component recovery.
Alchemical Distillation covers turning magical monster parts, plants, venoms, organs, spirit residue, and other reagents into stable essence.
Harvest Rulings records creature-specific rulings made during play so repeated harvests remain consistent.

Formulas, Recipes, and Worked Examples¶

These pages show how the system is applied to actual magic item creation.

Formula Discovery explains how characters recover, reconstruct, research, reverse-engineer, or invent formulas for magic items, especially Rare, Very Rare, Legendary, unusual, lost, divine, planar, ancient, or unique items.
Magic Item Recipes is the main catalog of completed ACS magic item recipes, including crafting methods, required tools, physical components, magical components, essence requirements, substitutions, consumed supplies, and crafting notes.
The Crafting of a +1 Dagger is a worked example showing Material Perfection, Essence Incorporation, and Arcane Imposition as different paths to the same finished item.

Magical Crafting Methods¶

Magic item recipes may use one or more of the following approaches:

Material Perfection refines the physical item until its materials, balance, structure, and workmanship can support enchantment.
Essence Incorporation binds an existing magical principle into the item using harvested monster parts, magical plants, distilled essence, or other supernatural materials.
Arcane Imposition uses spellwork, inscription, ritual geometry, stabilizing reagents, and magical theory to impose an enchantment directly onto the item. This is advanced work and is not normally available to low-level characters.

Most ACS magic item recipes use Essence Incorporation as the default assumption unless the recipe says otherwise.

Civilization Crafting¶

Civilization Crafting covers things characters build, support, staff, expand, defend, and leave behind at the scale of communities, factions, outposts, settlements, and long-term infrastructure.

This includes bastions, strongholds, workshops, settlements, fortifications, roads, ships, guilds, civic institutions, resource sites, stockpiles, supply chains, and the workers who make those projects possible.

Where Item Crafting asks, “What can this character make?”, Civilization Crafting asks, “What can this community become?”

Civilization Crafting Core Rules¶

These pages explain how construction-scale materials, workers, project assignments, maps, facilities, structures, population capacity, Room Points, and defensive consequences work at the civilization scale.

Materials and Logistics¶

Material Acquisition

This page covers Material Units, construction-scale resources, Wood, Stone, Iron, stockpiles, salvage, resource sites, wagons, ships, supply routes, transport limits, and the risks created by moving large amounts of usable material through a dangerous world.

Use Material Acquisition when the question is:

Where are the construction materials coming from?
How many Material Units can be gathered, salvaged, or quarried?
Where are the materials stockpiled?
How are they being transported?
Can the party actually spend those materials at the construction site?

Workforce and Projects¶

Labor Management

This page covers unskilled laborers, skilled hirelings, work crews, construction stalls, project assignment, parallel projects, gathering rates, delays, defense, and the consequences of leaving workers idle or supply lines exposed.

Use Labor Management when the question is:

Who is doing the work?
How many crews are required?
Which skilled hirelings are needed?
Can multiple projects run at once?
Does construction progress or stall?
What are the workers doing while the party adventures?

Bastions¶

Bastions are character-scale bases, outposts, homes, towers, workshops, fortified camps, lodges, sanctums, or similar places controlled by the characters.

Use Bastions when characters build or expand a specific location they can personally inhabit, map, staff, defend, and use.

Use Bastion Facilities when the question is about Basic Facilities, Special Facilities, facility size, room area, level requirements, prerequisites, orders, source books, or how Bastion facilities translate into Stronghold Room Points.

The core Bastion rule is simple:

If it exists in your Bastion, it must exist on your map.

Strongholds¶

Strongholds are settlement-scale or faction-scale holdings. A Stronghold is not a single building. It is everything the characters construct, everyone they support, every resource they control, every structure they maintain, and every supply line they depend on.

Use Strongholds when characters are rebuilding civilization, founding a settlement, creating a faction center, expanding a population base, building institutions, or developing holdings that outgrow a single Bastion.

Use Bastion Facilities alongside Strongholds when Special Facilities are built into a Stronghold using Room Points.

Choosing the Right Page¶

When a character wants to make, gather, build, or alter something, start with the scale of the work.

If the character wants to...	Start Here
Make mundane adventuring gear	Crafting Common Items
Make poison	Crafting Poisons
Craft a magic item	Magic Item Recipes
Learn, recover, or invent a magic item formula	Formula Discovery
Decide what tool proficiency applies	On Tools and the Practice of Craft
Price, weigh, or compare raw materials and essence	Material Values and Weights
Harvest a monster	Creature Harvesting
Record a creature-specific harvest ruling	Harvest Rulings
Distill essence from magical materials	Alchemical Distillation
Gather or use magical plants	Herbalism
Choose or substitute a metal	Metallurgy
Choose or substitute a wood	Woodcraft
Choose or evaluate a gemstone	Gemsetting
Build a Bastion	Bastions
Add or reference Bastion facilities	Bastion Facilities
Build a Stronghold or settlement structure	Strongholds
Gather, salvage, move, or stockpile construction materials	Material Acquisition
Assign workers, crews, or skilled hirelings	Labor Management
Understand the civilization-scale branch as a whole	Civilization Crafting

Using ACS at the Table¶

ACS is meant to support play, not replace judgment.

When a character wants to craft or build something, ask:

What scale is this? Is it an item, a facility, a stronghold structure, an infrastructure project, or something stranger?
What tool, skill, workforce, or institution is required?
What materials must be physically present?
What resources are consumed?
How long does the work take?
Where does the work happen?
What complications, risks, or opportunities does the work create?

For item crafting, use the Item Crafting rules.

For settlement-scale, stronghold-scale, bastion-scale, or infrastructure-scale projects, use the Civilization Crafting rules.

Final Rule¶

Crafting is how characters leave fingerprints on the world.

At the item scale, they make tools, weapons, reagents, poisons, armor, scrolls, and wonders.

At the civilization scale, they make homes, roads, walls, workshops, institutions, and legacies.

Or, in its shortest form:

Item Crafting changes what the characters carry.
Civilization Crafting changes where the characters belong.