Heroic crafting is starting to become a must-have in any of my PF2e games with a player who wants to specialise in crafting. It makes crafting work in a way that is more intuitive to most players, and comes with Foundry integration and great community support to boot.
Functionally, the core of this supplement changes the crafting rules so that crafting an item is now competitive or better than buying the item from a shop. This completely flips the use case for crafting, which previously was relegated to uncommon or rare formulas from quests or remote locations with no high level settlement. Now, crafting functions in a way that is a lot more intuitive to my players, producing items at a better rate than the market but balanced by needing to spend time to do so. The supplement also has a system for foraging and scavenging for crafting materials, which is cool.
Balance wise, here are the impacts I've observed in this supplement:
- Currency: Because of PF2e's fairly robust rules about selling items for 50% of their value, it's actually pretty much impossible for a character to start swimming in gold purely because of crafting items. Earn Income remains a competitive way to get straight currency using the crafting skill.
- Party Wealth: This supplement doesn't actually cause party wealth to balloon beyond expected rates, except in some pretty fringe cases where you are giving players an extreme amount of downtime (but to be fair, you could technically outscale wealth by leve using Earn Income + extreme amounts of downtime anyways). The good news is that, again, PF2e's fairly robust rules make this pretty easy to balance. The supplement gives guidance to just check the party's wealth against the Party Treasure By Level table every once and a while during downtime, so long as you're in the bounds you should be golden.
- Stats: This supplement increases the value of taking INT, as it keys into Crafting. It (somewhat less) increases the value of WIS and Survival, which now has use in foraging. Both of these attributes are generally considered some of the weaker ones, so balance wise I think this is good.
- Classes: Primarily, this increases the usefulness of the Alchemist and the Inventor. Let's be honest; these classes are far from OP in the base game. This supplement provides some great utility/ fantasy fulfilment for these classes. To a lesser extent, this supplement buffs the utility of any INT based class that wants to specialise into crafting, as well as resource-dependant classes like the Gunslinger who now how a better way to craft ammo on the fly.
- Magic Items: This supplement does not do too much to affect the overall accessibility of magic items for a party. Players are still bound by a need for formulae to gain access to magic items, and still require the magical crafting feat. The one significant change is that players can now craft items above their level: If the party gains access to a higher level formula they can start crafting it right away, however because of the cost differential in gp this actually would take a really long time and you'll find that the party is at or very close to the item level by the time they craft it.
- Suggestions: I would suggest adding a Rare tag to the Natural-Born Tinker feat. This feat effectivly allows you to replace Crafting with Survival on a lot of checks and requirements to craft items. I don't think this is too OP because such characters won't benefit from a lot of the crafting bonuses that actual crafters get, but I think there are some parties in which this could lead to a more generalist class like a Druid or Ranger pushing into the niche of a more specialised crafting character with only a single feat. Whether or not this is a bad thing honestly depends on the table & how players feel about their niche in the party, so ymmv & that's why I'd suggest giving it a Rare tag and only handing it out to the appropriate party.
Here's how the module is compatible with some other resources:
- Base Game: This supplement replaces the base Craft an Item activity, and slots pretty easily into the rest of the base game. The supplement has very concise rules for what to change about base game feats that affect crafting. Most of the time nothing needs to be changes, the only major one is changes to feats that affect the setup time for crafting, because that's not a thing in Heroic Crafting.
- Remaster: The Remaster lowered the setup times for crafting, but because Heroic Crafting doesn't use setup times it simply overwrites this. The Remaster mainly moved in the direction of making crafting easier to use, so if anything Heroic Crafting is already on that track anyways.
- Battlezoo monster parts: The supplement has guidelines on how to harvest and use monster parts if no prior guidelines are given, but because Battlezoo does provide those guidelines in their bestiary, you just use the Battlezoo rules instead.
Lastly, but certainly not least, this supplement has a Foundry module if you like to play digitally. It even has a fan-made addition that fully tracks crafting with high automation, and I can't recommend it enough. It really makes running crafting a breeze, honestly even easier than the base game rules on Foundry.
Overall, I think this is a very good supplement for PF2e. It really helps fulfil the fantasy of being a crafter for some players. I've found crafting is a support activity the builds appreciation amongst the team: other players enjoy the crafter making items for them, and the crafter enjoys that their hard work is being appreciated by the team.
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