Blacksmithing

Blacksmithing is a popular professional interest of two sorts of adventurers: those that want to hit things with heavy metal objects, and those that want a heavy metal object between them and the thing hitting them.

While often relying on the town blacksmith to do their work for them is a fine option, rolling up your sleeves and doing the work yourself can allow you to express your creativity... and may save you a few coins in the process.

Blacksmithing is slow hard work, but has a higher tolerance for failure than most, and is more dependent on knowing your material, as the templates you work from tend to be common across many of them.

Related Tool

Crafting Roll

Success and Failure

Maintenance & Modifications

Related Tool

Blacksmithing works using Blacksmith’s Tools. Attempting to craft an item without blacksmith’s tools will often be impossible. Proficiency in blacksmith’s tools allows you to add your proficiency bonus to any blacksmithing check.

While Blacksmiths can benefit from their skills in small ways such as sharpening their weapons and retrofitting their gear on the go, many of their crafting options require a fully equipped Forge; a fully equipped Forge entails forge, anvil, and blacksmith’s tools.

Crafting Roll

Putting that together means that when you would like to smith an item, your crafting roll is as follows:

Blacksmithing Modifier = your Blacksmith’s Tools proficiency bonus + your Strength modifier

Success and Failure

After you make a crafting roll, if you succeed, you make 10 Minutes of progress toward the total crafting time (and have completed one of the required checks for making an item).

Checks for Blacksmithing do not need to be immediately consecutive. If you fail three times in a row, all progress and materials are lost and can no longer be salvaged. Failure means that no progress is made during that time.

Once an item is started, even if no progress is made, the components reserved for that item can only be recovered via salvage.

Maintenance & Modifications

While the primary purpose of Blacksmithing is to forge armor and weapons from metal, for an adventurer such events are important milestones that generally will not occur everyday. The following are some tasks that require proficiency with Blacksmith’s Tools that provide a more day-to-day utility to the proficiency, giving them minor ways to enhance or adapt their gear.

These are minor crafts can be completed in 10 minutes with the expenditure of 5 gp worth of materials. They can be done as part of a long rest, but have limitations the normally crafted items do not (such as a maximum stockpile of minor crafts).

The following are “minor crafting options” for Blacksmiths:

Maintain Gear

One of the perks of having a blacksmith in the field is their ability to keep gear in its best condition, giving you an edge (sometimes literally) in the quality of your gear and weapons. Over the course of 10 Minutes, a Blacksmith can maintain a number of weapons or sets of armor equal to their proficiency bonus, granting each weapon or armor maintained a special d6 Quality Die.

For a weapon, this can be rolled and added to an attack or damage roll, representing a case where the perfect state of the gear turned a miss into a hit or dealt a bit of extra damage. For a set of armor, the die can be rolled when hit by an attack, and the damage taken from that attack can be reduced by that amount.

Rolling this die doesn’t require an action, but once rolled it is spent and can’t be regained until the blacksmith maintains that armor or weapon again.

Modify Armor

While the field crafting of armor is often not possible, you can make smaller adjustments on the go. Over the course of 10 Minutes, you can turn a set of plate mail into a half plate or a breastplate, refit a set of heavy or medium armor to fit another user that is equal in size or smaller than the original user.

Modify Weapon

Every adventure has slightly different preferences in their gear, and your skills allow you make slight modifications to non-magical weapons made of metal. These modifications take 10 minutes, require a heat source, and require you to pass a DC 14 Blacksmithing Tool’s check (on failure, the weapon is damaged and has a −1 penalty to its attack rolls until fixed).

You can perform one of the following modifications:

You can weight a weapon, giving it the heavy property. If it did not already have the two-handed property, it gains the two-handed property.
You can remove the heavy property from a weapon, reducing its damage dice by d2.
You can add the light property to a weapon without the heavy property, reducing its damage dice by d2.
You can silver the weapon (requires 5 silver scraps, doubled for two handed weapons).

Item Crafting

Refining Ores

Note that all recipes listed below requires a smelter or other resource of similar nature in order to heat up and refine the ores.

Materials

Below are a list of materials ingots can be made from in some way, along with how the Crafting DC will be increased by, as well as what weapons and armors will gain when used with it.

Adamantine

DC Modifier : +7

Weapon Effect : Gains the “Special: Critical Strikes with this weapon permanently damage nonmagical weapons, shields or armor of the defending creature that are not forged from Adamantine (reducing the attack roll of a weapon or the AC of armor by 2)”.

Armor Effect : While you’re wearing it, any critical hit against you becomes a normal hit.

Dark Iron

DC Modifier : +6

Weapon Effect : A weapon forged from Dark Iron will deal an additional 1d4 Fire damage. This stacks with enchantments.

Armor Effect : Wearing armor forged from Dark Iron will grant resistance to Fire damage.

Fel Iron

DC Modifier : +10

Weapon Effect : A weapon forged from Fel Iron will deal an additional 1d4 Fire damage, which ignores resistance to Fire damage. This effect does not apply if the target also has resistance or immunity to Necrotic damage. Vulnerability to one damage type is treated as vulnerable to both. This stacks with enchantments.

Armor Effect : While you're wearing this armor, all damage taken from Fiends is reduced by double your proficiency bonus.

Mithril

DC Modifier : +5

Weapon Effect : A weapon with the heavy property forged from it loses the heavy property. If the weapon didn’t have the heavy property, it gains the light property. The DC of an Enchanter applying an Enchantment to it is reduced by 4, and it always counts has having 1 common essence of any type as part of the craft.

Armor Effect : If the armor normally imposes disadvantage on Dexterity (Stealth) checks or has a Strength requirement, the mithril version of the armor doesn’t. Easier for Enchanters to Enchant.

Saronite

DC Modifier : +11

Weapon Effect : A weapon forged from Saronite will deal an additional 1d4 Necrotic damage, which ignores resistance to Necrotic damage. If the attack target is an Aberration, Celestial, Fiend, or Undead, the damage is increased to 1d6 and ignores Immunity as well. This stacks with enchantments.

Armor Effect : While you're wearing this armor, all damage taken from spells is reduced by your proficiency bonus.

Thorium

DC Modifier : +6

Weapon Effect : Gains the “Special: When this weapon's damage causes a creature must make a Constitution saving throw to maintain concentration, that creature must do so with disadvantage”.

Armor Effect : Wearing armor forged from Thorium will grant resistance to Necrotic damage.

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