ICRPG Crafting

inspiration

#1

Hey there, guys!

So I’ve been making up lists of exotic space chunks inspired from various sci-fi series, novels, comics & movies to allow crafting. Nothing too tight, just a way to inspire my players into making weapons or adding interesting twists to their tools.

Take the Carbonadium, for example, which mess with healing factors! You could make a blade, bullets or even the tip of a missile with this! Okay, that last one might be a bit overboard!

However! The intent of these chunks is to be used as crafting material, not so much to build motor “hover” cycles or giant robots… so my problem becomes: what can I call them to imply this, instead of chunks? 'cause I don’t want to mix and match both those mechanics…

I also would like suggestions as to how to handle crafting in ICRPG: what do you guys think?


#2

The boring name, which you correctly used in your question, would be “raw materials” or simply “materials”.


#3

Or since we’re in space: RawM! For Raw Materials! Mwuahaha! :smiling_imp:


#4

Very cool, I love crafting stuff, and invariably there’s always a member or 3 of my party that wants to craft stuff as part of play.

You could simply use the tag “material,” “ingredient,” or other designation when they acquire a raw crafting component.

Creation could be as simple as one effort roll each day until the item’s hearts are filled. A simple item could use maybe 1-2 hearts. A complex item could have several, and even the initial crafting of individual parts for the greater whole.

The applications for this could be creating a safe zombie compound, repairing a starship after a crash landing, or repairing defenses in a post apocalyptic kind of Borderlands world. The timers/repair time won’t matter unless there’s an element of time, so making sure time is of the essence will make the crafting feel necessary: board the windows and barricade doors/stairwells before nightfall, the starship’s pursuers will be planetside and searching for the wreckage in a few days, or the sand worms will barrel through town if we don’t repair the subsonic emitters.

Best of luck!


#5

Oh, they’re definitely going to need all the help they can get as the campaign themes are “Space Opera” and “Cosmic Horror”. Nothing too out of the ordinary but I think it fits pretty well with the infinite space!

So you can bet they need to hide when times go bad! Hehehe!
Thanks for your suggestions, too, I’ll look into that!


#6

I echo the others here, just call stuff of this nature either Ingredients (consumables, recipe items) or Materials.

As for how to handle it, simply make it an attempt adding a heart(s) of effort. Be sure to let characters shine by making it easy when appropriate. Say a character has back story or a tag pertaining to Alchemy (ingredients) or Engineer/Mechanic/Scientist/Blacksmith (materials).

Idea starters:

Finding a rare bark that they can mix into a cure potion to create a cure potion that gives +3 armor for d4 rounds.

A chunk of dragon hide merged onto an existing shield or armor increasing its armor bonus +1.

A special glass substance merged with a telescope that allows it to also give dark vision.

You’ve got me thinking now about how fun crafting can be! I’ll need to make a point to create opportunities for it in my games more often.


#7

I would call them MODULES if in a sci-fi/cyberpunk ambient, otherwise I would just call them ACME (Arcane Crafting Material Enhancements) just for fun lol.

The way I handle crafting so far is basically like hank states it in the ICRPG manuals: I put an effort tax to craft the item, the the player rolls during downtime… but that’s pretty boring right?

I’ve been DMing a 5e sandbox campaign for a while now, and my players are now fond of a couple of crafting homebrew modules, which include the Simple Alchemist’s Supplies variant.

That made me ring some bells and I started thinking of a crafting system for ICRPG (now my official home system for my game design/homebrew creative steam dump) which could use different “elements” to create crazy (d100 random table like) effects when combined.

I’ve also played A LOT of Terraria (which is basically ICRPG, the video game) and I think a crafting system that could use raw materials with pre-defined effects (bones and spiderweb makes you stealthier, adamantite makes you tougher, gold makes you charmier, etc.) could kind of work if done simply…