User:StarHawk/Ten Crafts

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The Ten Crafts

Like many players of Exalted, I’ve always been just a bit wary of the open-ended Crafts Ability. With little guidance concerning what is and is not an acceptable Crafts Ability, I’ve found that my players come up with all kinds of crazy shit: from the incredibly vague and broad-based to the painstakingly specific and specialized. As such, I’ve created a series of ten Crafts Abilities that will ALWAYS be acceptable in my games.

These Ten Crafts are divided into two categories: means-based Crafts, and ends-based Crafts. The five means-based Crafts are each dedicated to specific groups of materials. Those that possess these Crafts can use them to make just about ANY items which can be made out of the appropriate material. The five ends-based Crafts are based on finished products. Those that possess these Crafts can use them to make appropriate products, regardless of the materials out of which they are made.

Before I begin listing the Crafts, it should be noted that the Ten Crafts represent those Crafts most often practiced by MORTALS. Fair Folk, ghosts, demons, and Exalted surely have specialized Crafts of their own falling WELL outside the boundaries of any of these ten. That said, those very same beings surely practice these Crafts as well. This list is not mean to be EXHAUSTIVE – there’s bound to be plenty of skills that are clearly Crafts but do not fall under any of these Ten.

Without further ado, the Ten Crafts:

Means-based Crafts

The means-based Crafts fit into five broad skills: Farmcraft, Textile/ Leathercraft, Woodcraft, Metalcraft, and Earthcraft.

Farmcraft is the Craft of living things, and is by far the single most commonly practiced Craft in all of Creation. It includes agriculture, gardening, botany, forestry, animal husbandry, slaughtering/butchery, and just about any other Craft Ability that deals with growing and preparing living things to be made into product. An individual skilled in Farmcraft can grow all sorts of useful plants and prepare them to be turned into valuable product. Similarly, such an individual can breed, raise, and prepare live animals for sale. Once a tree has been felled, a crop has been harvested, or an animal has been slaughtered, however, what happens to the resource is beyond the purview of this Craft.

Textile/ Leathercraft is the Craft of woven plant fibers and tanned animal hides. It can be used to turn plant fibers into string, weave string into cloth, and turn cloth into functional garments, upholstery, sails, and just about anything else that can be made of cloth. Paper is also made using this Craft. The Leathercraft half of this Craft is used for skinning animals and turning that skin into workable leather. It can also be used to fashion that leather into clothing, tents, armor, or anything else that can be made of leather.

Woodcraft allows a skilled craftsman to make any sort of item that can be made out of wood. The craft is also used to fell trees and prepare lumber for working. Weapons, armor, furniture, buildings, ships, wagons, and a host of other items can be made using this Craft, provided the items are to be made entirely or almost entirely out of wood. A Woodcrafter can make a sailing ship, but a Textile Crafter is needed to make the sails, and a Metalcrafter may be needed to make many of the ship’s fittings. Woodcraft may also be used to make items out of animal bone, antler, and horn, as these substances are worked in a fashion similar to that of wood.

Metalcraft is to metal what woodcraft is to wood. The Craft is equally useful for mining, smelting, and refining metal as it is for actually shaping metal into a finished product. As with Woodcraft, the items that can be made using Metalcraft are many and varied, but they must be made entirely or almost entirely out of metal. Four of the Five Magical Metals (excluding Jade) ARE considered metal for the purposes of this Craft, although OTHER skills and knowledge are required to create, refine, or work them with any real skill.

Earthcraft covers all non-metal material mined or derived from the earth. These materials include stone, clay, glass, and Jade. The Craft is useful in mining and preparing these materials, as well as for fashioning them into finished products. Obviously working Jade into anything more complicated that currency is likely to require additional skills and knowledge, and it is worth noting that the special properties Jade acquires in the Underworld render this Craft all but useless for shaping it there (ghosts have their own specialized Craft for working Jade).

Those are your five means-based Crafts. As you can see, each one can be used to perform an incredibly wide variety of tasks, but is limited in the resources used in the performance of those tasks. At Storyteller discretion, these Crafts may also be used to make or repair simple tools used in the practice of the Craft. There is some overlap between Crafts, but not much. However, these Crafts and the ends-based Crafts overlap considerably more, as you will soon see.

Ends-based Crafts

Like the means-based Crafts, the ends-based Crafts are divided into five skills: Armorsmithing, Weaponsmithing, Shipbuilding, Architecture, and Engineering.

Armorsmithing is used, quite obviously, to create armor. While most think of metal when they think of armor, armor can also be made of wood, bone, leather, or even thick cloth. Any sort of protective garment or covering can be made using this Craft. This Craft is also explicitly useful in making shields, and though it cannot be used to BUILD ships, wagons, or buildings, it can be used to bolster such items against physical damage.

Weaponsmithing is to weapons as armorsmithing is to armor, and is certainly one of the most popular Crafts in the violent and turbulent Age of Sorrows. It is used for making weapons of all sorts. Swords, axes, bows, arrows, spears, etc. . . . any sort of weapon a man can dream up can be made using weaponsmithing, regardless of the material out of which the weapon is made. This Craft specifically EXCLUDES the ability to make catapults, ballistae, or other large siege weapons, as these fall under the Engineering Crafts Ability. It is used mainly to create weapons designed to be wielded by a single person in combat. Obviously the Craft can also be used to make weapon-like tools such as wood axes and carving knives.

Shipbuilding covers the construction of not just ships, but of all things nautical. An individual with this Craft can design and build not only ships, but also sails, rigging, and oars. The Craft includes some general skill at carpentry and may be used to build other, shiplike items (like wagons or simple homes), but with greater difficulty. An individual with this Craft will also be able to make several items commonly associated with nautical vessels, such as barrels, cranes, and gangplanks.

Architecture is the Craft of permanent structures – both their design and their construction. This Craft is not exclusively limited to actual buildings, but also includes bridges, dams, canals, roads, and free-standing walls and fences. Architecture also includes the skills landscaping and interior design, and though an architect is unable to MAKE furniture or GROW plants, he is able to place them to best serve a given purpose or artistic vision. As with all ends-based Crafts, the materials out of which the items are made matters not – merely that they fit within this broad category of finished products.

Engineering is probably one of the least-practiced Crafts of the Second Age, and is simultaneously (or perhaps consequently) one of the most valued. Engineering is the Craft of complex machinery. It does overlap somewhat with both Shipbuilding and Architecture, but someone desiring a seaworthy sailing vessel or defensible fortress is better off seeking specialists in those fields, as an engineer’s designs, while grand, are likely to be far less practical (and thereby of lesser usefulness). Engineering is used in the creation of siege engines, wagons and carriages, clocks, firewands, and all sorts of items featuring a number of complex and/or delicate moving parts. This Craft requires considerable attention to detail, and the items made using it tend not to be terribly useful to the average mortal. Still, the world would be in poor shape without its engineers.

Well, there are your Ten Crafts. As with the means-based Crafts, Storytellers may choose to allow these Crafts to be used to make or repair simple tools used in the practice of the Craft. The ends-based ones have a little more overlap than the means-based ones, I think . . . but I certainly don’t have a problem with that. One particular bonus of this system is that if you possess all five Crafts in either category, you’ve pretty much got 90% of your bases covered. Sure, there’s a few things that don’t seem to properly fall into any of these skills, but such things are generally the sorts of Crafts that wouldn’t come up terribly often in-game anyway.

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The Ten Crafts

Comments

There's one kind of crafting which would probably come up often in an Exalted game which isn't covered by these categories: gem-cutting. The prevalence of Hearthstones makes this a very important craft. - IanPrice

True. That would kinda be neat. I haven't thought of it much. Perhaps having it be a mix of Earthcraft and it's own End-based craft. ~StarHawk

On second thought Gem-cutting would be an earthcraft thing. It says in the skill it can be used to make a few finnished products. I'd allow it in my games. ~StarHawk

I'm just curious and don't know my way around here much (I found this page by accident, yay!), but I was wondering if drawing would be considered a Craft... - TepetWoxa

I'm sure some people would. But in all the games I've been in Drawing, along with many other forms of art have been performance based. In respect to the ten crafts I'm sure drawing might fall under textiles? ~StarHawk