Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 118 - Harvesting Parts from D&D and Pathfinder Monsters

Episode Date: March 27, 2022

In this episode suggested by Daniel during a donation to ko-fi.com/taking20podcast, I talk about the good, bad, and ugly of allowing your players to harvest their kills and the situations you want to try to avoid if you allow it.  Also, I muttered a lot in this episode and will be going to sit in the sunshine after this to improve my mood. #DnD #Pathfinder #DungeonsandDragons

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. Your game system doesn't have native rules for this, so you're stuck making it up on the fly. Or like me, you now have weird shit in your search engine history like, how long does it take a horse to decompose? Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to episode 118 of the Taking 20 podcast. This week, all about how to harvest parts from monsters. This week's sponsor, dragons. I'm kind of surprised I haven't done a dragon pun before, but movie companies love hiring dragons.

After all, they get paid scale. This episode's suggestion was part of a coffee donation last year by Daniel. Thank you so much for the donation, Daniel, and for the topic suggestion. If you'd like to donate to the podcast to help keep it going, I mean, I just paid the 2022 hosting costs a couple weeks ago, and my rear end is still pretty sore from that spanking, please consider donating to the ko-fi.com slash taking20podcast. Every dollar that you give there goes towards keeping this financially sinking ship afloat. Also, don't forget that episode 120 is the viewer mailbag episode. If you have a question about RPG gaming rules and theory, about me, about podcasting, equipment, my dog, whatever, please feel free to send it to me at feedback at Taking20Podcast.com

or message me on Instagram or Facebook. I want to start this episode off with a story. I grew up in the southern United States and it was a fairly rural area. Hunting was kind of a very, very common thing around where I lived. I still see pictures of people I know posting with deer and various other critters that they have downed and they're very, very proud of. None of them I know hunt, kill the creature, and then just abandon the carcass untouched, leaving behind meat, hide, bone, and then they head in someplace for something warm to drink. Instead, they collect the creature, take it to a processor who butchers the animal to collect the meat, hide, head, and even entrails. Any and all usable parts of the animal are collected to make sure the animal is fully or at least almost fully used. Even those hunters I know who can't afford a processor,

can't carry the animal out, or who hunt smaller game learn to field dress their kills, collecting meat, bone, and other parts of the animal, perhaps leaving behind something for the carnivores or carrion eaters to consume. In the interest of full disclosure, I haven't been hunting since I was 14. I went deer hunting with a family friend, probably in some misguided attempt to make me feel more manly because puberty or testosterone or whatever reason. I got up well before the sun came up, dressed in about four layers of clothing, went out into the snow with my friend and his dad,

crawled up into a tree, sat in a tree stand, and shivered my baguettes off for hours. I had to remain silent for hour after hour after hour, which as you can probably tell is difficult for me. It was during that time I learned two things. One, I fucking hate hunting, and two, when you're that cold, hot chicken soup from a thermos is nectar of the gods. Not long after the sun came up, I heard a gunshot from a nearby tree, and my friend's dad dropped a deer instantly from a ways away. I hadn't even heard or seen the deer. I was probably more worried about my shriveled baguettes at that point. We climbed down, dragged the deer out of the woods, took it back to their house,

where I learned that he was going to teach me how to dress a deer. He hung it up, gave me the knife with a little protrusion called a gut hook, and pointed to where I should make the first incision. I trusted this man. I made the incision he asked me to, and I cut too deeply and too fast. I wound up covered in blood and worse, from nose to toes. My friend and his dad thought it was hilarious. They laughed and laughed while I smelled like the inside of a deer for the rest of the morning. What was the point of that story? Well, after I got used to the smell, I helped him cut 50 pounds of meat, antlers, and pelt from the deer. He even taught me how to use the bones for soup stock. We used almost all of the deer to make sure none of it went to waste, and that was just a freaking deer with all due respect to the deer.

Imagine if our world was full of monsters that could turn invisible, produce acid spittle, breathe fire. Wouldn't we be harvesting parts of those monsters too? Keeping what we can use, selling the rest? Of course we would. So why can't we do that in our RPG games? So let's start with some basic facts. With the exception

of some very specific monsters, there aren't a lot of native rules for harvesting meat, organs, heads, whatever from monsters in nearly any game system. Pathfinder First Edition Core Games specifically mentions harvesting in the craft skill. Poison or venom can be harvested from certain creatures. Most of the rules for harvesting, though, came from a book called Ultimate Wilderness. Page 162 of that book discusses harvesting trophies. They are treated as art objects which can be sold for their full value. Think heads that you would mount on the wall, or antlers, or what have you. The DC to do so is based on the CR of the creature to identify what parts of the animal can be captured for a trophy, then another check to actually craft the trophy itself. It includes possible weight of the trophy based on the size of the creature and CR of the monster,

and the value of the trophy is solely based on the CR of the creature. So a CR5 Cloaker and a CR5 Dire Lion will both produce a 300 gold piece trophy. The next page of Alternate Wilderness has rules for a few harvestable components that can be used to have magical properties. The comprehensive list of creatures is Demons, Devils, Doppelgangers, Mimics, Elementals, Intelligent Undead, Oozes, Petrifying Monsters like Medusa, Primeval Creatures, Proteans, Quipoth,

Rakshasas, True Dragons, and Web using monsters like spiders. Other than that, the specific trophies earned are abstracted and left up to the GM to determine what gets salvaged. In Pathfinder 2nd Edition, though, it is much more limited on its harvesting rules. I did a quick glance through the bestiaries and found that the Tendriculus specifically says you can harvest lacquer from it that will give items acid resistance. The survival skill would make a ton of sense for how you make that happen,

but I can't find codified rules on this. You can always convert the Pathfinder 1e rules pretty easily. The transition from 1e to 2e is a very well-worn road. Adjust the DCs and the amount of money it's worth, and you're good to go. But jumping over to 5th edition. Also, there aren't really any real rules for harvesting kills. Again, the survival skill makes the most sense, but everything is left up to the DM. The core rules don't really give you a lot to go on. Now, what you can find are a shit ton of third-party content that can augment existing rules to allow for harvesting. Pathfinder, for example, has the Spheres Bestiary,

which discusses monster harvesting. Fifth Edition has the Battle Zoo Bestiary and Hayman's Harvesting Handbook Volumes 1-3. I reached out to the authors of those particular products and received, well, no response, unfortunately. Guess nobody loves me and my podcast. Let's see how it is. No, that's fine. That's fine. I'm just going to be drinking later on today and sipping brandy in a quiet, dark room and thinking about my life. But the DMs Guild website also has a ton of third-party, fifth-edition material about harvesting monster rules.

Similarly, for Pathfinder, DriveThruRPG has a ton of books. Go out there and take a look. People have released free versions and information online. You can always go digging through those sites to see what's out there. You see what I did there? It's a harvesting episode and I said digging through because it's kind of what you do when you harvest. Damn, a scoop up joke would have been better. Suppose you do when you harvest. Damn, a scoop-up joke would have been better. Suppose you do want to allow your players to harvest monsters. It does depend on what they're trying to do with harvesting. In other words, are they making trophies and treasures with it? If they're harvesting components because they want to keep a claw from the first bear they kill,

save a tooth from every dragon that they slay, or want to make a necklace out of drow ears, that's one thing. I really don't think that's a big deal, and if they don't plan on selling it, I don't even make them make a roll. Yeah, you dig out the purple worm spleen and put the sloppy mess into your bag of holding. Now what? Also, sloppy purple worm spleen sounds like the name of a... So I've been informed by my wife that that joke was maybe a little too dirty to keep in the episode. I don't understand why I'm not allowed to brag about the huge purple worm spleen that I have, but here we are. So, harvesting for trophies? Sure, knock yourself out. No mechanical effect on the game. But suppose they're harvesting to craft components.

Sometimes characters want to collect the leftover bits and bobs of a monster to use to craft items. I generally have no issue with harvesting for crafting purposes. But to further break it down, the harvesting could be for magical properties of the created items, or purely for flavor, and I think you should handle those differently. If you're harvesting for magical properties, let's say you're trying to make a plus one shield. What components would the players need? What components would work for that? Dinosaur hide? Bark of a treant? Dragon scales? I found a website called blogofholding.com and it has a page where someone made crafting recipes for every item in the 5e dungeon master's guide. Dear god. Someone find

this mad genius and either hire them or lock them away from society forever. The amount of work here is amazing. While that website's not the only solution that's out there, it is a good starting point for pointing your characters in the direction of what they need to collect if they want to make a staff of healing. Spoiler alert, it's the heart of a Hydra. On the other side, if you're harvesting for flavor though, don't sweat what the players are doing too much. They want their new magic shield to be made of red dragon scales, but it's no mechanical difference than an other plus one shield. That does not worry me at all. Let the players go nuts. But if they want to make a plus one shield that's also fire resistant, you may want to consider being very careful about how free you allow the players

to make these types of harvesting rolls. More on that in a minute. Suppose players are harvesting for money. They want to harvest the organs, the hide, the talons of creatures to sell and get rich. After all, if your world has capitalism, things are worth whatever someone will pay, and someone would probably buy roper arms for the adhesive, or planetar feathers for flight, or slod vomit for potion of shape change, or whatever. Here's the issue with allowing your players to sell that stuff willy-nilly. Most game systems are somewhat balanced around a treasure level granted by creatures when you send them to meet their maker. Allowing your player characters to harvest dead bodies for more money makes your characters richer faster. While that may not be a problem in your world, if done too freely, this could break the economy of your game as your characters

have more money than they should for their level. So let's talk about the benefits of harvesting monsters. Allowing your characters to harvest monsters make rangers and druids feel more important. Rangers as a whole really are underwhelming in most of the gaming systems. I think I talked about that back in the episode where I covered rangers. You're supposed to be these rugged survivalists who understand how to live out in the wilderness, far away from people, spending extended times in their chosen terrains, and most of them far from civilization and they may not see people for months at a time. You'd think that to do that, they'd need to be really good hunters and knowledgeable about how

to get the most out of every plant and animal they harvest or hunt. Other than tracking baddies and monsters through their chosen terrains, they hardly ever get to show off that skill. Adding harvesting rules really lets rangers and to the lesser extent druids, their knowledge of nature and their knowledge of how to survive becomes really, really important. Adding harvesting rules also could potentially include a creative use of the heal skill. Now I'm going to take this topic to a dark place for a minute. I promise we won't be here long, but let's play out some logic. Suppose the characters start skinning animals and monsters. So how long will it be before they want to field dress a humanoid?

A lizardfolk, a drow, a halfling, a human? When it comes to knowing the anatomy of sentient races, it's not the survival skill that applies. Mostly it's the heal skill, and that's used to understand their anatomy and the way they work and so forth. So your cleric, who has all these ranks and expertise in human anatomy, may suddenly become an expert on extracting organs from intelligent humanoids that the party may kill along the way. So what's the next step after that? Cannibalism?

Which, while we're here, on Earth we only have humans, so cannibalism is defined as humans eating another human. But on Faerun, Galarian, Duskwall, the Inner Sphere, wherever your game takes place, there may be multiple intelligent races. Wouldn't it be just as much of a crime for a human to eat a gnome as it would be for a halfling to eat a human? Further, I would think the field dressing and harvesting of an intelligent humanoid would at minimum be problematic and could even be considered a hate crime by some groups in your world. Be sure the party understands that if they're doing something that society would frown upon, there would be consequences from that. Okay, let's leave the

thought of butchering people for meat and move on to something happier, like the problems of implementing harvesting solutions. Besides the whole party turning into cannibal hobos, the other issue is that while importance on the survival skill is great, if you do this too much, it ramps up the importance of the survival skill I think well above what most of the rest of the skills would have. Survival can potentially become a critical part of looting the corpse, so to speak, and party members who traditionally are using their precious skill ranks on knowledge, lore, arcana, or other class-based skills that the game assumes your party will have, those precious ranks are used on survival, so they can harvest Ankhag Chiton or Tyrannosaurus Rex Anus or whatever the hell.

Your party may wind up with a lot of ranks in survival because that's how they make their money. Another problematic aspect is the increased number of die rolls that your characters will be making after every single encounter. We killed those seven formians, great, time for 21 survival checks to see what we harvest. That can really drag the game down. Also, as I alluded to earlier, selling harvested parts of corpses can break the economy of your game. Suddenly that Pathfinder 2e level 3 character who should have about 75 gold pieces worth of stuff suddenly has 250 gold pieces to her name, the same as roughly a 5th level

character. Resources and services that should be too expensive for your character suddenly become attainable at lower levels, and your party may become overpowered because of it. Another issue with harvesting rules is you've got to figure out that body parts tend to rot. You and your party will need to determine how you keep harvested parts usable as they make the days or even weeks long trip back to civilization. Suppose they're gone for a month after they harvest that dragon. How much of that flesh they carved is still viable? Have the scales rotted and fallen off? Are the teeth falling out of the head?

How much is all that gross shit worth now? Again, your game system doesn't have native rules for this, so you're stuck making it up on the fly. Or like me, you now have weird shit in your search engine history like, how long does it take a horse to decompose? The answer, by the way, 6 to 12 months, but the meat becomes rancid in days. There, I just spared you a Google. I weep to think what advertisements I'm going to get now.

Are you looking to dispose of a horse carcass? Come to Crazy Jimmy's Horse Dumping Ground. We're here to help when the county trash department says nay. Dovetailing off the rotting concept, characters will inevitably want to eat what they harvest, so you got to determine what's edible and what's not. Before rotting even comes into play, eventually someone's going to ask if they can make dragon kebabs or rust monster rump roast or foie gras from the liver of that caca demon over there. And of course, the rogue is going to want flank steaks. Do you really want to spend your time trying to figure out if your

lizard folk PC can safely eat those things? I sure as hell don't. I've got encounters to design and balance, plots to unfold, and dick jokes to make, so something's got to give and probably this is going to be it. Not all monsters are equally easy to harvest, so what DC do you set for that harvesting? Further, what's the value of what they harvest? Do you base it on CR, like the Pathfinder 1e rules? It feels too simple, but at some point you have to snap down a chalk line and go. Do you base it on monster rarity?

Now you've got to create different DCs for the same creature in different parts of the world. I guess I've just become lazy in my old age because I don't want to sink that kind of time into a duct tape mechanic on top of an already complex game system. But suppose you have more energy than me and you're interested in doing this. I do have some tips. First and foremost, ease into it. Do not go too high too fast with the magical properties of what they collect. This will make your characters overpowered in a hurry if you allow them to apply magical effects to your things that they harvest like its milkweed pollen. A cockatrice gland should not give a weapon the ability to turn something to stone.

A black dragon's bile gland shouldn't give acid damage to all attacks. Have harvested items grant relatively small or minor bonuses, so let them be used as alchemical or magical components when the characters are of the right level. Base the powers and abilities gained from harvesting on similar items. Monster hide should be roughly equivalent to hide in leather armor, maybe with a small bonus. It makes no sense to harvest dinosaur leather and get plate mail out of it. Heavy metal armor out of a dinosaur skin doesn't really make sense. Unless there's no metal in your world, the toughness of the hide is equivalent to plate mail. You know what? Fuck it. It's faster to say it doesn't make sense, except for a very narrow range of circumstances. If you allow players to sell what they harvest, deduct the amount they would sell it for from other treasure the creature

should have. For example, let's say the characters kill a small dragon that, according to your game's treasure tables, should have 27,000 gold pieces worth of treasure. If you allow them to harvest the scales, the breath weapon gland, the claws, the teeth, etc. purely for the ability to sell them, and you estimate that everything they harvest is worth about 1,000 gold pieces, then the dragon should have 27,000 minus the 1,000 for the harvesting or 26,000 gold pieces worth of stuff in its hoard. Otherwise, you're giving them free money just for making a survival check.

If you only allow harvesting for the sake of components to be used when making magic items, though, that deduction isn't nearly as important. Because you're not giving them cash per se, you're just making it easier for them to craft items. As mentioned previously, characters generally are balanced to have a certain amount of wealth per level, and most big-time RPGs are balanced based around that. Giving too much gold too quickly can unbalance the game in the PC's favor. Of course, if that's what you're going for, then ignore my previous advice. Work hard, make no progress, just ignore my advice, that's fine. Also, harvesting should take time and have risks. It shouldn't be an always successful, always instantaneous,

more gold from an encounter kind of thing. The risks could be that you ruin what you're trying to harvest, other creatures coming up for the monster that you killed, the monster's pack or family or whatever finding you cutting up one of theirs and they attack. Finally, if you want to include some kind of harvesting rule, you could always just abstract what the characters harvest from the monster. Congratulations, you got 100 gold pieces with a bone flesh sinew and whatever else.

Helps you as a DM keep your sanity. In summary, when implemented incorrectly, harvesting rules can make your characters too powerful too quickly and can bog the game down with extra rolls after combat. Implement with caution and very slowly and maybe you and your players will have fun doing it. And by doing it, I mean using their entire adventuring career as an excuse to open up a butcher shop. Tune in next week when we'll talk about how to handle those dangerous situations, player argument. Once again though, before I go,

I want to thank our sponsor, Dragons. You don't want to get into a rap battle with a dragon. They can truly spit fire. This has been episode 118, all about harvesting monsters. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking 20 Podcast is a Publishing Cube media production. Copyright 2022.

References to game system content are copyrighted by their respective publishers.