Leatherworking

Leatherworker’s Tools

• RAW Cost: 5gp
• RAW Weight: 5lbs
• Example Items: Mallet, Stitching Pony, Steel Square, Knife, Needles, Thread
• Crafting Restrictions: Requires workshop to tan leather, otherwise there are no restrictions on creating goods with purchased leather.
• Mundane Item Crafting: Sling, Whip, Leather/Hide Armors, and a smattering of leather goods such as spellbooks, pouches, and survival gear.
• Magic Item Crafting: A wide variety of armor, belts, bracers, cloaks, and other leather-based items.
• Artwork Creation: Can create high quality leather products that are high in demand.
• QA Artwork Bonus: -2 days (minimum 1) to find a buyer for artwork.
• Structure Building: N/A
• Adventuring Utility: Able to add proficiency bonus to checks that involve observing or using leather and add proficiency bonus to checks made when skinning creatures.

Metal armor doesn’t agree with everyone, and many creatures have perfectly good hides that they won’t be using anymore. For times like these, a leatherworker is required. It is a long and messy job to take raw hides, tan them, preserve them, cut them, and fashion them into armor and other equipment, but most societies would break down without this crucial industry.

While leather workers are often looked down upon for their unpleasant job, these are usually just the leather workers that deal with mundane animal hides and skins. Highly skilled leather workers however are treated with the utmost respect since without them, your skinned purple Worm hides would go completely to waste.

Any character that is proficient in the leatherworker’s tools may be considered a leatherworker for crafting purposes.

Default Blueprints

You begin with the following things you can make:

• Common leather goods
• Leather/Hide Armors
• Slings
• Whips

Skill Usage

• Arcana: Your expertise in working with leather grants you added insight when you inspect magic items crafted from leather, such as boots and some cloaks.
• Investigation: You gain added insight when studying leather items or clues related to them, as you draw on your knowledge of leather to pick out details that others would overlook.
• Identify Hides: When looking at a hide or a leather item, you can determine the source of the leather and any special techniques used to treat it. For example, you can spot the difference between leather crafted using dwarven methods and leather crafted using half­ling methods.

Leatherworker’s Tools Basic Skill Use Difficulty Table

Leatherworking Tasks

Skinning and Scraps: One skill any leatherworker must have been the ability to skin beasts. This means removing the hide from a (usually) dead animal and using it for other purposes. While some cultures are irreverent about the process, others treat the process of skinning some animals as a religious process that confers great respect to the animal killed to procure the hide.

This process allows a leatherworker to acquire raw hides to use, but there are the occasional leather workers whose scavenging abilities allow them to seek out leather scraps not actively used. The leather scraps may also be used after some recycling preparation.

Tanning: Another trade a leatherworker can practice is the ability to properly tan raw hides into supple leather. The conversion animal hides into leather is a tedious task, but the rewards primarily entail the ability to use the newly-acquired leather for crafting purposes.

Crafting: The main attraction of the leatherworking profession is the ability to craft leather items. From armor to waterskins, the creation of leather items relies on fabricating leather sheets or scraps into the desired product. The process of crafting leather objects takes time, resources, and skill in proportion to the complexity and quality of the finished good.

Repairs: A leatherworker can also repair items that are made of leather. Using scraps or sheets of leather, the wear and tear dealt to a leather object can be undone. This module will introduce mechanics to record damage from use on armor, weapons, and other metal objects, as well to repair them.

Crafting

For much of the crafting for this skill set and tools, just use the Mundane Crafting rules unless there is something specific that the character wishes to create outside of the normal things.