Monster Harvesting

Monster Harvesting

Description and context.

Origin

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Interpretation

Theories, importance, or player insights.

Monster Harvesting

A slain monster is a mobile treasury of crafting materials. A steady hand and the right tools can turn scale, gland, fang, ichor, and bone into arms, armor, alchemy, and arcana.

The carcass comes first

Every creature's components exist on the body before anyone rolls. When a new kind of creature is slain, its manifest is generated first — the full list of what the carcass holds — and only then are harvest checks matched against it.

A manifest is built like this:

• The creature's CR sets the rarity ceiling (table below). The manifest holds components at the ceiling rarity and every rarity below it, so there is always a spread — the low-end materials the party will keep needing are always present.
• The number of components at each rarity is fixed by the slot table below. The counts are cumulative: a Very Rare-ceiling carcass holds 3 Very Rare, 4 Rare, 5 Uncommon, and 6 Common components (18 in all).
• One component at the ceiling rarity is the signature — the creature's most evocative part, the single greatest prize on the body.
• The same material can appear at several grades as separate entries (loose Scale Shards at Common, a full Scale Coat at the top — see the Dragon Turtle's shell).

Rarity	Components at this rarity
Artifact	1
Legendary	2
Very Rare	3
Rare	4
Uncommon	5
Common	6

Example: a Rare-ceiling creature (CR 5–9) holds 4 Rare + 5 Uncommon + 6 Common = 15 components. A Legendary-ceiling creature (CR 15–19) holds 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 = 20. An Artifact-ceiling creature (CR 20+) holds all 21.

Rarity ceiling by CR

CR sets only what the body can hold, never the DC.

CR	Rarity ceiling	Total components
0–½	Common	6
1–4	Uncommon	11
5–9	Rare	15
10–14	Very Rare	18
15–19	Legendary	20
20+	Artifact	21

Harvesting a carcass

After a fight, each character may make one harvest check: pick a single tool you are proficient with, roll d20 + that tool's bonus, and find the highest rarity on the ladder your total meets. You claim everything in that tool's column at that rarity and every rarity below it. Proficiency in a fitting knowledge or handling skill (Nature or Arcana to know the beast, Medicine or Survival to work the body — the DM's call) grants Advantage.

A tool only produces if the carcass's manifest actually holds materials in that column — Calligrapher's Supplies pull nothing from a dumb beast. Choose the tool that fits the body in front of you, not just your highest bonus.

Where two harvesters share a column, the higher roll takes the signature or the best single piece.

Scraps are automatic. Even a failed or low roll yields the base salvage — meat, fat, blood, hide-scrap — at no DC. Nobody walks away empty-handed.

Margin yields quantity. For each non-signature component you recover, you extract one additional unit for every full 5 points your total exceeds that component's DC — beat it by 5 for one extra, by 10 for two, and so on. The signature component does not scale this way: it yields at most one additional unit, and only on a margin of 10 or more.

Beyond the ceiling — natural 20 only. A natural 20 on a harvest check can pull one component one rarity level above the creature's ceiling — something in the body that, by rights, should not be there, flavored to the harvester's tool column. Above-ceiling components are not part of the manifest's slot counts.

Boosting the check. Guidance may be cast once per group harvest — including by the caster on their own check. Tempered Soul may be spent on a harvest check like any other d20 test.

The harvest ladder

Rarity sets the difficulty; the monster's CR sets only what is available to find.

Rarity	Harvest DC	Craft Value (CV, per unit)
Scraps	0	1
Common	5	2
Uncommon	10	4
Rare	15	8
Very Rare	20	16
Legendary	25	32
Artifact	30	64

Tools and what they collect

The tool decides the category you can extract and what it feeds into. This is why a lower bonus in the right tool beats a higher bonus in the wrong one — the wrong column simply has nothing to give.

Tool	Collects	Feeds into
Alchemist's Supplies	Glands, blood, bile, ichor, organs, essences	Potions, oils, acids, bombs
Herbalism Kit	Spores, saps, antitoxin glands, medicinal organs	Healing draughts, antitoxins, salves
Poisoner's Kit	Venom sacs, stingers, toxic glands	Poisons, paralytics, contact toxins
Smith's Tools	Scales, plates, horn, claws, fangs, chitin, hard bone	Weapons, shields, heavy & medium armor
Leatherworker's Tools	Hide, membrane, pelt, sinew	Light armor, cloaks, straps, tents
Woodcarver's Tools	Bone, ivory, antler, beak (fine work)	Hafts, foci, wands, ammunition
Calligrapher's Supplies	Ink sacs, chromatophore fluid, sigil-blood, psychic residue	Magical inks, scrolls, glyph & sigil reagents
Navigator's Tools	Eyes & lenses, weather organs, swim bladders, lateral lines, wing-tendons	Optics, weather & travel instruments, sea & sky gear
Jeweler's Tools	Gemlike eyes, crystalline growths, gizzard pearls	Gem-foci, ornaments, luckstones
Cook's Utensils	Flesh, fat, marrow, organs	Rations, tallow, exotic cuisine
Tinker's Tools	Cores, gears, animating crystals	Construct & clockwork parts
Thieves' Tools	Generalist fine work — pick from the small-Smith's, Calligrapher's, Jeweler's, or Tinker's columns for that check	As the chosen column
None (Scavenge)	Swallowed loot, gizzard contents	Coins, gear, oddments — anyone may attempt

Niche defaults: Weaver's → silk & web cordage; Glassblower's → crystalline organs & lenses; Painter's → pigment glands; Brewer's → fermentable organs; Mason's or Potter's → shell & calcified plating; Cartographer's overlaps Navigator's.

Crafting with what you harvest

Harvested parts are spent as Craft Value against item thresholds — see the component crafting economy for how a primary component sets an item's effect and rarity cap, and how secondary parts are added to reach a tier. The designs the party already knows are collected in the pattern book; the party's banked components, their effects, and what each can build are tracked on the Harvested Materials ledger.

The harvest database

The harvest system is backed by four Cargo database tables, filled in automatically by the templates on each page — nothing is tallied by hand:

• HarvestComponents — every component known to exist on a carcass; one row per Template:Harvest Component call in a creature's Harvest Profile. Each component carries standard effect tags from the fixed vocabulary in Template:Harvest Effect Values (105 Category: Subtype tags — Damage, Resistance, Ward, Afflict, Boost, Skill, Sense, Move, Restore, Utility) alongside its free-prose effect.
• HarvestLog — every harvest event (who rolled what, units recovered with margin bonuses, recovered / left / eaten / spent); one row per Template:Harvest Log Entry call in a creature's Harvest Record.
• Patterns — the pattern book; one row per Template:Crafting Pattern call, with the effect tags each design accepts as its primary.
• DMHarvest — the DM's side of the ledger, stored only from the DM namespace.

Players: use Find Components — a multiselect search over the effect tags, rarity, and item type, showing banked quantities. The Harvested Materials ledger is a live query summing the log against the component definitions, so it updates itself whenever a creature page changes. Ad-hoc questions can be asked anywhere with #cargo_query, and Special:Drilldown offers a click-through browser. For example, everything tagged as poison-damage stock:

{{#cargo_query:tables=HarvestComponents
|fields=creature,component,rarity,effect
|where=effects HOLDS 'Damage: Poison'
|order by=cv DESC}}

Creature harvest profiles

Every creature dossier in the Bestiary carries a Harvest Profile — the full carcass manifest for that kind. For creatures the company slew before the harvest-craft was learned, and for the few it has faced but not felled, the manifest is the Harpers' compilation of what such a body holds, ready against the next carcass. A creature's page also carries a Harvest Record wherever the company has actually worked a carcass of that kind (the fullest worked examples: Arauthator, Peryton, Blue Dragon Wyrmling). Search all components by effect: Find Components.

Live index from the database (updates itself as profiles are added):

Creature	Known components
Aboleth	18
Adult White Dragon	18
Arauthator	23
Bearded Devil	11
Black Dragon	18
Blue Dragon	20
Blue Dragon Wyrmling	13
Bugbear	11
Cloaker	15
Dragon Turtle	22
Duergar	11
Flameskull	11
Frost Giant	15
Gelatinous Cube	11
Ghoul	11
Giant Crab	6
Giant Spider	11
Giant Toad	11
Goblin	6
Green Dragon	20
Guard Drake	11
Hobgoblin	6
Hook Horror	11
Horned Devil	18
Hydra	15
Ice Elemental	15
Ice Troll	15
Kobold	6
Merrow	11
Mimic	11
Mind Gobbler	20
Owlbear	11
Peryton	11
Red Dragon	20
Rust Monster	6
Scrag	15
Sea Hag	11
Skeleton	6
Stirge	6
Stone Giant	15
Troll	15
Umber Hulk	15
Yuan-ti Anathema	20
Zombie	6