Monster Harvesting
Monster Harvesting
Description and context.
Origin
Where it came from or who created it.
Contents
Include the full text or excerpt.
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.
This system was unveiled in full at the table in Session 51, and reworked to the carcass-first manifest rules below in September 2026.
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. (Rule set September 2026, replacing an earlier margin-based rarity bonus.) 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. (Rule added in Session 53.) 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. First invoked on Karma's nat 20 over a CR 3 wyrmling, pulling a Rare from an Uncommon-capped carcass. Above-ceiling components are not part of the manifest's slot counts.
Boosting the check. (Rulings from Session 54.) 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; in S54, with a long rest imminent, the whole party was allowed to spend on the same carcass.
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. (Thieves' Tools as a generalist column: DM ruling sketched at the table in S53, exercised again in S54 — treat as standing.)
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 party's banked components, their effects, and what each can build are tracked on the Harvested Materials ledger.
The September 2026 retro pass
When the carcass-first manifest rules were adopted, every previously harvested creature's manifest was regenerated to the new slot counts and all past rolls were re-adjudicated additively — nothing already harvested was removed; rolls that would have recovered more under the new rules (rarity-and-below sweeps, and the margin-quantity rule) recovered it retroactively. (An interim draft of the margin rule granted above-ceiling components at +10; those were converted to quantity bonuses when the rule was finalized — the conversions are noted on Harvested Materials.) The gains are recorded per carcass on Harvested Materials and each creature's harvest profile.
The harvest database
(Added September 2026.) The harvest system is backed by three 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.
- 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.
- DMHarvest — the DM's side of the ledger, stored only from the DM namespace.
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 a poisoner could pull from carcasses the company knows:
{{#cargo_query:tables=HarvestComponents
|fields=creature,component,rarity,effect
|where=tool LIKE '%Poisoner%'
|order by=cv DESC}}
Creature harvest profiles
All creature dossiers live in the Bestiary.
- Arauthator — ancient white dragon, CR 20 (Artifact ceiling)
- Dragon Turtle — CR 17 (Legendary ceiling)
- Yuan-ti Anathema — CR 12 (Very Rare ceiling)
- Hydra — CR 8 (Rare ceiling)
- Blue Dragon Wyrmling — CR 3 (Uncommon ceiling)
- Ice Spider Queen — CR 2 (Uncommon ceiling)
- Peryton — CR 2 (Uncommon ceiling)
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 |