The Ultimate Guide to Alchemy, Crafting & Enchanting is a 5E D&D supplement that turns crafting into something a character can actually pursue, with professions, guild ranks, recipes, and 200 magic items. The print run is sold out, so this instant-download PDF is how the book is available now.
Three Disciplines
Alchemy specialises into Alkahest, Apothecary, and Tincturer. Crafting covers blacksmith, leatherworker, tailor, jeweler, woodworker, and tinkerer. Enchanting splits into Implemancer, Wardwright, and Eclectist. Each has its own materials, tools, and a discipline ability that sets it apart at the table.
The Creation Process
Making an item follows five steps, whatever your profession. First training, earning ranks in an association or equivalent instruction elsewhere. Then a recipe at or below your rank. Then ingredients, which you forage, harvest, buy, make from a lower-rank recipe, or win by quest. Then facilities, the tools and workspace, because a blacksmith needs an anvil and a forge and none of that is portable. Then the creation itself, an ability check against the recipe's DC, influenced by the grade of your ingredients. Succeed and the ingredients are consumed; fail and you lose only the first, and can try again in a day with fresh materials. Once you have made an item successfully, you succeed at it automatically thereafter.
Associations, Quests, and the Underground
Every discipline belongs to an association that works like a guild: ranks to climb, tenets to uphold, benefits for standing, and consequences for falling out of favour. Each discipline has its own quests, from novice work up to specialisation-specific jobs by rank, so a GM always has something to hand a crafting character. A chapter on the Underground covers players who would rather deal outside the associations entirely.
Two Hundred Magic Items
The Magic Item Compendium holds 200 items across four categories: weapons and armour, rings and wondrous items, rods, staves and wands, and potions, poultices and powders. Each category opens with a d100 table for random results, and every single item has a matching recipe, so anything your players find can also be built.
Why the PDF
Recipe chapters are organised by discipline and rank, and searching beats flipping when a player asks what they can make at their current standing. Keep it on a tablet, copy recipes into your notes, and paste item text into a virtual tabletop.
Appendices include a harvester's handbook, a forager's handbook, useful tables, and reference lists of SRD magic and mundane items. If you want those systems in full, the follow-up volume, Foraging, Harvesting & Natural Discovery, expands them into a book of their own. Compatible with both the 2014 and 2024 rules.
