Alchemy, Crafting & Enchanting PDF (5E)

Overall a great guide that really helps flesh out crafting in 5e. I think this is one of my players favorite books to leaf through during our session 0.

On the other hand my campaign now has two artificers, so be prepared to use this book a lot!

I will echo one complaint I saw before about enchanting time frames and penalties. They are a bit wonky, but that's easy enough to homebrew.

Quite large book covering nice variety of crafting options. It's quite complex in some cases which is neither good nor bad, all depends on personal view if you want a more straightforward approach or multiple options.

TL;DR - Good source of inspiration, might not worth full price.

Pros:
- Really enjoyed that all crafting paths have sub-options, you're not just making potions for example, you pick a specialization, granting you additional benefits and customization.
- Addition of quests for each of the professions is also great and can be used both to progress your skills or something extra to do and earn rewards.
- Nice list of magic items that can be used outside of this crafting system to just throw in your games as a reward, for sale or as a discovery.

Cons:

- Biggest issue of this PDF is how things are organized. First you have a simple list of recipes for each rank and each specialization, and then you have description of *all* recipes for that crafting path in alphabetical order. As such when you want to see what can an aprentice apothecary can make you have to jump back and forth between what you can do and what it does.

- There is a very vague of description and representation of material pricing, while stuff like flora has precise price listed, other stuff has this very vague description "it is measured in gold".

- It might be my misunderstanding but there seem to be a mismatch of description and actual process of creating items that take very long amount of time (like 100 hours for example for enchanting items). On on one hand if you succeed on a skill check you successfully create an item, meaning you have to do everything in one go (potentially allocating 1000 hours for that), if you fail then first material is consumed. If you are doing this every day do you repeatedly do rolls and potentially waste materials? What happens with tables that you roll for additional implications? Some random effects on enchantment can give you debuff until next long rest, but does it really matter if the whole thing will take you months to finish? Again this last issue comes from complexity of the system, where as you get to add more and more layers some things might have been clear to writers but unclear to the reader

Interesting resource to expand the artificer class options in 5e

My favorite part is the Magic Item Compendium with 200 items!

Awesome book to use if your players are into crafting and into creative use of items. Also a very nice reference to have when creating (or improvising) artisan npcs like blacksmiths and alchemists!