Enchanting

Enchanting is a hard and expensive profession, but one eagerly pursued by many all the same. The makers of miracles, the craftsmen of wonder, no other profession holds the fascination of adventurers quite like Enchanter, for their domain encompasses the large majority of magical items.
An item need not pass through an enchanter’s hands to be magical, indeed many a blacksmith has forged a magical blade with the right materials, but the true wonder of enchantment is to turn the mundane magical. An enchanter can turn even the most base and commonplace item into something wonderful and powerful, and when given the head start of working with an already well crafted item can craft things of legend.
Many enchanters further specialize in subdomains such as Scroll Scribing or Wand Whittling for more specialized good that require more specialized tools, with many even pursuing such things as Jewelry Crafting in order to create the precious items that most easily enchant, but the general field of Enchanting still covers a large swath of the wondrous.
Scrolls are heavily featured as a component of nearly all magical items, forming the basis for the powerful enchantments that imbue them with their magic. These are templates of a sort, and thus the ability to craft scrolls with Scroll Scribery is often the most desired of the subdomains for an Enchanter.

Quick Reference

While each step will go into more depth, the quick reference allows you to at a glance follow the steps to make a magic item in its most basic form:

• Select the magic item that you would like to craft from any of the Magic Item Tables.
• Acquire the items listed in the materials column for that item.
• Use your Arcana skill to infuse the option using the number of hours listed in the Crafting Time column, or during a long rest using the crafting camp action if the crafting time is 2 hours or less.
• For every 2 hours, make a crafting roll of 1d20 + your Intelligence modifier + your Arcana proficiency.
• On success, you mark 2 hours of completed time. Once the completed time is equal to the crafting time, the magic item is complete. On failure, the crafting time is lost and no progress has been made during the 2 hours. If you fail 3 times in a row, the crafting is a failure and all materials are lost.

Related Skill & Ability Score

Rather than any one tool, Enchanting primarily uses the Arcana skill. Due to the subdomains of scrolls (Scroll Scribing) and runes (Runecraft) being part of enchanting, proficiency in Calligraphy Tools is often useful. Enchanting uses your Intelligence modifier. While magic comes in many forms (Arcane, Primal, Divine) and many casters are able to control it with other aspects of their talent, the ability to systematically bind it into magic items requires a deep understanding of its inner workings that can only be accomplished through meticulous study and knowledge.

Psionic Items

The items listed on the Psionic Items table is the exception to this rule. These are items infused with psionic power, and instead use the “Psionics” skill, a skill that any psionic character can be considered proficient if not using special psionics rules. These items are something of a subtype of enchanting, and may not exist in your setting if psionics aren’t included. Consult your GM.

Materials: Essences & Components

The materials of enchanting are Essences and Components. Essences come in three different types: Arcane, Primal, and Divine—as well as five rarities: common, uncommon, rare, very rare, and legendary. What an Essence is can vary greatly, as they are things of innate magic that is used to power the Enchanter’s creations. They could be organs of magical monsters (such as the heart of a dragon which would be a rare primal essence) or they can be synthesized from magical reagents into a magical compound. Components are a broad category of items ranging from the base item you are enchanting to any extraneous bits needed to be added. One unique component that is present in many enchantments is a Spell Scroll of various types of spells that form the basis of the sort of the magic the item has.

Replacing Spell Scrolls

A crafter that is capable of casting magic can replace the spell scroll in an enchantment with the ability to cast that spell, but when doing so they must cast that spell for each crafting check they make on that item. This is an exhausting process, draining their magic far more deeply than normal casting, and confers a level of exhaustion each time this technique is used to replace a crafting check. If a magic item requires multiple scrolls, only one of them can be replaced in this way, though if an additional spell caster that can cast the necessary spell can assist you, they can replace a second scroll, though suffering the same penalty.

Exhausting & Difficult Method

This mechanic is intentionally quite difficult to use—even for casters that are capable of casting the spell. The typical process would be to make the scroll first to formalize their thoughts and process, laying down the patterns and templates for the magic item. It also removes a very costly gate in the process, so should not be easily bypassed.

Crafting Roll

Putting that together means that when you would like to enchant an item, your crafting roll is as follows:

Enchanting Modifier = your Arcana proficiency bonus + your Intelligence modifier

Success and Failure

After you make a crafting roll, if you succeed, you make 2 hours of progress toward the total crafting time (and have completed one of the required checks for making an item). Checks for Enchanting do not need to be immediately consecutive. If you fail three times in a row, all progress and materials are lost and can no longer be salvaged. Failure means that no progress is made during that time. Once an item is started, even if no progress is made, the components reserved for that item can only be recovered via salvage.

Enchanting Example and Walkthrough.

Caius the Wizard has a keen interest in magic items. At the start, all he has is the Arcana skill and big dreams. Let’s walk through how turn those into a magic item. Caius the Wizard happens to be a level 4 wizard in this moment in time. Strangely, he’s the only human in his party, and his lack of darkvision has been holding them back.
So, Caius decides to embark on making a set of Goggles of Night.
Let’s follow his journey:  First, he'll need to gather that materials. He needs googles, a scroll of darkvision, a common primal essence, and an uncommon arcane essence. Goggles are easily acquired from the local merchants for a few gold pieces, the rest will be a bit trickier.
A common primal essence isn't that hard to come by, and can be found by harvesting elementals, dragons, giants, or monstrosities, even at the humble 0-4 CR rating of monsters Caius has been dealing with. The uncommon arcane essence will require a hunt. His party takes on a CR 5 undead, but on their d100, they roll a 64... no luck, all that was left was some mangled bones and 3 uncommon poisonous reagents. After a few more tries, it seems luck isn't with them.
Fortunately, Caius has a plan. That uncommon poisonous reagent he got can be combined with an uncommon curative and uncome reactive reagent in a simple 4 hour process with Alchemist's supplies and a head source (page 181). Boiling them all down, he's left with some magical residue forming an uncommon arcane essence. Now all he needs is the scroll of darkvision. Caius really should have this spell long since given his darkvision shortcomings, but never got around to it. So Caius shells out 90 gp to buy a scroll of it. Not to learn it though, of course, as soon he'll never need that spell again!
All the pieces are assembled. As a level 4 Wizard with 16 Intellgience and proficiency in the Arcana skill, Caius Enchanting Modifier is 2 (his Arcana proficiency bonus) + 3 (his intelligence modifier), so is 5 total. During his next long rest, Caius makes his first crafting check, and rolls a d20! It's a 10. 10 + 5 = 15, so he as a success. He's 1/4th of the way done, but needs to spend the rest of that long rest sleeping. The next day he rolls again, 6! That's only 11! One failure. The next night it's a 15 for a check of 20! That's a second success. Tragedy almost strikes with the next two checks being a 4 and 2, with results of 9 and 7 respectively, that's two more failures! All of his hard work is on the edge of being lost.
But Caius asks to take an extra long break at the next town. He uses the 4 hours to make his next check, taking a 10 on the roll to forestall disaster. As he wasn't too ambitious and the Goggles of Night are only DC 13, that means by taking 10, Caius has a minimum check of a 15, and it's a pass. Feeling better, now that he's no longer one checked from the whole project failing, he makes his next check on the road, and gets an 18, for a total of 24. A fourth success, and he can take hiswatch that night with darkvision at long last... ...unfortunately he'd been up too late working and fell asleep, so his party got ambushed anyway, but that's a story for another time!
Caius the Wizard now can see in the dark as well as any pointy eared elf or long bearded dwarf! It took a bit longer than he'd hoped, but now Caius has his very first shiny magic item made by his own hands!

Type

Arcane