Crafter

Description

Crafting focused on creating simple weapons, armor and tools for other professions.

Putting more character build into Crafter let you refine your products more. This cost you more in components and time, but let you build better items.

The entire Crafter system was formulaic and available to read in the rule book. The only hidden information was how rare versions of common components modified your results, and this needed to be discovered through play.

Specialization in one type of item or another allowed you to refine these items even further. The result was that high end crafters were always in high demand, and while having more than one crafter in town with a given focus was useful in that it helped speed production, it also meant you were pretty unlikely to, as a community, have one master of each specialty present simultaneously.

Industrial Engineering

The name for the High tech version of Crafter may have been Industrial Engineering.

Inventions

Some of the best Crafter inventions came from hybridization efforts with the Tinkers. These included: Molds and the Computerized Forge. They were devices that were part crafter tool, part technology.

History

For a long time, Crafters were THE number one source for high quality weapons and armor, because while tinkers could build better stuff it all required fuel. And fuel was expensive and hard to come by. The advent of the Forge and Molds had real potential to revolutionize crafting and create opportunities for mass production, but were underused, perhaps because the needs of their customers were not unified enough for a mass production strategy to make sense.

As the game changed from a decaying post apoc world to a burgeoning sci fi setting, Crafters found themselves rapidly becoming irrelevant as solo builders. Especially once unlimited fuel and bullets were available, powered armor and ballistic weapons out paced their creations at every turn. Whereas chemists still found ways to use their trade, even those who specialized in bullets and fuel, to their advantage, Crafters did not have that kind of flexibility in a post-scarcity world. Ultimately teaming up with tinkers was necessary for them to remain relevant, though Imbued Weapons were still quite popular.

Player Crafters

NPC Crafters