Craft
Artistic Talent: Linguistics or Craft?
Linguistics is not the "Art" skill, any more than Investigation is the "Sight" skill. Linguistics does entail a very specific artistic skill—in the ability to produce elegant calligraphy, and the ability to produce, translate, or reproduce very specific aesthetics. Language in itself is a representative of such aesthetics: words evolve from pictograms to ideograms, hieroglyphs form and refine into runes that make up descendent languages thousands of years later.
Very specific forms of art are also constructs of language: maps, diagrams, and supplemental illustrations fall into these categories. Where art is concerned, Linguistics mainly provides the ability to produce beautiful and complex letters, and extremely complex, detailed informational illustrations. Drawing one's Lunar mate gobbling cake, or painting a gorgeous landscape or a portrait of the Circle's Twilight, are all examples of the Craft Ability.
This Ability is necessary to create artifacts.
Craft is used to create or repair objects through skilled labor, whether forging a sword, cutting the gem for a merchant prince’s brooch, or planning and overseeing the construction of a temple. The Exalted and other supernatural beings are capable of using this Ability to create artifacts, treasures of legendary quality that possess powerful magic of their own.
Special rules: When a character first buys this Ability, she must declare an area of expertise to which her crafting skill applies. Potential areas of expertise include weapon forging, armoring, architecture, tailoring, woodwork, carpentry, cooking, and anything else a player might come up with, covering similarly broad (but not all-encompassing) concepts.
Additional areas of expertise must be purchased as independent Abilities—thus, a character might have Craft (Weapon Forging) 4, and Craft (Gemcutting) 2. Of note are Craft (Artifacts) and Craft (Geomancy); these two craft skills in specific are needed to craft artifacts and design and raise manses, respectively.
For mundane crafts projects, Storytellers are encouraged to be generous in interpreting logical edge cases for uses of Craft. If a character needs to repair a horseshoe, but only has Craft (Armoring), it's reasonable to declare that the character's Craft rating encompasses basic metal fabrication and to allow her to use her Craft rating anyway, perhaps at +1 difficulty.
If You Liked the 2nd Edition Craft Better... (Houserule)
The mundane Craft Abilities are:
- Air: calligraphy, jewelry-making, creating precision instruments and glassblowing (making small, decorative or high-precision items)
- Earth: masonry, stone cutting, creating earthworks (creating buildings and large objects with stone or earth)
- Fire: blacksmithing, making ceramics (forging and casting large metal objects and creating objects using fire)
- Wood: carpentry, weaving, paper-making, flower arranging (carving, weaving and manipulating natural materials)
- Water: cooking, brewing, leather working, pharmacy and poison-making (boiling and cooking plants, chemicals and animal materials)
My (Np) houserule is that characters can use these five Crafts Abilities. It does save a few Ability and Bonus points for characters but not significantly.
Other areas of expertise still require individual Abilities, such as Craft (Architecture), Craft (Artifacts), or Craft (Geomancy). All supernatural and difficult, academic Crafts are in this group.
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