Salvage

Salvage is in everyone’s abilities menu, after the skills’ own uses. Choose something you carry. It takes ten minutes. If something comes into view, you stop, the item is untouched, and the time is lost.

You need: nothing. Anyone can salvage, trained or not, anywhere, with no tools.

When the time is up, you make one check for each material in the item that a craft works, using that material’s skill. A ruby-tipped hardwood quarterstaff takes two checks: Woodcraft for the hardwood and Jewelcraft for the ruby. You make each check even if you are not trained in the skill. Your stat’s modifier is then all you add.

• Made: the material comes back as pieces, half its weight, and at least one piece. A gem comes back whole, keeping its size and cut.
• Failed: the material is lost. A gem only loses a step: its cut drops one (down to crude), and if it cannot, its size drops one (down to tiny). A natural 2 shatters it. So does a failed check on a tiny gem with no cut left to lose.

The item itself is gone either way, with any improvements from a forge. From a stack, only one is taken apart. Materials that no craft works, like a cloth wrapping, give nothing.

Its magic can be caught. Before the material checks, a magic or rare item makes one more check for each of its affixes, on Willpower and Enchanting. Each one made leaves a magic crystal of the affix’s colour. A deep rare item may also leave a rare material. This works on an unidentified item too, but the messages do not name its affixes. Magic crystals has the numbers.

You cannot salvage:

• something you wear or wield (take it off first),
• something protected: a quest’s item, a unique item, or an item of Proof,
• goods you have not paid for in a shop,
• a weapon of spirit,
• coins (they are never melted down),
• something with nothing a craft works, like a scroll or food.

Each skill you rolled earns a training mark if you are trained in it, whatever came of the check. So does Enchanting, if any affix was checked.

The hardwood quarterstaff with its ruby gives 5 hardwood billets when the Woodcraft check is made, and the ruby when the Jewelcraft check is made.

Salvaging takes 600 seconds (10 minutes). Each material’s check is 2d12 plus the modifier of the stat its skill works with, what talents add to checks of that stat, and what that one skill gives to its craft, against 12 plus the material’s work. A natural 2 always fails, a natural 24 always succeeds. A material salvaged gives back 50% of its weight as stock, at least one piece.

See also: Crafting, Enchanting, and Forging at the anvil.