Leatherworker's Tools

Working with the hides of animals, you can craft armor, artwork and even clothes out of what nature provides. While most find your occupation to be rather noxious or odoriferous, everyone is happy for a new waterskin, or wineskin, when you start your travels.

The following text replaces the text found on pg. 82 of Xanathar's Guide to Everything.

Leatherworker's tools include a knife, a small mallet, an edger, a hole punch, thread, a small sealed wooden vat, and leather scraps. Your tools weigh 10 lbs and costs 8 gp.

Before you can begin, you need a source of leather. You can either prepare your own leather, or buy pre-prepared leather. If you prepare your own leather, there is no cost to build your own equipment.

If you wish to not purchase pre-prepared leather, you can easily find your own out in the wild. This requires tracking down a creature, killing it, and beginning the process of tanning.

Most jobs, like if you are wanting to craft armor, require a small to medium sized beast, though certain jobs, like a wineskin, would only require a tiny beast, per the DM's discretion.

After you track down your beast, you must then begin harvesting the leather by skinning it. This requires 1 hour of work for every size category that the beast is, i.e. a tiny creature requires 1 hour, a medium creature requires 3 hours. Once you finish this task, you must then scrub the leather clean.

Then you must fill your small wooden vat with urine, you then leave the cleaned skins in that sealed vat for a full day.

After fermenting, you can remove the skins and scour off the hairs. Once the fur is removed, you then must then pound animal dung into the leather and return it back into your sealed vat for another day to soften the leather for the tanning process. Scouring and applying the dung can be completed during a short rest.

Finally, you have leather that is ready to be tanned and you have two options for it. You can either boil the leather in water and wax to get strong and sturdy leather, or use vegatable oil which will provide supple and easily workable leather. See below for more information on types of leather.

Most cities and larger villages will have their own tanner, and you can buy pre-prepared leathers there.

Large leather can be cut into 4 medium pieces, a medium piece into 2 small pieces, a small piece into 2 tiny pieces.

When crafting your equipment, you will need to first have your leather available and decide what you wish to craft. Most equipment will only take a day or two to craft as you can work on up to 2 lbs of equipment in a day.

After every day you spend working on your equipment, you must make a Leatherworker's Tools (Dexterity) check with the DC determined by the size of the equipment. The craft checks are assumed to happen at the end of the work period, and on a fail you make no progress for the day.

As a leatherworker, you can create a lot of useful equipment, but it must be mostly leather. Some items may require bits of wood, cloth, or metal; if it is an important part of the equipment you are unable to craft it unless you are proficient in the required tool, per the DM's discretion. Some items, like Studded Leather, require putting metal studs in leather, you can build the leather armor and then hire a black smith to add in the metal studs.

When you boil leather in water and then in wax, you create a much harder leather that can help you withstand impacts and offers 1 point of Damage Reduction. The vegetable oil tanned leather is more flexible and cheaper but is not as durable. The DC for working with boiled leather is higher than vegetable tanned leather due to how tough and brittle the leather is.

When you are hit by non-magical Bludgeoning, Piercing or Slashing damage, you reduce the total damage you take by 1.

If you wish to dye your equipment, you can purchase alcohol based dyes in a large enough town and spend a work day preparing up to a large sized piece of leather in a color or design of your choice. This does not require a check to accomplish.