While the primary purpose of Blacksmithing is to forge armor and weapons from metal, for an adventurer such events are important milestones that generally will not occur everyday. The following are some tasks that require proficiency with Blacksmith's Tools that provide a more day-to-day utility to the proficiency, giving them minor ways to enhance or adapt their gear.

These minor crafts can be completed in two hours, and can be done as part of a long rest.

The following are 'minor crafting options' for Blacksmiths:

One of the perks of having a blacksmith in the field is their ability to keep gear in its best condition, giving you an edge (sometimes literally) in the quality of your gear and weapons. Over the course of 2 hours, a Blacksmith can maintain a number of weapons or sets of armor equal to their proficiency bonus, granting each weapon or armor maintained a special d6 Quality Die.

For a weapon, this can be rolled and added to an attack or damage roll, representing a case where the perfect state of the gear turned a miss into a hit or dealt a bit of extra damage. For a set of armor, the die can be rolled when hit by an attack, and the damage taken from that attack can be reduced by that amount.

Rolling this die doesn't require an action, but once rolled it is spent and can't be regained until the blacksmith maintains that armor or weapon again.

While the field crafting of armor is often not possible, you can make smaller adjustments on the go. Over the course of 2 hours, you can turn a set of plate mail into a half plate or a breastplate, or refit a set of heavy or medium armor to fit another user that is equal in size or smaller than the original user.

Every adventurer has slightly different preferences in their gear, and your skills allow you to make slight modifications to nonmagical weapons made of metal. These modifications take 2 hours, require a heat source, and require you to pass a DC 14 blacksmithing tool's check (on failure, the weapon is damaged and has a -1 penalty to attack rolls until fixed). You can perform one of the following modifications:

• You can weight a weapon, giving it the heavy property. If it did not already have the two-handed property, it gains the two-handed property.
• You can remove the heavy property from a weapon, reducing its damage dice by d2.
• You can add the light property to a weapon without the heavy property, reducing its damage dice by d2.
• You can silver the weapon (requires 5 silver scraps, doubled for two handed weapons).

Using this method will make some… bad weapons. This is largely intentional. If you want to make a more functional weapon, you can make it from scratch using the Weapon Templates. This represents quick hacks to an existing weapon.

Sometimes in the course of adventuring, weapons or armor will become severely damaged, suffering a penalty to attack rolls or AC. Over the course of 2 hours, you can repair this damage, though at the discretion of the GM you may need other materials to perform this task if it is heavily damaged. Weapons that are entirely broken (such as a snapped sword) are generally beyond simple repair.

Shields and bracers can't benefit from armor crafting modifications.

The effects of a helmet are included in armor; this entry is largely to allow for standalone helmet creation for enchanters.

Smelting ore requires specialized facilities. This can usually be accomplished in a fully equipped smithy, but consult your GM for where it might be appropriate. Adventurers rarely smelt their own ore; these are included primarily for informational purposes. Smelting magical ores may require more specialized facilities or locations.

To create a weapon go through five steps to determine the final damage and properties of the weapon. Adding a d2 means increasing the die by one size (d6 + d2 = d8), and the converse for subtracting a d2.

You can divide your damage die into smaller dice that equal the same total. For example, a d12 can become 2d6 or be reduced again to 3d4. Each time you do this, the crafting base DC increases by +1. You can't divide dice to be lower than d4.

You can additionally add Material Modifiers and Crafting Modifiers to template weapons. These modifiers may add additional properties as listed by the modifier, and their difficulty modifier is incorporated into the weapon.

Custom weapons are a bit more expensive than normal weapons. This is a reflection of their customization and greater difficulty to craft, as derived from their crafting DC.

Masterwork: Failing a crafting roll for Masterwork doesn't cause a failure, but the resulting weapon is only a Masterwork if all crafting rolls succeed past the DC of Masterwork. An item is automatically masterwork if every roll qualified for a Masterwork version.

Damage Reduction: While you are wearing armor, bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage that you take from nonmagical weapons is reduced by the value of your Damage Reduction to a minimum of 1.

Supplemental Materials are doubled for weapons with the two-handed property or armor.

Magical difficulty modifier is reduced to +3 if combined with Mithril or Adamantine material modifiers.

Common

This is a massive unwieldy shield. While carrying it, your speed is reduced by 10 feet. At the end of each of your turns, pick a direction. You have half cover from attacks in a cone in that direction. Alternatively, you can pick a single target, tracking the movement. You have half cover against attacks from that target (and only that target).

Common

Your shield is considered a martial melee weapon, dealing 1d4 damage on hit.

Common

While wearing bracers and not using a shield, as a reaction to being hit by an attack, you can attempt to parry the attack with your bracer, adding +2 AC bonus against the triggering attack.

Uncommon

While wearing bracers and not using a shield, as a reaction to being hit by an attack, you can attempt to parry the attack with your bracer, adding +2 AC bonus against the triggering attack. If this causes your AC to be exactly equal to the attack roll and the attacking weapon is made of a common metal, the attacking weapon is destroyed.

Requires attunement

Deals 1d12 piercing damage, and has the Ammunition (60/180), Two-Handed, Loud, and Stormcharged properties.

• Stormcharged. When you use an action, bonus action, or reaction to attack with a Stormcharged Weapon, you can make only one Attack regardless of the number of attacks you can normally make. If you could otherwise additional attacks with that action, the weapon deals an extra 3d6 lightning or thunder damage per attack that was foregone.
• Loud. Your weapon rings with thunder that is audible within 300 feet of you whenever it makes an attack.

While blacksmithing allows for a huge amount of custom creation, there will always be new things beyond the system.

The following are some guidelines for how to make something beyond the system.

• Trivial items should be composed of metal scraps, and have a DC in the range of 9-12. These represent things blacksmiths can easily make. Common items should require ingots, and have a DC of 12-18 depending on if they are simple or exotic. Uncommon and rarer items should have uncommon and rarer materials matching their rarity.
• Blacksmithing alone can make magical weapons only to the extent that magical components are used.
• If you would like Blacksmithing alone to make fully magical swords, you can largely just take the materials from an equivalent enchanting recipe and add them to materials of the weapon, and then take the higher of the difficulty and crafting time of the projects.

The system is, by its nature, extremely extensible. Great pains have been taken to make things as 'balanced' as possible. But this doesn't mean the rules transcend common sense. As a player, tell your GM what you want to make and be open to adjustments to how it would work. As a GM, tell players how their projects will work from the start, and be open to the idea they can make cool things… these crafted items are part of their 'loot' and don't need to be 'power neutral' as long as they aren't breaking anything.