After far too many months and just as many drafts, the number of completed Guile spheres has jumped from a handful to 10. This was a long time coming; all of the spheres that deal with items, tools, and crafting have so much in common yet are so unique that I kept writing the rules for one, checking it against the others, and discovering my understanding of the concept kept changing and I needed to go back and rewrite things. As it is I'm hoping its all clear but I will readily admit I can't see the forest for the trees anymore; I would love to tell you all how its supposed to work, and you can let me know if I succeeded or not.

The completed Guile spheres now are:

Sphere - Alchemy

Sphere - Artifice

Sphere - Cooking

Sphere - Infiltration 

Sphere - Investigation

Sphere - Medicine

Sphere - Scoundrel

Sphere - Scout

Sphere - Survival

Sphere - Trap

Tinker is also close to being done, but is taking a little bit more massaging, and I didn't want to wait any longer. While Infiltration, investigation, Scoundrel, and Scout are great and I'm happy about them, the reason this has taken so long to get out is alchemy, artifice, cooking, medicine, survival, and trap. It turns out when you have a dedicated design goal of making mundane items and crafting more interesting and then have 7 (counting tinker) spheres dealing with it all in some way, shape, or form, that's a lot of overlapping mechanics to try and get right.

Crafting and Raw Materials

As was discussed a few posts ago, item crafting exists in three levels: you can ignore it and just buy from shops, you can go to the shops for materials and craft yourself, or you can go all the way up the tech tree; gathering materials from the wild, refining it, and building items yourself as needed.

Generally speaking, there are 11 raw materials you can gather from the wilds in Spheres of Power: wood, ore, fibers, hides, stone, clay, sand, gemstones herbs, bones, or food. While there are varieties in all of these, herbs are the most codified with 10 different types (savory herbs, sweet herbs, intense herbs, etc.)

Each of the crafting spheres interacts with different materials, and in different ways:

The Survival Sphere deals directly with gathering these from the wilds and using them to make simple constructions (also called Stone Age constructions).

The Cooking Sphere takes food and herbs and turns them into potent party buffs.

The Artisan Sphere refines wood into planks, ore into metal, fibers into cloth, hides into leather, sand into glass, and turns that and other materials into strong, useful creations. It also can refine metal into gears.

The Alchemy Sphere refines herbs into chemicals and uses them to create all sorts of alchemical goods.

The Tinker Sphere takes gears from the Artisan sphere and uses them to create all sorts of technical wonders.

Medicine and Trap do not make anything, but do make great use of these items made by the other spheres.

Tech Levels

Incidentally, this is the primary definition of 'tech levels' in the game as well:

A Stone Age means NPCs can be espected to have the Survival sphere and Cooking spheres, but that is it.

A Bronze Age game means NPCs can be expected to have the Survival and Artisan spheres, but chemicals for alchemy are rarely found outside the circles of court officials, and Artificers need the Master Craftsman talent to enable working with iron.

A Medieval Age game means anything from the Survival and Artisan spheres can be found for purchase, and chemicals for Alchemy are available for purchase, though alchemy items are rare. Tinker is almost unheard of.

A Renaissance Age game means anything from the Survival, Artisan, and Alchemy spheres can be found on market shelves, and gears are available for purchase.

A Steampunk/Industrial Age game means everything, including alchemy materials and tinkering creations, can be found in any marketplace.

it is entirely possible to play a stone age game (or a frontier game with no way to head back home) where you can still make yourself a mech suit, but you would need to take every talent yourself to progress up the technology tree to do so.

Feedback

The biggest thing I need to know is if this all makes sense, and if what is on the page matches what is in my head; I'm sure there's another pass that Artificing and everything needs to be clear, but if people can point out where legacy text is hanging around, the better.

Thank you all for your patience, I'll have Tech up soon, and then the big thing to tackle is social skills, which like crafting, have a whole lot of spheres tied into those mechanics.