Brewer’s Supplies Can’t Make Beer and Other Crimes Against Craft
Tool proficiencies have always lived in a weird middle space in D&D: technically important, practically ignored. The 2024 revision tried to fix that by giving every tool a paired ability score and a short list of things you can make with it. It mostly succeeds at being tidy. It mostly fails at being interesting.
The clearest way to see this is with Alchemist’s Supplies. The 2024 rules let you make Acid, Alchemist’s Fire, component pouches, oil, paper, and perfume. Fine. But if you picked Alchemist’s Supplies, you probably had visions of bubbling concoctions and mysterious potions, not artisan soap. Xanathar’s Guide to Everything does more heavy lifting here: it ties the tool to Arcana checks for identifying potions, Investigation checks for spotting chemical traces at a crime scene, and a proper crafting table that includes antitoxin. It also gives you a graduated DC table with five options instead of two, which matters because a flat DC 15 to identify any substance, whether that’s lamp oil or a rare contact poison, is the kind of oversimplification that quietly kills verisimilitude at the table. The DCs in Xanathar’s are better used as a reference scale than a hard rulebook, but at least they give you five points on the scale instead of two.
Spell Scrolls Are Sitting Right There
Calligrapher’s Supplies is where 2024 makes its best move. Tying spell scroll crafting to this tool is a small codification of something a lot of tables were probably already doing informally, but having it in print matters. A cantrip costs 15 gold and a day’s work. A 3rd-level spell costs 150 gold and five days. You need the spell prepared on each day of scribing and you have to supply any material components yourself, because they’re consumed on completion. This is probably to keep an over zealous wizard from mass-producing Fireball scrolls over a long weekend.
What it opens up is potentially the more exciting part. A party with a few prepared casters and a couple thousand gold pieces can start handing offensive spells to people who would never otherwise cast them like soldiers, hired hands, and the barbarian who says “just trust me bro”. For a formal defense scenario, where the party has time to prepare and money to spend, a stockpile of spell scrolls distributed to non-magical allies can swing an encounter in ways that feel earned rather than dropped from the sky, and if you want to keep them from being forgotten in the Astral Plane, make sure you add them to our free Party Tracker tool!
Xanathar’s version of Calligrapher’s Supplies skips scroll crafting entirely and focuses on deciphering old documents and spotting forgeries instead. That overlap with the Forgery Kit is awkward so we’re glad 2024 gave them a bit more clear domains.
Cartography Is a Field Sport
The tool that benefits most from Xanathar’s treatment is Cartographer’s Tools. In 2024, the sole listed use is drawing a map of a small area at DC 15. That’s close to useless at most tables where players already have a map in front of them. Xanathar’s reframes the whole thing by remembering that cartographers don’t just draw maps in rooms, they go out and make them. Proficiency gives you Nature checks to read the terrain you’re standing in and Survival checks to predict where settlements might be, because you understand how geography shapes trade routes and habitation patterns. That is the kind of flavor that justifies a tool choice. It turns a drawing implement into a reason to let your players get lost somewhere interesting and have the skills to find their way back.
For the full breakdown on DC comparisons, crafting costs, and how the Xanathar’s versions interact with the 2024 rules, the deeper ruling has you covered.
Brewer’s Supplies, for the record, still cannot make beer in either edition. This is a policy failure of historic proportions and on behalf of the Rules as Written Show will continue fighting on everyone’s behalf for our right to party like it’s 999.