Mundane Crafts can be used to produce goods rated by resources
Magical Crafts can be used to produce goods rated by artifact
Esoteric crafts produce other things entirely.
The five mundane crafts are Air, Earth, Fire, Water and Wood.
Each of these deals with the areas mentioned in the core rulebook.
The five magical crafts are analogues of these, each dealing with specific areas.
Crystalsis - Air analogue, deals with mechanisms and moving energy.
Geomancy - Earth analogue, deals with manse, demesnes and similar.
Pyrognostics - Fire analogue, deals with crafting and shaping the magical materials to specific uses.
Alchemy - Water analogue, deals with brewing potions and transmuting substances.
Genesis - Wood analogue, deals with shaping living things and creating life.
The corebook describes first age wonders as needing Craft(Magitech) - they are more likely to need Craft(Crystalsis) with mechanisms and similar wearing down. Damage to the material components would require Craft(Pyrognostics).
A magical craft cannot be more than three dots higher than it's mundane equivalent. And can't be possesed at all if there are no dots in the mundane equivalent. However, dots in the mundane equivalent can count towards minimums needed in certain types of project (at a ratio of 2:1).
The Esoteric crafts can be possessed by anyone, but almost always require tutoring from someone who has natural access to them, they cannot be learned by mortals.
Craft(Glamour) - Air Analogue (Fair Folk)
Craft(Fate) - Earth Analogue (Gods)
Craft(Moliation) - Fire Analogue (Demons)
Craft(Thought) - Water Analogue (Primordials)
Craft(Souls) - Wood Analogue (Deathlords)
Comments
My Reasons
for the record i think artifact crafting should be quicker and easier. my proposed solution to this is to homebrew charms or similar. but there do need to be speed bumps, of a kind, before accessing certain things.
There are aspects of the rules which I just don't like very much. One of them being that in canon you can do most things with the 5 mundane crafts - except for very specific craft(magitech) and craft(genesis) stuff. though a lot of things require thaumaturgic rituals/arts as well.
i see two approaches to this. either we strip away magical crafts entirely and do everything with the base 5 - possibly with some perm charms that enable gradually higher level stuff and include the thaumaturgy. this doesn't feel right to me.
or we formalise crafts more carefully - which is the approach i outlined above - basically similar to the systems of sorcery and martial arts, except rather than investing all points in one ability and many charms, points need to be invested in few charms but many abilities.
Basically constructing any simple magical object would require one craft, the more complex the object gets the more crafts might be required. So a 5dot daiklave would require Craft(Pyrognostics) whereas a 5dot warstrider would require Craft(Pyrognostics) and Craft(Crystalsis).
i like thaumaturgy and i like that it exists, but i'm not a huge fan of the systems. and what i would like is for anything that thaumurtugy can do to be replicated more simply for exalts by charms/abilities or whatever.