Utilizing Herbalism in your Dungeons and Dragons campaign can be tricky and outright difficult. But, Herbalism is now more useful than ever thanks to the release of the Artificer class with the Eberron release. Furthermore, crafting your own magic items is now very popular.
This is why, as a player, you need to know more about Herbalism. So let’s get to it.
The Herbalism Kit
A Herbalism Kit is essential for every Herbalist in the game. The herbalism kit includes clippers, pouches, vials, and a mortar. With this kit at the ready, you will gain a proficiency bonus to ability checks made to identify or apply herbs and is essential to create potions of healing and useful antitoxin. The cost of a kit is 5gp and it weighs 3 pounds.
In this article, we’re going to comply with Xanathar’s Guide to Everything. And according to the guide, the kit includes pouches that can store herbs, leather gloves and clippers for harvesting plants, a pestle and mortar, and several glass jars that you need.
Another advantage is that the Artificer can choose various tools to be proficient with. Including a Poisoner’s Kit that is an awesome tool proficiency.
All about the plants
There’s no straight road or a shortcut to Herbalism in 5e, as there is no canonical Herbalism skill. So, to be a great herbalist, you must compile certain proficiencies together to round out the skills.
For example, Arcana for knowledge of how to use various plants and creatures; Perception or Investigation for finding various plants and ingredients in uncharted and unobvious areas; Medicine for using medicinal healing potion 5e purposes; and Survival or Nature to identify poisonous and dangerous plants.
These skills combined together can create a decent Herbalist and help everyone in your party. It could be tough for inexperienced players, but the payout is worth it. The whole world could look different to a skilled Herbalist.
Gathering the ingredients
Now we’ve come to the main point of having a Herbalism Kit, which is to add your proficiency bonus to Herbalism checks for gathering useful ingredients.
Your proficiency could also help you spot and find the plants that you’re looking for, including the season, time of day, terrain, challenges, and many more.
With enough proficiency, your character can passively search for ingredients during your adventure. Don’t forget to let your DM know that though. To make this ability even stronger, you can combine it with high Wisdom. This way, your passive perception is good enough to find plants that you really need.
How to apply Herbalism in-game
No matter if you’re a player or a DM, you need creativity to create exciting formulas for magic items. You can use various resources online, one of them is the Artificer’s Field Guide that you can download for free. So you better check that out before and during your adventure.
You can use all kinds of information during your adventure, for example how to use Calcena. Calcena is a small pink-brown mushroom that is dangerous can cause anyone to hallucinate for a few minutes. But, for a skilled Herbalist, this mushroom can be mixed with oils and create quick-performing potions of healing.
If you are a DM, you can help your Herbalist players with knowledge of many formulas through sage NPCs, random discoveries, ancient books, or allow them to create their own formulas.
Other playable options
I have talked about how good and strong the Artificer is, but there are other options available for you as well. These options you may have known before, such as Cleric, Wizard, Ranger, and Druid. So you don’t have to choose the Artificer, you can use these options to take advantage of Herbalism.
Conclusion
Herbalism in Dungeons and Dragons is fun and offers so many available options, formulas, ingredients, and ways to utilize it. Using your creativity to come up with unique formulas is without a doubt a fun thing to do. Don’t forget to communicate with your DM to see what actions are allowed.
If you are a DM, you can use various ways to help the Herbalist players thrive and be less restricted. It can be difficult at first, but once you get used to it, Herbalism is really fun to engage with.