Dresden Files Item Creation Using Focus Items

Question

Hi guys here's one I would like answered that my GM and I had a long discussion about. Please help.

1. If I take ritual instead of thaumaturgy and get Crafting, and I make a focus item for it, what would its focus item be? Should it still be Conviction and Discipline? Or would it be Frequency and Strength? As in specialization.

2. Will I be able to use the focus items when I make Enchanted Items applying the bonus on frequency and strength?

Answer 1

First a point of clarification: typical Thaumaturgic focus items don't give you a choice between bonuses to Conviction and Discipline, they give a choice between bonuses to Lore or Discipline. (Conviction and Discipline bonuses are the options for evocations, not thaumaturgical rituals.) And to clarify further, the bonus is to either Lore or Discipline, not Lore and Discipline as you have it written in the question.

That said, when creating a thaumaturgic focus item for crafting rituals, you can choose either a frequency, or strength bonus (see YS p. 280, top of the second column) instead of a Lore or Discipline bonus. However, notice that such a focus item would only be useful for creating enchanted items since strength and frequency are irrelevant to the creation of focus items (and the book even says that you can't use focus items to make other focus items).

Finally, it's worth noting that taking Ritual with a specialisation in crafting won't let you create more focus items and enchanted items than you have focus item slots and enchanted item slots:

Wizard characters get a number of “slots” for different kinds of items, under the assumption that there is a practical maximum of items that a wizard can make and maintain at one time. That number rises via character advancement (and the purchase of the Refinement ability—see page 182), allowing the wizard to either possess more items or create stronger ones. —YS p. 278

To get more slots to fill with your creations, take Refinement during character advancement.