Animalcraft is the domestication, breeding, keeping and handling of animals, droving and driving included. Individual livelihoods specialise, but the skill applies across all the domesticated animals of a culture — in temperate country, four broad groups: birds, dogs, horses, and livestock, the last taking in sheep, goats, oxen, cattle, pigs, chickens, ducks and geese. Other cultures add their own.
Animal lore. A character may test Animalcraft to read a domesticated animal’s health or temper:
| CF | MF | MS | CS |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unknown | Incomplete | General | Specific |
Training. Preparing an animal to obey under stress, and improving what it can do, takes three steps.
Time — six months with the beast, about an hour a day, usually broken into ten-minute sessions rather than taken in one sitting.
Test — an Animalcraft Success Value test. Subtract one SV if the animal is not recently born; subtract one SV again if it is wild-caught.
| SV | Training |
|---|---|
| ≤ 2 | Faulty. The animal has its base Mastery Levels, but a −1 penalty to its Control Secondary Rolls thereafter. |
| 3–4 | Base. The animal has its base Mastery Levels. |
| 5+ | Trained. The animal has its base Mastery Levels plus one bonus training roll per Value Diamond. Before proceeding, the trainer may trade one such roll to cut the training time by a month. |
A Critical Failure is a setback: training time increases by d3 months, whatever the Success Value.
Result — roll one d10 per Value Diamond earned, each separately, against a Target Number equal to the animal’s Reasoning. Every success grants the animal one Mastery Boost to its Initiative, Shock, Dodge, Press and each of its natural weapons. No animal may ever accumulate more Mastery Boosts than half its Creativity, rounded up, however many training rolls succeed — which is the ceiling that separates a clever dog from a merely obedient one.
Retraining an animal that has not reached its ceiling is possible, but the trainer must at least match the best Value Diamond result previously achieved with that same animal before any new training rolls are granted.
Control. To command an animal, the handler tests Animalcraft at the start of their turn. In battle or comparable stress the test is adjusted by the creature’s own Initiative Secondary Modifier, with a further −10 for an animal that was taken wild and trained afterwards. Any success issues the command as a free action; any failure spends a turn on it. Without a roll, the animal simply carries on doing whatever it was doing. A mounted animal is handled the same way, but through Riding.
Veterinary work. Treating a beast is a Physician test at −10, offset by any positive Animalcraft Secondary Modifier — a stockman with a good hand and a rough grasp of medicine treats their own animals at no penalty at all.