Ceramics is making durable things out of clay and heat. A potter is nominally a specialist, but the underlying principles carry across an unusually wide range of goods — cooking pots and storage jars, roof tile and brick, oil lamps, drainpipe, votive figures — so a single trained pair of hands supplies most of what a village puts on a shelf or a roof.

The shaping is quick. An experienced potter throws a bowl on a stick wheel in minutes and works several pieces at once. What takes time is everything after: drying without cracking, firing without exploding, glazing without ruin.

Knowing the craft’s history, or recognising an unfamiliar technique or an anomalous clay, is a different question from throwing a pot — that is a Reasoning (Ceramics) test rather than a Ceramics one.

Crafting

Pottery is made by the common crafting routine — workshop, expense, test, result, masterwork rolls, repair. What follows is what is particular to the kiln.

Expense. Reckon one day per 6d of the finished piece’s sale price, at a material cost of 3d per day.

Test. A Ceramics Success Value test, read on the standard ladder, so that the same potter’s kiln yields flawed ware, plain sound ware, and the occasional piece worth keeping.

Building materials are priced by the piece rather than as possessions — nobody inventories a brick — and a potter fires them by the cartload alongside everything else.