Everyone assumes the tailor makes hats. The tailor also makes the armour half the heroes in this magazine are wearing, and every bandage that has ever saved one of their lives.
Tailoring has two halves and newcomers only ever notice one. The obvious half is clothes — robes, cloaks, hats, dyed anything, the entire reason your family's characters can look like themselves instead of like the starting kit. The half nobody expects is armour: leather and studded, which is what every archer, ninja and mage in Britannia wants to be wearing.
The third thing you make is bandages, and it's quietly the most important item in the game. Every fighter burns through hundreds a trip, and they're just cut cloth. A tailor with a loom is an infinite bandage factory, and that fact alone will make you the most-messaged person on the shard.
The work is gentle and the materials are everywhere: cloth from cotton and flax you can grow or buy, and leather from hides off any animal. Better creatures drop better hides — spined, horned, barbed — and better hides make better armour. It is the most relaxing trade in Britannia and one of the most useful, which is a rare combination.
You get 700 skill points in total, which is seven skills at 100 (Grandmaster). Here is a sheet that works, and why each line is on it. You can load this exact spread on the hero sheet in the magazine and slide the numbers around.
| Skill | Points | Why it's here |
|---|---|---|
| Tailoring | 100 | The craft: clothing, leather and studded armour, bandages, and repair on everything cloth and leather. |
| Arms Lore | 100 | Raises your chance of an exceptional piece and the bonus it carries. It applies to the armour you sew, not just to swords. |
| Tinkering | 100 | Sewing kits, scissors and dye tubs on demand, plus every other crafter's tools. Cheap independence. |
| Carpentry | 100 | The spinning wheel and loom are carpentry work, and so is the furniture for the shop. This is how cotton becomes cloth under your own roof. |
| Herding | 100 | Walk the sheep to the shears and the cows to the knife. Sounds like a joke; it is genuinely how a tailor gets wool and hides without owning a weapon. |
| Magery | 100 | Mark and Recall. Bolts of cloth and stacks of hides are heavy, and the shop is never next to the animals. |
| Meditation | 100 | Keeps the travel spells running back to back. Swap both of these for Alchemy and Cooking if you'd rather be a homesteader than a courier. |
| Total | 700 | of 700 |
Herding makes moving animals pleasant, not possible — anyone can use shears on a sheep. If 100 points for convenience offends you, drop Herding and take Cooking or Alchemy instead; the sheep will just be more annoying.
Same system as the smiths: fill BODs from NPC tailors and the rewards include runic sewing kits, which make leather armour with real magical properties. This is the only route to top-end leather, so start hoarding deeds early.
Skills go up by using them, and they go up fastest on a task that is just barely hard for you. Climb the rungs in order — each one stops paying off, and that's your cue to move up.
An NPC tailor trains you to 30 and sells bolts of cloth across the same counter. Buy far more cloth than looks reasonable — it's the cheapest training material in the game.
Gains come from attempts. Make the cheapest item on the menu over and over while sitting next to your cloth. Failures cost you a scrap of material and nothing else, which makes this the most forgiving grind any crafter gets.
Switch to leather items as soon as they'll succeed sometimes. Buy leather from the tanners at first; start cutting your own hides once you're killing or herding animals. Keep picking the hardest item you can land about half the time.
Studded is the training sweet spot and the thing players actually want. Exceptional pieces start appearing; Arms Lore makes them appear far more often. Keep those, recycle the rest.
The last stretch is slow. Spend it making full studded suits, stacks of bandages and a shop's worth of clothing, and fill bulk order deeds while you do — then your Grandmaster day comes with a runic kit attached.
The cheapest start of any trade in Britannia. A sewing kit, scissors and an armful of cloth will carry you most of the way to Grandmaster, and the only real expense on this list is the loom.
| What | Where | What it's for |
|---|---|---|
| Several sewing kits | Any tailor | They run out of uses. Buy a handful now; tinker your own later and never think about it again. |
| Scissors | Tailor or provisioner | Cuts cloth into bandages and hides into leather. The most-used tool you own. |
| Bolts of cloth | Tailor shop | Training fuel and bandage stock. Buy in bulk — this is where most of your startup gold should go. |
| A spinning wheel and a loom | Carpentry, or house add-on deeds | Turns raw cotton and flax into thread and then cloth, for free, forever. The one purchase that makes you self-sufficient. |
| Dye tubs and dyes | Tailor or tinker | The entire reason the family will come to you. Pick up the special tubs when you see them; some colours are hard to get again. |
| A knife | Provisioner | For taking hides off things. Keep one on every character, honestly. |
The right room makes training three times faster. These are the spots worth a rune.
The biggest tailor shops, the biggest bank and the most foot traffic. If you want to sell to players rather than to shopkeepers, be where they already are.
Free wool, forever, from an animal that cannot hurt you. The farms around Britain and Trinsic are the usual haunts.
Spinning wheel, loom, dye tubs and a cloth chest in one room. This is where a tailor stops spending money on materials.
For the bulk order deeds, not the goods. Collect them in passing; the runic rewards are the top of the trade.
Cut cloth with scissors and you have bandages. Every fighter in the family burns hundreds per trip and most of them are buying them at shop prices. Hand out a thousand and you will never pay for anything again.
Plain leather is the bottom rung. Spined, horned and barbed hides come off tougher creatures and make noticeably better armour. If a fighter in the family is clearing a dungeon, ask them to bring the hides home.
Failures eat material, and at 50 Tailoring you fail a lot. Train on cheap cloth and plain leather; save the barbed hides for when you can actually land an exceptional piece with them.
Some dyes and some special tubs are one-way or one-of-a-kind. Before you recolour something irreplaceable, make a plain copy and test on that. This advice exists because somebody had to learn it the hard way.
Britannia runs on favours. These are the people you want in your party and on your friends list.