Pathfinder, like its predecessor D&amp;D 3.5, follows careful guidelines regarding the amount of treasure awarded and the value of items with magical properties.

That means while it's up to you as DM to decide what monster body parts are worth and what items can be crafted from them, be aware that you're effectively giving out treasure.


While there are no official rules, it stands to reason that the corpse has the creature's physical properties. A red dragon's hide is still tough and fire resistant even after separated from the dragon. However, magical properties (like a displacer beast's displacement) might degrade over time unless fixed in place with enchantment.
A house rule in our 3.5 games is that the item itself may have some properties of the creature, but the item does not confer these abilities to its wielder. For example, a red dragonhide shield won't protect you from a fireball, but the next adventurer to stumble upon your charred remains will find the shield undamaged. In fact, this rule made its way into Pathfinder's rules on dragonhide armour. While the armour doesn't confer energy resistance, the price to add the energy resistance enchantment is reduced by 25%.
You can craft weapons, armour, trophies and other items from slain creatures. Here's what I suggest:


Weapons/armour: You're essentially just crafting a normal item using the creature's corpse as special materials. Make craft checks as normal, but you don't pay the raw material cost. The GM decides what special properties the material has, if any, what items can be made, and what those items cost (for the purpose of craft duration and sale price). Properties shouldn't normally be as powerful as a permanent magic enhancement (but if they are, the GM should be aware of the treasure value he's awarding every time he uses that creature).
Wondrous items: Mundane crafting isn't enough to create a permanent magic item. You need rituals to fix the magic property in place. At best, a creature's body provides a discount of up to 25% on crafting an item: e.g. a displacer beast hide to make a cloak of displacement.
Spell components: 250gp for powdered horn sounds like a great way to get rich. However, that's the buy price, so you'd sell it at 125gp, and that's after processing: as per the craft skill, raw materials are only worth 1/3 of the finished item. So at best, body parts harvested for spell components are worth a fraction of the part's price.
Trinkets: Preserved monster hearts, heads on plaques and so forth should only be worth a few gp at most. Use the craft skill as a guideline. You can normally make half your craft check per week in gold as a profession anyway, so this isn't out of bounds.



If your players try to carry back every animal part for gold, this will lead to a lot of boring bean-counting and extra gold. Remind players that their carrying capacity is limited and body parts weigh a lot. Have the market saturate and suddenly nobody wants to buy all these grell beaks. Or abstract it away: say "you sell all the collected monster parts for 50gp", or you can craft as a profession for double value for two weeks after you have been on an adventure where you collected parts.

Harvesting parts from slain creatures
Kabuto had Orochimaru's DNA and a sacrifice, so why did he not use the Edo Tesei? Or couldn't he have used Anko, like Sasuke did?
