Enhancing magic items - Metals

Зачаровывая волшебные предметы - Металлы - Enhancing magic items - Metals VGtATM

Raw metals

Minstrels would have you believe there are metals that can talk even before they are forged, and places where metal grows as trees, gleaming in glorious plenty for anyone who finds the hidden groves, but I have yet to see such things with my own eyes and remain what some sages call "strongly unconvinced." This section is not an exhaustive guide to the pure metals and alloys used in Faerfinian magic, but rather practical notes on the most com-monly used metallic substances used in magic and the construc¬tion of magical items and the most common magical treatments for metals. Metals and alloys are listed together, alphabetically. A dwarf would chortle at the scanty magical lore gathered here, and it will even look paltry to the eyes of most sorcerer-smiths, who know and use far more alloys and a surprisingly large number of additional rare metals than I describe here. Yet these pages pro¬vide an overview of the value of certain metals to magic, a subject rife with distortions and misunderstandings even among mages. 

Adamant

This is the pure metal form of the hard, jet-black ferromagnetic ore known as adamantite, from which the famous alloy adamantine is made. Adamant is rarely found in nature, but when it is, it is always be in large spherical pockets in hardened volcanic flows.
Adamant is one of the hardest substances known on Toril, but it is also brittle. A sword made of adamant could slice through most metals—but would snap off if struck by another blade or even a smartly wielded wooden cudgel. It sees use in Faerun only in dwarven experimentation and in styluses used to etch metal with names, strike chased ornamentation, and imprint inscrip-tions. Such a stylus shatters if dropped to the floor, though the chips can be used to scratch things. Adamant styluses typically costs 35 to 50 gp, if one can be found at all; Waterdeep and the Great Rift of the dwarves are the best places to shop for one.
Adamant is a gleaming, glossy black. Any reflections seen in it acquire rainbow edges, and this peculiar optical property is the sure-fire way to identify this surprisingly light, valuable metal.
Adamant is worth five times its weight in gold and takes enchant¬ments readily. Some dwarves have worked together with human wizards to make adamant plate armor bound about with enchant¬ments so that when it shatters, the pieces hang together around the wearer, providing some —albeit flawed — protection. Specifically, adamant shields against all fire and heat, magical or nonmagical,
that it comes in contact with, so a wearer of adamant armor can stride through a small fire (one which still allows him the use of some oxygen to breathe) unscathed and even emerge from a fireball blast suffering only 1d6 points of damage from fiery damage to exposed areas. Items made primarily of adamant automatically suc¬ceed in all item saving throws vs. normal fire, cold, and electricity. They receive a +6 bonus to all item saving throws vs. magical fire and a +4 bonus to all item saving throws vs. acid, disintegration, and lightning. Unless items are enchanted to compensate for adamant's brittle nature, however, they receive a -4 penalty on all item saving throws vs. crushing blow and fall.

Adamantine

This alloy, of five-eighths adamant to two-eighths silver and one-eighth electrum (itself a natural alloy of silver and gold) retains the hardness of adamant, but combines it with a rugged durability that makes adamantine so hard to shatter that it is the favored substance for the making of war hammer heads, the best nonmithral armor, and harbor chains. (By one of the mira¬cles granted by the gods, adamantine can also be derived by com-bining steel and mithral —if one knows how. ) Adamantine is black, but has a clear green sheen in candlelight—a sheen that sharpens to purple-white under the light given off by most magi¬cal radiances and by will-o'-wisps.
Adamantine is tricky to make, and must be forged and worked at very high temperatures by smiths who know exactly what they are doing and who have access to special oils to slake and temper the hot metal in. Almost all such expert smiths are dwarves, as the Deep Folk guard the secrets of working adamant jealously, but a priest or wizard seeking to enchant items can make use of fin¬ished adamantine items and need not necessarily have to work with a smith to create an adamantine work anew.
Adamantine readily takes enchantments, adding a +2 bonus to all saving throws of awakening, enchant an item, holy vesting, and wondrous web spells cast upon it. It is often the primary material for enchanted armors.
Items made primarily of adamantine automatically succeed in all item saving throws vs. normal fire, cold, and electricity. They receive a +4 bonus to all item saving throws vs. acid, crushing blow, disintegration, fall, magical fire, and lightning.

Arandur

Once the exclusive secret of the gnomes, this leg¬endary metal has since been worked by elven smiths of Evereska and Evermeet. Many gnomish locks and hooks, as well as some fabled elven warblades, have been forged of arandur, though new forgings —and folk who know how to work the ore —are both rarer than ever today.
Arandur is a rare natural metal found in igneous rock, usually as streaks of blue-green ore amid vitreous glass. So that it does not become as brittle as the glass it is found in, it must be tempered with the blood of a red or blue dragon in its forging. Because of this, working it is not a task for the roadside village smith. The fin¬ished forged metal is silver-blue with a green reflective shine.
Arandur bonds with other metals so well that Merald's meld and crown meld spells are not necessary when enchanting an item made of it and other metals. It is famous for holding a sharp edge even when abused and was the favored material of old for making swords of sharpness and vorpal weapons.
Items made primarily of arandur automatically succeed in all item saving throws vs. fall, normal fire, cold, and electricity. They receive a +3 bonus to all item saving throws vs. acid, crushing blow, disintegration, magical fire, and lightning. Arandur also par¬tially absorbs magic missile energy pulses; folk who wield a sword or shield made of arandur or wear arandan armor take ld2 (to a minimum of 1) fewer points of damage per magic missile bolt directed at them.

Copper

This well-known pure metal, with its distinctive pink¬ish sheen, is the best widely available purifier and amalgamator among metals. It is soft and easily worked, widely known in Faerfin, and appears here because its role as a magical purifier and neutralizing agent cannot be overemphasized. The wizard and especially the priest seeking to work with a substance or item not suited to his or her faith or purpose can make the offending item usable by adding at least half the item's weight of copper to the item. (For example, by sheathing it in copper or adding a longer handle plated in copper, or similar means.) Holy or unholy water should not be stored for any length of time in copper ves¬sels, because the metal will neutralize either in 2d4 months, changing them to normal water. Items made primarily of copper make all item saving throws at the normal listings for metal.

Darksteel

The composition of this alloy is (or was) a secret of the possibly extinct Ironstar dwarf clan. It is unheard-of to find a new item made of darksteel, though a rare and lucky few delvers into deep places have come upon ingots of darksteel. (A darksteel ingot is about as large as the empty area in the middle of four rec¬tangular human warriors' shields stood up long-edges-together to form a hollow square when viewed from above.)
Darksteel behaves like steel but is lighter, and when coated in certain oils whose formula is known to few and heated in even a small fire, it becomes molten, and can be poured into molds — even simple sand molds —to be cast into a new shape. Remark¬ably, this does not destroy or (usually) alter existing enchantments on the metal. Moreover, darksteel is durable and takes new enchantments readily, even if it is already dweomer-laden. All of this makes darksteel very valuable (about 10 to 12 times more than gold, by weight), and it is eagerly sought by dwarves and by adven¬turers of other races. Certain smiths in Neverwinter and Water- deep have standing offers of 7,000 gp or more for an intact darksteel ingot.
Darksteel is silvery in hue when polished or cut, but its exposed surfaces have a deep, gleaming purple luster. It has the unique property of absorbing all natural and magical lightning or electrical energy (not heat, and not magic missiles or other pure energy pulses) into itself, without conducting any of it—or its damage —to a wearer or being in contact with it.
Items made primarily of darksteel automatically succeed in all item saving throws vs. fall, normal fire, cold, and electricity. They receive a +3 bonus to all item saving throws vs. acid, crushing blow, disintegration, and magical fire, and a +5 bonus to all item saving throws vs. lightning.

Dlarun

This bone-white metal can take a high polish and is often mistaken for ivory when seen in finished items, but it has a distinctive greenish sheen in candlelight and when in the pres¬ence of magical radiances. Dlarun is a little-known metal of the halflings, who take care to keep word of it as paltry and as inaccu¬rate as possible. Dlarun is usually encountered after having been formed by halflings into small figurines, inlay plates, or knobs and pommels shaped like beast claws, acorns, or other elements of nature.
Derived from roasting clay dug from the banks of certain rivers, dlarun is first gathered as white chips among fire ash that are then melted in a hot crucible that is filled with a secret mix¬ture of liquids. A lump of soft, soaplike metal results that can be readily carved by anyone with a sharp knife. When the desired end result has been achieved, a second heating —in the open flames of a fire fueled and supplemented by secret ingredients, this time — transforms the metal into lightweight rigidity. It is thus ideal for item adornment and has the added property of steadying the mind of any being in direct (bare flesh) contact with it, allow¬ing them to make all saving throws vs. enchantment/charm and illusion/phantasm spells (and similar psionic or spell-like power effects) at a +1 bonus.
Items made primarily of arandur automatically succeed in all item saving throws vs. fall, normal fire, cold, and electricity. They receive a +1 bonus to all item saving throws vs. acid, crushing blow, disintegration, magical fire, and lightning.

Gold

This well-known pure metal is the softest of workable metallic substances, and one of the best conductors among them. Despite its high value, it is relatively common and is favored for use in ornamentation in the making of magical items, often being used as an inlay in graven runes or inscriptions, where meld magics can keep it from being damaged or falling out through rough handling.
Gold has the important ability to hold multiple enchant¬ments—even conflicting ones —and keep them from affecting each other or the stability of the gold-adorned item. It therefore makes all dweomerflow magics entering an item in which it is present (even in very small amounts) automatically succeed. In other words, saving throws for magical charge transfers are always made at the receiving end, if that end is an item having gold in its makeup. Items made primarily of gold make all item saving throws at the normal listings for metal.

Hizagkuur

This extremely rare white metal is named for its long-ago dwarf discoverer and is found only in scattered, but very rich, deposits deep in the Underdark as a soft, greenish-gray clay¬like ore or a flaky mud. Its preparation is complex, and it is a secret known only to a very few senior dwarven smiths and elders. If even a single element of the process is wrong, the hizagkuur remains mud and not a usable metal.
If successfully transformed into a metal, hizagkuur must be cast, worked, or forged into final form within a day and thereafter can never be worked again. (If an item made of hizagkuur is bro¬ken, only magical mendings accomplished by limited wish or wish spells can repair it.) If hizagkuur is left untouched for that 24 hours, it becomes inert and unworkable unless either a wish or limited wish is cast and properly worded to allow a second chance at working it.
Hizagkuur is unsuitable for use in the crafting of magical items or items that are to be worn because once it has cooled and hard¬ened after being worked, it reflects all magic cast at it 100 percent back at the source and also deals 2d12 points of electrical damage per touch (or per round of continued contact) to all beings com¬ing into contact with it. It sees most use as a sheathing for fortress gates, vault doors, and seals on coffers or hatches of crucial importance.
Items made primarily of hizagkuur automatically succeed in all item saving throws vs. normal fire, cold, and electricity. They receive a +6 bonus to all item saving throws vs. magical fire and lightning and a +1 bonus to all item saving throws vs. acid, crush¬ing blow, fall, and disintegration.

Mithral

Known as truemetal to the dwarves, this silvery-blue, shining metal is derived from soft, glittering, silvery-black ore found in rare veins and pockets all over Faerun—from the depths of the Underdark to surface rocks, particularly in the easternmost Sword Coast North lands. Mithral can be combined with steel (varying alloys of iron and carbon) to derive adamantine if one has no access to adamantite ore, but this process is both difficult and known only to a very few dwarves, who do not perform it for nondwarves unless there is a very good reason.
Mithral is the lightest and most supple of metals hard enough to be used in the making of armor; it is extremely valuable. Against magical attacks, it has an unpredictable nature: Whenever magic contacts it, roll 1d12. On an odd result, it does nothing; on an even result, it alters the magic, either giving a +1 saving throw bonus to beings very nearby (in other words, the wearer of mithral armor) or lessening damage done by the magic by 1 point per die. (The result more favorable to the mithral wearer or bearer should be chosen.)
Items made primarily of mithral automatically succeed in all item saving throws vs. normal fire, cold, and electricity. They receive a +2 bonus to all item saving throws vs. acid, disintegra¬tion, magical fire, and lightning and a +6 bonus to all item saving throws vs. crushing blow and fall.

Silver

This relatively common valuable pure metal is known to the elves as "the sheath and shield of Art" because, of all metals, it is the most associated with and suitable for magic. Some Faeru- nians believe silver is the hardened tears of the goddess Selune, and in the eldest dwarven tongues, the names for silver meant "the blood of alloys," referring to its versatility in making one metal combine with another. Many dwarves use silver in various alloy formulae of their own devising —or that have been handed down through clans for generations. Most of the beauty of metalwork down through the ages has been associated with the gleam and hue of mirror-polished, untarnished silver, and it has always been associated with the adornment of magical items.
Enchanted items that involve moon-related magics, electricity or lightning, and pure energy discharges (such as magic missiles) will always automatically make all saving throws related to awak¬ening, enchant an item, holy vesting, wondrous web, Merald's meld, crown meld, Obar's lesser purification, Azundel's purifica¬tion, higher consecration, and any other purification spells cast upon them if silver is their dominant ingredient (60% or greater composition by mass). If the silver content of an item is between 50% and 60%, the metal instead confers a +4 bonus on all such saving throws. 
On other sorts of magical items, silver confers only one benefit: Silver content of 50% or greater gives a +2 bonus to all rolls asso¬ciated with the success of purification, strengthening, and meld¬ing spells. Certain elven folk, and many senior Harpers, are known to command secret processes that exploit other magical benefits of silver. Dwarves are known to be able to combine it with mithral to make several lightning-warding alloys, so that a warrior clad in full plate armor made of such alloys can take the lightning strikes of a furious storm without harm and fight on.
Items made primarily of silver make all item saving throws at the normal listings for metal.

Telstang

Originally a gnomish secret, this alloy of copper, mithral, platinum, and silver has been adopted by the halflings and by certain elven and orc peoples in the Sword Coast North. Its making remains known to few, and in many writings it is hidden behind the term "truesilver," which has also been applied to mithral, or the phrase "the trusty metal," often misunderstood by human sages to mean steel or perhaps bronze—the very mistake the writers hoped they would make.
Telstang is a dull silver in hue, rather like pewter, and is known as the singing metal because it gives off a clear bell-like tone when struck. It is nonferromagnetic but readily forgeable, though it tends to be brittle and easily snapped off or shattered in large pieces. It never oxidizes and so lasts forever if not struck or dropped.
Telstang's shortcomings make it unsuitable for use in weapons or armor, but it is often worn (by folk who know of and can get it) as bracers, buckles, brooches, pendants, and the like because of its most valuable property: Telstang and all organic material in contact with or encased in it cannot be altered in state; that is, a warrior wearing telstang and the telstang itself cannot be affected by para- lyzation, polymorph spells, disintegrate, petrification, shape change, and similar attacks. However, such a being also cannot be aided by beneficial magical state-altering effects such as those conferred by such spells as spider climb and water breathing.
Except where the special property of telstang comes into play, items made primarily of this metal automatically succeed in all item saving throws vs. normal fire, cold, and electricity. They receive a +2 bonus to all item saving throws vs. acid, disintegra¬tion, magical fire, and lightning, and save normally vs. crushing blow and fall.

Zardazil

This rare, durable, amber-to-red ferromagnetic metal is (thus far, at least) found only in mountains and delves around the Lake of Steam and in certain sand-scoured fissures in the heart of Raurin. It is a very soft metal, and because of this is never used in pure form, but rather alloyed or used to sheath other metals. It can be added to other metals in perfect bondings, apparently vanishing into them in alloys that have all the proper-ties of the other metal —plus the one benefit of zardazil: the ability of any item partially or wholly composed of it to body phase with the first being whose blood it spills.
When a zardazil blade wounds its first creature, it inexorably begins a spell-like internal alteration that takes a full turn (though it can be used normally during that time and does not look or feel any different). At the end of that turn, the zardazil weapon behaves as it has always done for and to all other beings in Faerfin, but it cannot ever harm the being it first wounded again. Instead, the weapon passes through the body of that being harmlessly, as though the body is not present, in a manner similar to, but not exactly like, an ironguard spell.53 Such woundings are often done deliberately to enable a being to carry a concealed weapon: The weapon is simply slid into the body and carried internally until needed, whereupon—without bloodshed or internal damage —it is plucked forth for use. At least three Waterdhavian noble ladies have drawn forth daggers tied to throat jewelry from their bodies in recent years to defend themselves against attackers, and it is suspected that Ardrethra Laurindar, a professional slayer who has posed as an evening escort in Calimport and Westgate to gain access to her targets, also employs such a weapon.
No matter how small the amount of zardazil used in the mak¬ing of a weapon, the entire weapon enters a state of body phase: It is able to coexist with the body it is linked to, and out of the reach of all magics such as heat metal, enlarge, or other spells that spell- casters may attempt to apply to do harm to the weapon carrier. This causes it to fall right through the body of the carrier unless a nonmetal part of the weapon is present. Usually a leather hilt grip or a loop of cord strung through a hole in the pommel is used to prevent this. The weapon hangs, swinging freely inside the body, from this nonmetal part, so the part is usually fastened to an anchor on body armor or a harness in the shoulder area.
The presence of a body-phased zardazil blade does not affect the body containing it in any way—weight, bodily processes, spells cast on the person, and so on are all unchanged. The blade moves with the body if magic or physical actions cause the body to tele¬port, change planes, and the like, but is itself (both metal and pro¬truding nonmetal portions) unaffected by magic —even when this causes it to part company with the body it is linked to. Blood, poi¬sons, and other contaminants a blade might have acquired while in use are not communicated to the body when the blade is slid back home; it is in body phase rather than being in direct contact with organs, bones, and flesh.
Note that a zardazil blade does not pass through clothing with¬out doing damage. A blade's sheath can also be in body phase if it is all-metal and contains zardazil, so a swordpoint that might hap¬pen to protrude from a twisting or bending body need not be uncovered and dangerous. Except by such an emergence, a zardazil blade in body phase does not betray its presence in any way, including to magical scrying or metal detection. Multiple nonmetal anchors, such as leather thongs tied to fine chains affixed to the top and bottom of a sheath and incorporated into external garments could well prevent unintended exposures of zardazil weapons. Some anchors have been cleverly woven into long hair or otherwise concealed so that seemingly defenseless prisoners have surprised their captors by producing weapons.
Except where the special property of zardazil comes into play, items containing zardazil make all saving throws as the metal the zardazil is bonded with.