Revision as of 20:03, 6 February 2009

Only Five Magical Materials? Bah!

Only five? Come on, people. Let's get more creative.

The Celestial Trio

• Orichalcum: The favored material of the Sun and the Solars, blah blah blah, awesome awesome awesome, whatever the F. It is most auspiciously shaped into octagons, circles, and sunbursts. Orichalcum forges are invariably located in volcanoes. The geomantic configurations of the fire mountains are excellent for working this most radiant of the magical materials, and the naturally occurring incredible heat makes forging relatively easy.
  • Forging: Orichalcum must be forged from pure gold, at approximately a 3:1 ratio (that is, 3 oz. gold gives you 1 oz. orichalcum). While forged, it must be saturated in sunlight, usually provided and concentrated by orichalcum-forging mirrors, which are actually not simple mirrors, but great arrays of complex construction and auspicious design. It must be heated in magma, as no other material will provide the unique mixture of earth and fire Essence that anchors and stabilizes the radiant ore. Any product of orichalcum cannot be quenched, but must cool by itself, for however long that may take. It must also be in direct sunlight for as much of that time as possible. Quenching would destabilize the orichalcum, causing it to break or even explode. There are two schools of orichalcum-forging, both dating back to the First Age. They differ in the tools and techniques used, as well as the occult formulae worked into the artifacts. The divergence most scrutable to the uninitiated is as follows: The Avarakhan school, which has the greater number of proficient initiates, lets the excess fire and earth Essence work their way out of the blade once the forging is complete, forming a hard shell of black rock that must be broken off to reveal the blade beneath. This process is generally held to be faster and easier than the other school, but is also said (by its competitors) to produce inferior results. The second, more elite, college, known as the Murjite school, practices a different, more slow and difficult method. The blade is never immersed in the magma, only heated in close proximity to it. Occasionally magma may be rubbed along the artifact to warm cooling areas, but it is always carefully wiped away before it becomes alloyed with the orichalcum. This school requires not the elaborate geomantic arrays used by the Avarakhan school to ensure the blade crystallizes properly within its shell, and as such there exists the potential for much mightier enchantments to be woven into the device, as well as more elegant craftsmanship. The only downside is, of course, that few smiths have the skill, Charms, or stamina necessary to work using the Murjite methods. It is not unheard of to have several smiths working as a team on a Murjite artifact, although the methods have been imperfectly adapted to group efforts. The Murjite school also has the advantage of being able to incorporate more magics into its artifacts, due to the fact that Avarakhan artifacts are all generally of a piece, being cast rather than forged.
  • Qualities: Orichalcum is unyielding and self-defining. It does not fall prey to the shaping chaos of the Wyld, the curses of the Yozi, or the twisted dreams of the Neverborn. Once orichalcum has set and cooled, only the greatest of forces can break or bend it, and it is for nearly all intents and purposes indestructible. Yet it is also as light as light in the hands of its attuned wielders, the aetheric energy contained within flowing through the air like the sunlight that it radiates in the hands of its rightful wielders. Orichalcum endures, firm and radiant. It smites dark things and brings definition to the world. Alloys of orichalcum are...difficult. By its nature, orichalcum does not take well to group effort. When employed in small quantities, it can reinforce starmetal constructs and back up their complex magical processes with raw power.
• Moonsilver: The protean metal of Luna and her Stewards, moonsilver is shaped most easily and auspiciously into crescents, circles, spirals, and rings. Moonsilver weapons are curving and elegant, but often simple in design, as the subtle shifts they constantly undergo make excess ornamentation useless, even dangerous. To force moonsilver to hold an excessively defined shape weakens its power and may have catastrophic feedback results resulting in the collapse of the artifact.
  • Forging: Moonsilver is forged in a way somewhat similar to orichalcum in that mirrors and arrays of lenses are used to focus moonlight onto silver extracted from Wyld-tainted areas. Unlike orichalcum, moonsilver is anchored using water and air, rather than earth and fire. The moonlight gathered by the arrays must be shone through pure water from a stream or spring. The most potent moonsilver is anchored using water from underground aquifers that have never seen light. The moonlight will shine through the water, rendering its black depths transparent, creating the catalyst for moonsilver's creation. The quicksilver must then me charged with Essence and fired through the water. Certain limiting supernatural characteristics will be stripped away and allow the Wyld-tainted silver to assume its full potential as raw moonsilver. The process must be repeated anywhere from four to seven times, each time creating a stronger material closer to the ideal magical material. Upon completion, Luna's authority must be invoked to stabilize the newly liberated moonsilver, rendering it able to be shaped into the form of the weapon or device desired. A further invocation of the Moon's unanswerable authority over her totemic metal solidifies the creation fully, rendering it usable.
  • Qualities: Moonsilver is protean and amorphous, shifting to best fit the situation, as adaptable and widely applicable as the Charms of its Lunar wielders. Yet it is not easily shaped by outside forces, or against its will. It, like its Lunar masters, can change shape, but its shape cannot be changed. It self-defines, as does orichalcum. Unlike orichalcum, its self-definition is more based in will than raw power. Alloys of moonsilver with starmetal or jade are useless and produce only slag and a gnarled metaphysical mess, as the Wyld-derived vibrations of Essence are at odds with the Loom- or Primordial-derived stability of starmetal and jade, respectively. Alloys of orichalcum and moonsilver, however, produce a more flexible, workable variation on the brazen Solar theme, allowing for more delicate, if somewhat less mighty, thaumaturgic constructions.
• Starmetal:

Necrotic Jades

• Cinerary Jade is an ashen gray in color, shot with black lines reminiscent of veins, arteries, and nerves, or that suggest corpses trapped within the stone. It is as dry as sun-mummified corpses, and has the airy softness of ash. Cinerary jade is useful for its properties as a material that acts as an Essence insulator, a role at which it excels in a fashion second only to Malfean lead. The only other materials that even approach it for efficacy as insulators are white jade and orichalcum. Orichalcum is often used as a shielding material to contain high-energy Essence flows, and white-jade fulfills a more standard nonconductive role, preventing Essence flows from intermixing in undesirable fashions. Neither of them can simply stop Essence the way that cinerary jade does. Cinerary jade is as light in the hand as ash, but it is unsuited to armor, due to its tendency to crumble and break away. Its deposits are often found near the surface, exposed by some crumbling cliff or opened mineshaft.
• Osseous Jade is the necrotic counterpart to green jade. It is off-white, ranging from the bleached white of bones in the desert to the brown-white of bones dug fresh from the earth. Most commonly, it is a yellow-white shade, something like pale popcorn. Osseous jade grows in bulging, spherical deposits, and is carved most easily into curving, skeletal shapes. It is difficult to work with, tending to fracture at inopportune moments, but it channels and stores necrotic Essence with ease and efficiency, making it a prized ingredient in necrotech armours and power-storage devices, such as the ammunition canisters on the blight cannons that grace the ships of the Bodhisattva Anointed By Dark Water's armada. It is the heaviest of the necrotic jades. Its durability makes it favored for armour, along with sanguine jade.
• Luminous Jade occurs in crystalline growths in the tunnels that worm their way through the Underworld, like clots in the veins of some great dead creature (which, in a very true sense, such deposits are). It is an eerie blue-green, and glows softly. The light it emits serves less to illuminate and more to emphasize the darkness, blurring details and making the eyes ache and water if stared at for too long. However, a careful artisan can carve and polish luminous jade in such a way that it emits a clear, precise light, and ameliorates to a vast degree the detrimental side effects of its light (such as cataracts and eye cancers). Luminous jade is useful for its durable structure, and the extremely detailed degree to which it can be carved. It is as such prized for delicate magitech circuitry and other intricate artifacts. It is carved most easily into angular configurations, and occurs in its raw state as crystalline, fanglike growths.
• Sanguine Jade is deep red, like blood or wine. It hungers for bloodshed and aggravates wounds, and is prized for weapons and armor for the ghostly legions. It is smooth and cool to the touch, and is carved most easily into wavy, radiating shapes, like the splatters from drops of blood falling from a corpse hung up to bleed out. it also is readily shaped into serrated or zigzagging designs. It is temperamental to work with, seeking to cut at its craftsman, guided by a malice and bloodlust inherent to the material. However, if one has the trick of it is supremely yielding and amenable to elegant work. This gives rise to the most time-honored saying of sanguinary jade's craftsmen: "Blood can be trusted to get itself spilled. Take care that yours doesn't." Sanguinary jade is more durable than the other strains of necrotic jade, making it prized as a component for armor. The structure of the material makes it unsuited to delicate or intricate work, however, so it is uncommon to see anything lighter that plate-and-chain in that distinctive dark red shade. It is also unsuited to powerbow construction, a facet of its nature that has given rise to another aphorism among its craftsmen: "Blood can't be unspilled." Sanguinary jade is not elastic, not malleable or ductile. It does not repair well, which is fortunate since it hardly ever requires repair in the first place. It can be made flexible, but it will not return to a more rigid shape. A bow of sanguine jade is akin to a bow of wax. It bends to the arrow readily enough, but resumes its stiffness poorly. Great deposits of it lie beneath the Bloody Deeps of the Underworld's West, but the ravening hekatonkhire and strange plasmics and ghosts who inhabit that direction make harvesting difficult. The Bodhisattva Anointed By Dark Water currently operates the largest mining efforts, and holds the smallest actual stockpile, preferring to sell the vast majority of it to the First And Forsaken Lion and the Lover Clad In Raiment Of Tears in exchange for osseous jade from the First and ghosts for soulsteel from the Lover.