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Old 06-15-2020, 04:30 PM   #21
Anthony
 
Join Date: Feb 2005
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Default Re: Meteoric iron immunities

Stealing doors is a long tradition in RPGs, I've heard many stories (and variants, such as stealing monowire fences in cyberpunk). In the case of meteoric iron, though, the cost increase for meteoric could easily just be based on how much more difficult it is to work -- it costs $11,400 extra to make a broadsword out of meteoric iron, $950 extra for an axe, and a sword does not have 12x as much metal as an axe.
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Old 06-15-2020, 04:46 PM   #22
Varyon
 
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Default Re: Meteoric iron immunities

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Originally Posted by Evil Roy Slade View Post
Er... I think see an issue here.
The shell isn't made of iron, so isn't meteoric iron, and thus can be affected by magic. As noted above, you can affect something that has meteoric iron in it with magic, you just can't affect the iron itself. It's no different from using Levitate or whatever on a character who is carrying some meteoric iron in their backpack.
Yes, this is arguably rampant munchkinism, but I think is acceptable for the genre...

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Originally Posted by Anthony View Post
In the case of meteoric iron, though, the cost increase for meteoric could easily just be based on how much more difficult it is to work -- it costs $11,400 extra to make a broadsword out of meteoric iron, $950 extra for an axe, and a sword does not have 12x as much metal as an axe.
Eh, all CF modifiers work like that (note it costs less to make 16 lb of scale armor into bronze than to do the same for 8 lb of plate armor), but I do agree it's entirely possible a lot of meteoric iron's cost is due to the difficulty in working it. Unless the buyer is in the market for a meteoric iron door of that size and design, you may essentially just be selling the door for its value in scrap metal... but one would expect meteoric iron scrap metal to still command a high price, given that it should be fairly rare.
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Old 06-15-2020, 05:36 PM   #23
Evil Roy Slade
 
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Default Re: Meteoric iron immunities

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Originally Posted by Varyon View Post
The shell isn't made of iron, so isn't meteoric iron, and thus can be affected by magic. As noted above, you can affect something that has meteoric iron in it with magic, you just can't affect the iron itself. It's no different from using Levitate or whatever on a character who is carrying some meteoric iron in their backpack.

Yes, this is arguably rampant munchkinism, but I think is acceptable for the genre...
Hmm. If this shell notion worked to create the door, surely the looters would ask why not put a shell on it again and shove it through a gate or a plane shift it or what have you? I like the scope of your thinking, but a bit of back-of-the-envelope scribbling suggests this door weighs about 2700 lbs/1250 kg, and getting such a thing falling from terminal velocity with only part of its total mass subject to any magical manipulation... that seems like a plan with all kinds of ways to end in grief.
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Old 06-15-2020, 06:38 PM   #24
thrash
 
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Default Re: Meteoric iron immunities

It also assumes that the minimal, scientific definition of "meteorite" has any bearing on its (anti-)magical properties. Maybe what DF refers to as "meteoritic iron" is left-over debris from the magically zeroed hull of the Heavenly Junk Great Peace, destroyed in the final battle of the Celestial Sphere Gods War.
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Old 06-15-2020, 06:41 PM   #25
Anthony
 
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Default Re: Meteoric iron immunities

There are weirder or meaner ways of making doors resistant to magic, of course. A lot of spells you might use are specific to materials so various laminates are at least an awful lot of work to deal with magically. There are of course no mana zones and antimagic traps (linked suppress mana over a pit that is covered by a substance that ceases to exist in a no mana zone, for example, or in the less extreme case just alarms tied to detect magic).
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Old 06-15-2020, 07:07 PM   #26
Fred Brackin
 
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Default Re: Meteoric iron immunities

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Stealing doors is a long tradition in RPGs,
Module writers keep thinking of exotic substances as colorful adjectives rather than tangible commodities.

In my group there's an Eberron module that's permantly notorious. It not only had adamantine doors (fortunately discovered on the way out) but a bronzewood armoire. The writer probably thought of "bronzewood" as being like double-expensive oak when the Eberron creators thought of it as being an exotic material for Druids to make plate armor out of at 500 gp per lb.

I've never seen a Druid in bronzewood plate (or even dragonskin plate) but I did have to figure out how much an average armoire weighed. The doors too. If you wonder, yes the PC group did have a wagon. The bad guys had thoughtfully provided one.

The "Emerald Claw" had sent a whole squad of their crossbowfodder minions into the field with a month's supplies. This included enough "sunrods" for every grunt to use 2 per day. Why somebody did the math on the sunrods but not the bronzewood or the adamantine seems odd to me but mentioning any of those three things just sets off my group.

The moral of the story is that every named item in a dungeoncrawl has to be considered on the basis of what happens if the PCs take it.
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Old 06-15-2020, 07:31 PM   #27
malloyd
 
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Default Re: Meteoric iron immunities

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1. Is a spell being cast directly on the meteoric iron object?

2. Is the meteoric iron object (e.g., a meteoric sword or arrow) encountering magic intended as a defense against that kind of object in general (in those cases, swords or arrows)?
Now for the nasty edge case - can I use Blink to *avoid* a hit from a meteoritic iron sword? It's clearly a defense against this kind of thing....

Conceivably it could even be the effect of an item with an actual limitation of only Blinking you away from sword attacks.

Actually I think I might rule differently in those two cases myself.
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Old 06-15-2020, 07:40 PM   #28
AlexanderHowl
 
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Default Re: Meteoric iron immunities

Meteoric means "of, relating to, or formed by a meteoroid", so the iron would have to come from a meteoroid. Meteoriod means "a solid body, moving in space, that is smaller than an asteroid and at least as large as a speck of dust". Thus, for anything to count as meteoric iron, it needs to have been moving in space, and you need a TL5+ understanding of science to actually know what space is.

A TL5+ civilization might be able to produce small batches of meteoric iron through teleportation, though it would be expensive and difficult. On average, only five percent of the original object makes it to the ground, so you could need to teleport a 80 pound object to get 4 pounds of meteoric iron. The Karman line is 100 km up, which would be a base 9 energy and -6 to skill, increasing to 18 energy and -12 to skill with Teleport Other.

Now, with a ceremonial magic team of 90 mundane participants, a caster with Recover Energy-20 and Teleport Other-27 could send around 1600 pounds of iron into space every hour with twenty castings, allowing for the production of 80 pounds of meteoric iron per hour (though someone would need go to retrieve it, a team of nine people). With 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 4 weeks a month, and 12 months a year, that would be 153,600 pounds of meteoric iron per year.

Now, for the economics to work, you would the mage would need to earn a Very Wealthy wage, the gatherers would need to earn a Comfortable wage, and the mundane participants an Average wage. At TL5, that would be around $1.7 million per year, or exactly $11 per pound. Since they would not have an easy way of finding meteoric iron, magic does not sense it, they would probably recover only 50% of it, increasing the cost to $22 per pound.
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Old 06-15-2020, 08:12 PM   #29
Anthony
 
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Default Re: Meteoric iron immunities

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Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl View Post
Meteoric means "of, relating to, or formed by a meteoroid", so the iron would have to come from a meteoroid. Meteoriod means "a solid body, moving in space, that is smaller than an asteroid and at least as large as a speck of dust".
Meteoric means "of, related to, or consisting of meteors". The word "meteor" predates the modern astronomical concept (from a latin root meaning "a thing in the air") and in DF could perfectly well refer to iron rocks that fall from cloud giant castles. Or celestial iron, normally found on Earth because it's what Zeus' thunderbolts are forged from but also possible in other things forged by Hephaestus.
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Last edited by Anthony; 06-15-2020 at 08:24 PM.
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Old 06-15-2020, 09:01 PM   #30
Evil Roy Slade
 
Join Date: Oct 2007
Default Re: Meteoric iron immunities

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Or celestial iron, normally found on Earth because it's what Zeus' thunderbolts are forged from but also possible in other things forged by Hephaestus.
In Dunsany's lyrical The King of Elfland's Daughter, the hero Alveric carries a sword crafted of thunderbolts, gathered from the garden of the witch who later forges the sword for him.

If I recall well, it is proof against the runes (spells) of the Elf-King, his principal antagonist.

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