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Old 12-28-2020, 08:27 PM   #70
Agemegos
 
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Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
Default Re: Meteoric iron immunities

Quote:
Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl View Post
I am curious how meteoric iron became associated with antimagic.
It is a restriction of the old folklore tradition that ordinary "cold" iron was anti-magic. Figures in folk stories were immune to fairy glamour &c. because they had some nails in their pocket, or because they touched a horseshoe and so on. But game designers and extruded fantasy writers dealt with characters who routinely wore tens of pounds of ironmongery, and didn't want them to be immune to magic. So they first supposed that cold iron was a special kind of iron, and then specified that it was special in that it was meteoric (and therefore never smelted, and therefore "cold"), and then transferred the property explicitly to meteoric iron to avoid defeat in the argument that "cold iron" is just a poetic expression for iron, bladed weapons especially.
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