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Old 06-16-2020, 06:31 AM   #35
Varyon
 
Join Date: Jun 2013
Default Re: Meteoric iron immunities

Quote:
Originally Posted by malloyd View Post
If you can see a meteor coming down, you are tens of miles from where it landed. And the atmosphere is variable enough that "much the same place" amounts to a circle miles across too. That's a lot of area to search for a small object. Or lots of small objects - meteors almost always break up into strewn fields miles long and half a mile wide.
Which is why you only have some iron in the teleported meteor, and cast some equivalent of Featherfall on it as it falls (or, better yet, before teleporting it and with a built-in delay). Meteoric stone doesn't have an immunity to magic, so that should work just fine (bonus - you can use Detect spells to find it after it lands).

To review, you start by crafting the item(s) you want out of normal iron with all the magic assistance you desire, and use Shape Earth or similar to surround it/them with a protective layer of rock (note you can "flow" the stone around and into crevices of the iron item(s), making the whole mass solid without any air pockets to ker-splode from being heated, and you can then just use Shape Earth or a disintegration spell or magic acid or whatever to free the meteoric iron item(s) once it lands) . You then do some ceremonial casting to put some sort of slow-fall spell on the outer layer, with a built-in delay (ideally "activate x yards above the ground," but "activate in y minutes" can also work). You then do further ceremonial casting to teleport it high enough that it becomes incandescent upon re-entry (or whatever requirement you have for "meteor"), possibly waiting to finish the spell until the timing is right for the delay to work. The rock teleports up, becomes a meteor streaking through the air, then gets slowed down to land safely. You can use Detect Magic to track it while the slow-fall spell is active; if you don't think it'll last long enough for you to find it in a timely manner, you may want to include something in the meteor that makes it easy to track, such as a small magic item, a bit of precious metal, etc. Doing all this isn't going to cheap, of course, but may allow for items that are basically impossible to craft without magic at TL DF, or perhaps can result in a reduced cost for meteoric iron (AlexanderHowl's suggestion, which I suspect would have a lower yield-per-dollar than the above, implied roughly a CF of +1, as it doubled the cost of raw materials from ~$5.50 to $11).

Of course, I think we're veering a wee bit from the topic of discussion due to my mostly-a-joke suggestion. It sounds like the intent was that meteoric iron was largely something of a plot device, but I see no problem with a semi-scientific analysis of the way meteoric iron roughly works. Just don't be surprised if you wind up with odd results.
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