Quote:
Originally Posted by malloyd
All iron on the planet was after all produced in stars somewhere, so just coming from one isn't enough.
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An iron star isn't an ordinary star, though. It's a stellar core that's not quite dense enough to be a neutron star, and has been around long enough for fusion to have ceased, remaining heat radiated away, and all the elements to decay into iron-56, or, if lighter than iron, to fuse via quantum tunneling effects bringing nuclei together in the dense core. This takes so long that they're only hypothesized to exist if protons turn out not to decay (around 10^1500 years). It's one of those wacky things that people playing with math speculate might happen if the universe expands forever.
So the "parallel but older" universe is very, very much older, and considerably different from ours. As a source for phlebotinum, it's probably even a weirder backstory even than "rock that fell from heaven". I wouldn't object if a GM wanted to use the Plane of Future Past as the fluff text for the existence of meteoric iron. It'd have to be a pretty fantastic campaign if the PCs expected to be able to actually go retrieve some from the source, though. And if they could pull it off, it would seem like they were powerful enough not to care about trivial toys like anti-magic iron.