GURPS Magic - Creating gemstones

[ehrbar]

Originally Posted by Anders

If you can create a cubic yard of diamonds then the economy will very quickly be broken.

Not really. If a mage can make a 13-million carat (1 cubic yard) diamond for 3 energy, well, that makes diamonds cheap, but cheap diamonds don't have a lot of uses. There are minimal-at-best secondary effects, and the economy as a whole moves along just fine. It's largely a cosmetic matter.

Originally Posted by malloyd

but there is an important secondary issue in GURPS in that the high cost of large gems is one of the important limits on the proliferation of large Powerstones

This was important, but isn't in 4th edition.

Sure, when Powerstones had to be gemstones and were limited in capacity by their number of carats, not their price, stopping mages from waving a hand to make incredibly huge gemstones would limit Powerstones some (the 2-energy-cost casting of Earth to Stone in 3e was for an object up to 20 lbs, or a bit over 45,000 carats; the 5 energy cost version was for an object up to a hex in size, which, at the density of diamond, is over 23 million carats).

Now that it isn't true (4th edition does not restrict Powerstone materials, and simply varies the cost of enchantment based on the price of the underlying material), the gemstone restriction is largely vestigial. At best, it helps keep gemstones valuable enough that they make allowed subjects for the lower casting cost for Powerstone.