GURPS Magic - Creating gemstones

[benz72]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Preset a tL3 blacksmith a 3 foot by 3 foot by 3 foot cube of iron and rather than "I luv you forever!" his most likely exclamtion would be "What do you expect me to do with that?".

It weighs 13,500 lbs. It would be extremely difficult for a TL3 society to move it or even break it into conveniently sized pieces without more magic. They might ignore it. They might declare it sacred and start planning to make money off of pilgrims who'll come to see it but get rich off it directly is not very likely.

For one thing it isn't worth 13,500 x the value of 1 lb of iron before it was created. As you break off 1 lb chunks (somehow) and sell those the price per lb will fall every time you do until you can't sell any more.

Not that 1 lb chunks of unworked kiron are all that valuable anyway. Most of the alue copmes from what e blacksmith does with it and by itself this won't create more ironworkers.

Again, like preventing abuse of Powerstones this is not something you need to work that hard at preventing. Is "self-futilizing" a word?

Why are we assuming that it is the shape of a cube? Why wouldn't our mage Shape Earth first to put it into the desired geometry THEN transform it into the desired material? The fact that this might obviate the smith certainly has implications, but 'you clogged up my shop with a big block of raw material' seems not to be a likely one.

[benz72]

AS for a reason to exclude gemstone, my first instinct is to simply forbid all translucent crystals... the magic is just too chaotic to make one with any clarity to it, so the result, if you tried, would be a big lump of nano-diamonds (or nano-saphires... whatever).
This can also play into the world building of the magic system if you want, magi use the crystals to amplify their store/power making those stone magically valuable.
The next trick will come in when someone tried to find spells to cause the natural conditions to create those stones... You can't magic up a diamond? OK, I'll just create a high temperature, high pressure environment, load it up with carbon and see what develops. A GM would need to nix those spells as well.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by benz72

Why are we assuming that it is the shape of a cube? .

Because the costs are figured for a cubic yard. Not for "as much Earth as would fill a cubic yard in a simpler shape". It would be an adaptation of the Area spell rules (and Earth to Stone admittedly isn't an Area Spell) but I'd charge for each part of a cubic yard your complex shape occupied.

Of course, if you're Shaping Earth into the desired shape and then transforming it you'll be doing ingots of 5 to 20 lbs. This is actually what a spell user would probably be doing. He wouldn't be able to sell a cubic yard of iron.

On why the Earth to Stone Spell exists in the first place it's so gurps Magic would ahve a way to emulate original D&D Wall of Stone and Wall of Iron Spells which did ahver a duration of "until dispelled"..

[Culture20]

And the "until dispelled" part is crucial to defeating a lot of its uses. Essential Earth press-molded into armor and made into orichalcum-esque armor? A dispel returns it to dirt. Cubic yard of earth or essential earth turned into a cubic yard of opal or emerald to make powerstones? Again, a dispel ruins everything. The bigger problem comes if magic is rare; this is better than changing lead into gold, and no one else may ever call you on it.

[Kromm]

The simplest fix is to say, "Sure, why not?" and allow "Create X" and "Y to X" spells to work with anything that reasonably falls into the domains of X and Y . . . but also to do what GURPS Dungeon Fantasy and the Dungeon Fantasy RPG do and say that anything created this way lasts for one day unless irreversibly consumed (e.g., air is breathed, water is swallowed, or coal is burned). The spells that do this don't count as "on," nor can they be maintained (or for that matter, canceled early) – they just don't last forever. It follows that Detect Magic, Mage Sight, etc. could distinguish the resulting materials from "natural" ones, so short-term scams would be easy to catch – and in my campaign, ordinary merchants without spells would routinely use a cheap alchemical elixir that works like a counterfeit banknote detection pen!

Could truly permanent creation be possible? Sure. Call it an enchantment version of the same spell, at some huge multiple of the usual energy cost. Even if cubic yards of gold or huge diamonds are possible, I doubt mages would spend months or years investing thousands of energy in the task. If they want to get rich, there are easier ways.

[joppeknol]

Originally Posted by Kromm

and say that anything created this way lasts for one day unless irreversibly consumed (e.g., air is breathed, water is swallowed, or coal is burned).

Wouldn't that get into a munchkin discussion on what counts as consuming? I just googled that gold reacts with some other elements. Isn't that similar as consuming air or eating food?

I had the idea to have it randomly revert back after it is hit by a random local no-mana wave (*insert some magical mumbo-jumbo here*). It normally only can happen after a month. This makes eating some magical food fine, but you cannot live on it forever. Conjured valuables (or stone) can be detected by magical aptitude or elixirs and distributing them without consent is punishable as counterfeiting.

It might however, still be feasible to create temporary manastones.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by joppeknol

Wouldn't that get into a munchkin discussion on what counts as consuming? I just googled that gold reacts with some other elements. Isn't that similar as consuming air or eating food?

Only if the GM puts up with it . . . and I'm not that kind of GM! I don't run fantasy games where real-world science operates behind the scenes and the locals just aren't aware of it yet. I run the kind where magic replaces science, where there really are just four or five elements, and alchemy works "because magic." When players try to use science to explain nature in a fantasy campaign (whether to invent gunpowder or cheese the way spells work), I ask them to word it in a way their character would understand in a TL3 setting with wizards, where everybody believes in spirits, curses, and alchemical transformations.

For me, "consumed" is "gone." You eat food, drink water, or breathe air and it's gone, transformed into vital essence. You burn fuel and it's gone, transformed from solid or liquid to gas. Whereas tarnish and patina are just materials getting old and showing the magical traces of their long lifespans.

[hal]

Originally Posted by Kromm

The simplest fix is to say, "Sure, why not?" and allow "Create X" and "Y to X" spells to work with anything that reasonably falls into the domains of X and Y . . . but also to do what GURPS Dungeon Fantasy and the Dungeon Fantasy RPG do and say that anything created this way lasts for one day unless irreversibly consumed (e.g., air is breathed, water is swallowed, or coal is burned).

Herein lies the crux of the matter. If you don't like how a spell as written works, fix it so it does. If you want things to be somewhat different, simply change duration type to ongoing and costs fatigue to maintain. Change duration to hours, or what have you. It is your game.

[Anthony]

In general if magic allows creating items of value, you should decide how wealthy you think a creation specialist mage should be, and then either adjust the price of things in-setting to match, or adjust how the spells work so the creation mage won't become wealthier than that.

Given the wide variety of tricks available for offsetting fatigue costs in GURPS Magic, a simple rule that accomplishes the latter is to just set a minimum fatigue cost for creating permanent things with magic equal to the monetary value of the thing.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Kromm

do and say that anything created this way lasts for one day unless irreversibly consumed (e.g., air is breathed, water is swallowed, or coal is burned).

Originally Posted by joppeknol

Wouldn't that get into a munchkin discussion on what counts as consuming? I just googled that gold reacts with some other elements. Isn't that similar as consuming air or eating food?

The adjective matters - it's [irreversibly] consumed. So sure maybe you can find some analogous reaction with gold (though I can't think of a likely case, elements are a bad choice for this, you really need lost complexity to make it work). But if you can, so what? You can't reverse it to get the gold back.