02-15-2020, 03:20 PM | #61 |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: [RPM] Gem Lore, Lapidaries and Precious Stones as Traditional Trappings
Someone needs to have a mummified monkey's paw.
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02-15-2020, 03:40 PM | #62 | |
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: [RPM] Gem Lore, Lapidaries and Precious Stones as Traditional Trappings
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Wait, don't answer that. I've got it, Nando Acevedo can have a mummified monkey's paw!
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02-15-2020, 07:00 PM | #63 | ||||
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: [RPM] Gem Lore, Lapidaries and Precious Stones as Traditional Trappings
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It's classy and also has the bonus of being regulated and restricted, which gives analysts something to track in order to find clues of nasty-bad cult or occult activity. I bet the worldwide ivory smuggling underground is just all amoral (or worse) ritual magicians and occultists by the 2010s. Quote:
Which is to say, you want dice handmade by gemcutters or jewelers, not novelty dice made on CNC machines. Quote:
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Not the sort of thing I'd like to try to bring through Customs, at least not if the innocent victim was murdered within recent enough memory to be treated as a murder victim rather than archeological remains. Iron is slightly anti-magical, it is true, but it's not impossihle to work with. And meteorites are symbolically resonant enough so that for some kinds of magic the bonus they grant probably more than makes up for the -1 to -3 for the iron. In general, metals that humans only started to work after the start of recorded history give a penalty of some kind to magic, correlating roughly to the technological sophistication needed to work with it. Lead is something of an exception, in that it is completely magically inert. It doesn't interfere with magic, but it doesn't conduct it either. Gold would probably be preferable to the titanium for the ring if we're going by magical affinity. Very useful metal, good for many different kinds of magic, very good thaumic conductor and can store a decent amount of supernatural energy. Silver also has many magical uses, a bit more specialized and not in itself capable of storing much raw magical energy, but a solid material for enchanted trinkets and charms nonetheless, in especially for effects metaphysically associated with the moon. Copper is useful because it's a fairly cheap metal that doesn't give any kind of penalty to magic use, so you can make nearly any kind of magical object from copper. For example, the PCs generally use .45 caliber copper bullets with a huge hollow cavity, which allows them to use them as Charms and also to more easily deliver esoteric substances that monsters might have weaknesses against. Quick enchantments are also possible in a way they wouldn't be with lead bullets. Plus, it's environmentally-conscious not to pollute with toxic metals.
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02-15-2020, 09:51 PM | #64 | ||
Join Date: Mar 2008
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Re: [RPM] Gem Lore, Lapidaries and Precious Stones as Traditional Trappings
Given that magic was around in the far enough past living things that were around since then might be worth something as ritual components. With many of your cultists from South America maybe the 9th oldest tree in the world.
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02-16-2020, 05:56 AM | #65 | |
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: [RPM] Gem Lore, Lapidaries and Precious Stones as Traditional Trappings
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I wonder how good the security at National Parks in Chile is... After all, in the real world, the almost as old Senator tree in Florida actually was burnt to ash by a tourist in 2012. And the ashes used to make all sorts of artwork, which I'm sure had nothing to do with any occult groups in my campaign...
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02-16-2020, 01:49 PM | #66 | |||
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: [RPM] Gem Lore, Lapidaries and Precious Stones as Traditional Trappings
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Even if they aren't used for this particular adventure, given that extremely expensive items of mystical significance provide a way to carry with you quickly accessible magical power of some sort in a setting where magic is ordinarily almost impossible to cast on the fly... well, it means that a lot of nefarious schemes by cults or rogue magicians look something like this: 1) Acquire jealously guarded and extremely valuable object of some sort. 2) Use 1) in ritual of some sort that we would have no chance of performing without some such object. 3) .... 4) PROFIT! Quote:
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Lunar rock is pretty difficult to acquire, I imagine, but how hard is meteoric iron to source?
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02-16-2020, 01:59 PM | #67 |
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Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
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Re: [RPM] Gem Lore, Lapidaries and Precious Stones as Traditional Trappings
Not very, from a bit of searching. It costs something like $5/gram.
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02-16-2020, 02:06 PM | #68 | |
Join Date: Sep 2006
Location: Luxembourg
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Re: [RPM] Gem Lore, Lapidaries and Precious Stones as Traditional Trappings
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Price ranging from a few € to a few thousands, depending on size and tracability/authenticity... Getting a museum piece (knife, druidic torc, ...) with I assume more mystical weight is another story, obviously. |
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02-16-2020, 02:16 PM | #69 | ||
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: [RPM] Gem Lore, Lapidaries and Precious Stones as Traditional Trappings
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I should have Googled it myself, but I was traveling and on the phone telling a newspaper editor to remove the name and picture of my client from the front page of his website instantly and not to think about publishing them in his paper version. I hate working weekends, but there are some simple pleasures involved. What might be a particularly evocative and interesting way to work meteoric iron into jewelry or ritual paraphernalia that is mystically significant to a magical tradition of loss and endings?
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02-16-2020, 02:44 PM | #70 |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: [RPM] Gem Lore, Lapidaries and Precious Stones as Traditional Trappings
The US government distributed 270 samples as goodwill gifts about 1970, 180 of which are unaccounted for, and some of which seem now to be simulants. If you told me Kessler had acquired one I wouldn't refuse to suspend disbelief.
Besides that, some meteorites consist of material of lunar origin.
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diamond, gems, ritual path magic, rpm |
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