Materials Other Than Steel/Iron.

[Koningkrush]

I've been getting ready to start a gritty fantasy GURPS game and have been going over rules (first time GMing). My concern at the moment is that while I understand weapon quality, I was wondering about other materials other than steel/iron for weapons and armor. I am transitioning from D&D to GURPS and am used to all sorts of different materials such as Adamantine, Mithril, etc. I just feel like encountering a soldier clad in steel plate isn't as fun as encountering a knight of doom wearing nearly impenetrable adamantine. Another reason is that I feel like over the course of time everyone will start getting rich and have no way to spend excess gold (maybe hiring a personal army?). I could even set up individual quests purely for finding extremely exotic materials in a deep underground mine.

My problem is that I haven't been able to fine any rules regarding these possibilities. The most I've found are rules for bone weapons in Low Tech :/.
The easiest way I can think of to differentiate different materials are applying enhancements such as armor divisors for lower/higher grades of metal.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Which edition of Low Tech are you using? The current edition addresses armor made from a variety of materials (stone, copper, etc.), though admittedly most of them are realistically not very good. And if you're transitioning from D&D, you want to take a look at the Dungeon Fantasy series, which addresses dungeon delving campaigns for GURPS. That means you get fantasy materials like elven mail, dragon hide, meteoric iron (which ignores magic) and orichalcum (a nigh-impenetrable bronze).

[simply Nathan]

In GURPS Magic, Adamant is the stone form of Essential Earth and Orichalcum is the metallic version of the same; in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, the latter may be used in place of bronze for equipment and have either one-third the weight for ten times the cost or equal weight and triple DR for thirty times the cost. Renaming it "Adamantine" might be appropriate, but I'm not particularly familiar with the rules for fabulous materials in D&D since the only instance I remember of it was a friend's GMPC being a warrior with a full suit of mithril plate at level one...

Meteoric Iron, also in Dungeon Fantasy, works as iron or steel (including being allowed to also be made Fine or Very Fine) and cannot be effected by magic.

Elven Mail and Dwarven Plate armors I envision more as different manners of making the armor than being of different materials, per se. Elven Mail protects just as well against all damage types rather than the split for cutting and crushing, whereas Dwarven Plate is just a thicker, heavier version of regular plate appropriate to a race that makes lighter of great burdens (by the books it can only be done to helms, breastplates/corselets, arm armor, and leg armor - there are no DR 6+ gauntlets or sollerets that I'm aware of unfortunately).

[Anaraxes]

There are fan sites, like mlangsdorf's Better Fantasy Armors.

Seems like there could well be a Pyramid article somewhere in the stacks, but I can't cite one.

[Dwarf99]

How about GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 1 and 8? actually Kenneth Latrans beat me to the punch.

[Koningkrush]

Thanks for the rapid replies. I didn't expect to get answers overnight like this lol. Mlangsdorf's site provides plenty of ideas. I'll also be looking closer at GURPS magic and fantasy as well.

[Dwarf99]

Originally Posted by Koningkrush

I'll also be looking closer at GURPS magic and fantasy as well.

Be sure to take heed that Fantasy isn't the same book, or even the same subject as the Dungeon Fantasy series. The former tries for more plausibility than your average dungeon crawler.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Dwarf99

Be sure to take heed that Fantasy isn't the same book, or even the same subject as the Dungeon Fantasy series. The former tries for more plausibility than your average dungeon crawler.

Quite. Fantasy's motto is "imaginary gardens with real toads in them" (as Marianne Moore put it). It has a couple of passages about dungeon crawls but that's not what it's about.

For suggestions on materials, Low-Tech is better for real materials. Magical materials can be conformed to essential stone or essential metal, both of which are in Magic; "threefold strength" is pretty standard in fantastic narratives—it's what Tolkien says for Bilbo's mithril armor, for example.