GURPS Magic - Creating gemstones

[Dalillama]

Originally Posted by malloyd

]


When gold coins aren't worth anything more than iron ones, or random rocks for that matter, why does the dragon even want a million of them.

Because they're shiny, because the draconic metabolism requires gold, because it's a religious obligation, the options are endless.

[malloyd]

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 will make a decent, if rather soft, anvil.
He could eventually break it apart if he had too, you can deform and fracture iron bars with a cold chisel, or grind through it with an abrasive cord, but it probably wouldn't be worth the effort unless iron was quite rare around here. Iron isn't worthless, but the smith's time isn't either.

[Whitewings]

Or the mage could turn a pile of smaller stones into chunks of iron. Less need to break them apart. Though again, how much this will change a setting depends on how common mages with Earth to Stone are, and how often they’re willing to provide such a service and how much they charge for it.

[ehrbar]

Th OP, of course, specifically said he wasn't interested in the (discussed how many times?) metal issue. Still, I will note that GURPS Technomancer in 1998 specified, under the Metal/Plastic college heading, that when using magic to create metal, the GM, not the caster, decided what metal resulted, and that the GM could vary the result from casting to casting.

(It also sets a default, in the Technomancer setting, of getting a nickel-iron alloy when cast on Earth; sensible enough, when you consider the most common metal on Earth, on a whole-planet basis, is the nickel-iron core.)

Originally Posted by Calliban

What I am looking for is the reasoning for why gems were excluded, and what would a spell to create them be like - is there even an official one?

So, I think we've covered the first part -- the reasons for exclusion -- rather thoroughly. On the second part, there isn't an official spell, so we can instead consider what one should look like.

The simplest approach might well be, "Just remove the exclusion". The difference between stone and gemstone is not rigorous, and has historically changed depending on availability. The next-simplest might be, instead of eliminating the exclusion entirely, using the same rule as using Earth to Stone to make metal. Or maybe layering on a change-metal-to-gemstone layer, so you pay standard cost to go metal to gemstone, double to go stone to gemstone, and triple to go earth to gemstone.

The next step, of course, is an actually separate spell. The obvious parameters to start from are those of Earth to Stone, with Earth to Stone as the prerequisite spell. Maybe the new spell increases the Magery prereq from Earth to Stone's Magery 1 to Magery 2? The cost per unit volume can of course be changed (3 per cubic foot), and you get to decide what sort of target you change.

On the target, incidentally, I'll note Earth to Stone specifically affects "an item of earth or clay" or "an item of stone". It is entirely reasonable to look at a caster trying to transform a patch of ground or a pile of stones and say, "No, that isn't cohesive or distinct enough to count as 'an item', so the spell can't target that." It's not a particularly hard limit to overcome, of course.

[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.

[Calliban]

The Money problem is complicated for sure.

OTOH, a cubic yard of Rhodium is well worth $1.5 billion with current TL8 prices. Selling it in our modern day would be another issue, and quite a few government and corporations would rather have it disappear than flooding the market. This would be the same for any other precious metal.

Realistically in a TL8 world it would be way easier (and safer) to just create pure white marble and get about a couple grand per Fatigue point.

Mostly any "stone" created by Earth to Stone is as structurally complex as any raw gemstone. The block of Rhodium, OTOH, is molecularly and structurally as simple as it gets. Even alloys like Bronze are way more complex than that.

I don't think rarity is an issue, as well. Raw diamonds are neither rare nor expensive - jewelry, otoh, is quite expensive, with Hope Diamond reaching well over $300 million, but much of its value is due to its historical significance.

I would assume selling gemstones over a few thousand dollars in our world would not get you far before questions start popping up.

[SRoach]

I saw a nice solution to creating items for magical use once. Don't allow it. The article, which was fairly long, basically said that, in his setting, items "Cure", over time, on the order of centuries, when formed and sitting in mana-rich areas, so items that were mined from natural veins in mana-rich areas would be better for enchanting, and just-created stuff, or stuff mined from mana-poor areas would be significantly worse, so enchanters would want the "real" stuff, even if a mundane couldn't tell the two apart.

In one Star Trek guide I have, the stated reason the Ferengi love Latinum so much is because that particular material couldn't be replicated (yet), while gold could be. A similar issue existed, in TOS, with dilithium crystals.
You could easily rule that certain materials, ones we value, are mystically impossible, (or at least EXTREMELY difficult) to produce magically, and that adds to their value, because they can't be counterfeited.
I'd start with the Cu family of metals, maybe throw in the family Pt is in, or not, (and I don't know that I'd want to keep Nickel rare), and then decide which gemstones are simply beyond producing with magic. If all the familiar precious stones; Diamond, Emerald, Ruby, Sapphire, (the last two are the same rock), happen to be hard to produce magically, they may be valued for that alone, as a form of durable hard coin.

Heck, you could easily double them up and say that materials that are difficult to impossible to conjure up make the best receptacles for enchanting, for the same underlying reason.

[Anders]

Originally Posted by SRoach

I saw a nice solution to creating items for magical use once. Don't allow it. The article, which was fairly long, basically said that, in his setting, items "Cure", over time, on the order of centuries, when formed and sitting in mana-rich areas, so items that were mined from natural veins in mana-rich areas would be better for enchanting, and just-created stuff, or stuff mined from mana-poor areas would be significantly worse, so enchanters would want the "real" stuff, even if a mundane couldn't tell the two apart.

Thaumatology has rules for creating items through exposure or through deeds.

[hal]

Part of the issue is the low energy costs involved. Simple fixes would have been to give a duration for Earth to Stone, or Stone to Metal instead of instant or permanent. Had the energy costs been per pound instead of cubic yards, that would be better. Had there been a higher energy cost for gold as opposed to tin, that would help.

As written, any spell, such as inquired about by the Original Poster, should include higher energy costs and skill penalties to where creating certain gemstones are harder to do than others, and take it from there. One could even go the route of treating variant spells as techniques such that creating rubies is base spell-6, but one can study a technique to produce a given gemstone with a given clarity, etc. A success by a given amount creates an average color, clarity, lack of visible fracture lines and is seeming worth X dollars per carat.

The problem still remains: Player characters can create wealth out of nothing.