Liquid light in a diamond flask was brought forth. The glowing liquid was poured across Rehobath’s brow, bathing him in its light as it coursed down over his shoulders.
A circlet of elfin gold was produced and placed upon Rehobath’s brow. As it settled into place, the liquid light flowed back up across his body, becoming concentrated in a great glowing bauble that shone forth from his forehead.
About twenty years ago now, I opened a Word document on my computer and saved it as “Fantasy Materials.” It was originally intended to be a magazine article, but it quickly became the sort of project that’s never finished because it can’t be finished. The document became a storehouse for fantastical materials: Not magic items, but rather those strange substances that can only be found where pervasive magic has changed the very substance of mortal reality.
As I wrote in the introduction to the article-that-was-not-to-be:
These are not the common materials of history or the modern world. Items of marvelous grandeur may be forged from gold and silver, but such items lack the spark of the fundamentally fantastic which even a simple blade of mithril possesses. This, then, is a catalog of things which never have been and will never be. Here there are gems which will never sparkle; trees which have never been felled; stones from quarries which will never be mined; metals which will never be forged.
They are the building blocks of a world which can live only in our imagination.
Some of the material in this article was stuff I had created out of wholecloth – like taurum, the true gold which makes common gold naught but a bauble, or wave cypress, a pale blue wood that never rots. Others, following in the grand tradition of mithril, were the result of kitchen-sinking, like Terry Pratchett’s darklight or Fritz Leiber’s snow-diamonds.
This is clearly something that Monte Cook also enjoys, as the Ptolus sourcebook includes a number of unique special materials, too. (Including the liquid light referred to above.)
The utility of this storehouse is manifold:
- It’s an easy resource to tap when you want to put magic in the set dressing.
- Any time you want to infuse an element of the game world with the fantastical, you can reach for this list and do so. For example, the ritual of the novarch’s inauguration is studded with liquid light (what it says on the tin), godwood (a pale white wood that glows in the presence of divine magic), and elfin gold (an alchemical admixture of gold and ruby dust with tremendous flexibility).
- It allows you to craft structures and vistas impossible in the mundane world. For example, the lighter-than-air stone known as heliothil which makes floating towers and flying ships possible. Or the sheets of ruby crystal which can be used to create literal gemstone rooms.
- It can be used to create fantastical challenges for high level characters. Ironwood, for example, requires adamantine axes to fell and can be used to construct incredibly sturdy doors and other structures. Or locks made of cortosis that resist magical knock spells.
- It can provide memorable and noteworthy treasures (much like Bilbo’s original mithril shirt). For example, abyssopelagic gems that are fused in the depths of the ocean and melt at the pressures of sea level unless preserved with magical stasis fields. Or the lens of phantomglass that allows you perceive invisible spirits. Or the woven shirt of ghost grass which has the protective properties of chain.
It would be a mistake, though, to constantly fill your world with novel, never-before-seen material. The reason “mithril” resonates with meaning when I say it to you is because you have been exposed to it countless times; its redolent with lore. So the new fantastical materials you introduce to your campaigns will gain meaning over time as you reincorporate them into new contexts: The PCs encounter a statue of elfin gold, the individual strands of its metallic hair impossibly blowing in the wind. They see it used as magical circlet by Rehobath. They discover small craft-ingots of it in the alchemical laboratory of a dark elf. And so forth.
It’s great when the players recognize and truly know these fantastical materials. It’s even better when they’ve internalized them and start seeking them out: “You know what would be useful for this? Some shadow-veined rock.”
Even if that article will never be finished, I would still love to read it.
These are a good place to start:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mythological_substances
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alchemical_substances
The tricky part when it comes to such materials is that some types of players will see them as treasures to be obtained and nothing more, regardless of the context. I’ve heard tales of adventures getting derailed just because of a throwaway mention of a mithril emblem on a door, because the players wanted to steal and sell it. Of course, the most infamous case was the Adamantine Body feat for warforged in the 3.5 version of Eberron. PCs’ attempts to kill their own party members resulted first in weak attempts during 3.5’s life to claim it somehow wouldn’t work the way the murderhobos would like, then the abandonment of the entire concept in later editions.
I suspect the root of the problem lies in a ridiculously unbalanced economy, designed around keeping PC equipment level-appropriate instead of around letting the world be fantastical. I’d be interested in games with economies skewed towards the latter, even (heck, especially) if that means treasure accumulation is not an intended goal. It seems like a key prerequisite to making it all hang together. Sometimes I’ll see excellent ideas that help make a fantasy material feel more like a real thing in the world, like Pathfinder 1e saying that mithril cookware is inherently nonstick… and have my heart broken by a price that’s more than 120 times what an iron item would cost.
There’s a great framework for introducing this kind of thing that’s used over and over in Nintendo games. It’s based on Kishōtenketsu.
1. Introduce the element & its properties
2. Development: Use the element as intended
3. Twist: Use the element in novel ways. The more out-of-the-box the better.
4. Synthesis/Conclusion/Mastery: Use what you have learned in 3 to solve an ultimate problem or apply the new knowledge to a new situation.
It’s a new concept for me, so I need to fiddle with it. Maybe someone has more experience with it than I?
Have you thought about releasing these items as products?