So after my players vanquished Vhalantru, the Beholder, they got together and decided to loot his layer. This included the Adamantine that is part of the oblivion doors. My question is how much Adamantine is there and what is the cost of removing it from the rest of the material that the doors are made of.
I'm curious what good it would do them to try and salvage Adamantine? It can't exactly be melted down and reforged, can it? I thought that once it cooled the first time that was that. And being nigh-invulnerable, you couldn't even cut a slab of it into any usable form.
But I could be wrong.
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The concept of Adamantine salvage is hardly a new one :) It's a frequent question w/ regards to "Forgotten Forge" adventure enclosed in the Eberron Campaign Setting and it has been described this way to me:
Adamantine is a rare to semi-rare ore that has the unique property of being incredibly resilient once it has been purified and forged. However, given admantine's incredible durability (and thus heat resistance) it is nearly impossible to re-forge and thus worth very little in salavage.
Additionally, its price is not based solely on the material's worth, but on the time and energy it takes to forge the product into a usable form- the steel that makes up full-plate is only twice the weight of that in chain shirt, but the full plate is worth nearly 10x as much due to vast effort it takes to sculpt the armor to fit its owner's form (remember, full plate can only be worn by the person it was designed for unless effort is made to re-shape it).
In this same way, a party trying to sell adamantine doors is only going to extract a good price from an individual looking for a massive, round adamantine door (and honestly, a savvy buyer will exploit a seller's desperation to be rid of such an unwieldy thing). Weapons are easier to sell, given the martial nature of the D&D world, but who honestly needs a 20' diameter door? Thus, the party is far more likely to get the raw end of any deal involving the salavage of adamantine.
The good news is that even if the PCs do get a raw deal, they didn't pay for the doors in the first place, so it's 100% profit!
In one game I ran, the characters entered a room with runes engraved on the walls, with traces of mithral for decoration. They spent more time digging out a couple ounces of mithral than they spent on searching the rest of the dungeon.
Hooray for the avaricious nature of adventurers! I'm sorry, I mean the entrepreneurial spirit...