... black metal bolts?


Curse of the Crimson Throne


In the middle of 7 Days to the Grave, when dealing with the wererats, one finds a mountain of mundane gear, except for "60 black metal bolts," which have no other description.

Googling turned up very little except for a play thread here which linked to this wiki entry.

I wound up just deciding that they were, in fact, black steel, and therefore very valuable, and since the running schtick with the magic shop is that the owner isn't from around these parts, I just told them that these weren't supposed to exist in this dimension, so he'd offer them a good price and whisk them away. (Mostly I decided this because I felt like the players were due for a giant pile of gold falling into their laps. I may regret that later; we'll see.)

Anyway, the question I had is: What was the actual intent with these things? Even in 3.5 I'd never heard of black metals, and the fact that they were just mentioned in passing in the middle of an otherwise mundane pile of loot makes me think they probably weren't supposed to be that, but the label "black metal bolts" is oddly specific if it's not meant to be anything special.

RPG Superstar 2008 Top 32

I don't have that adventure in front of me, but I'm pretty sure that's just description. It would be like saying a 'yellow cloak', or 'arrows with green fletching'. Mechanically, they're just crossbow bolts.

You could always decide that means they're adamantine or something like that, though.


Seven Days to the Grave wrote:
Amid the rotted food, miles of rope, and dark cloaks that fill most of the crates in this room, a DC 15 Search check turns up 22 daggers, 12 short swords, 3 light crossbows, 60 black metal bolts, 4 chain shirts, 12 flasks of alchemist’s fire, a masterwork longsword, and a masterwork suit of chainmail.

The way it's written, it seems to be referring to the material. I can see from the aforementioned play thread that I'm not the first one to think that.

RPG Superstar 2008 Top 32

The wiki entry you found is categorized as Homebrew. I doubt that is what the author was referring to.

I've referred Wes to this thread. Perhaps he will have a better answer.

Contributor

pathar wrote:
The way it's written, it seems to be referring to the material. I can see from the aforementioned play thread that I'm not the first one to think that.

Nope, nothing special, just that the forging process of these bolts made them black, which the wererats favor because they're sneaky types. No special rules were meant to be implied as I wrote it, but if you want to make them cooler in some way, go for it!


D'oh. Ah well, thanks for clearing that up.


Funnily enough, I've used a few "black metal" objects in my games, inspired out of a 3PP list of mundane loot somewhere. They are always completely magically immune and count as adamantine, but are not exactly. The parties have never gotten high enough level to find out, but they are really relics of alternate realities, random tools or objects that seem magical.

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