Just make it out of Adamatine also.
Adamantine weapons ignore hardness less than 20 (not less than or equal to 20)and Adamantine items have a hardness of 20. So weapons made of Adamantine will NOT ignore hardness of items made out of Adamantine. Problem solved!
Edit: Also, if you are worried about somebody tearing through castle walls and sewers and such, just remember how many hit points the item will have. I mean three feet of hewn stone has 540 hit points and that is sure to take a while even ignoring hardness. I would think that all types of guards and alarms would hear that noise.
In the sewers I am sure that would bring hordes of rats and maybe an Otyugh or maybe a swarm of Otyughs (depending on how maen the DM is :) ).
I'm not limiting this to items you can carry either. An adamantine pick would ruin a cities sewers/docks/etc if it got into the hands of a terrorist.
What about stuff crumling on his head? Cave-ins, water flows, pitfalls, etc.
Keep a pet rust monster or prepare rusting grasp spells. If someone tries to sunder your stuff, feed theirs to Rusty.
They still get a reflex DC 15 to avoid the antennaes of a rust monster.
Not if they are Held, muahahahaha
:)
Doors made of Adamantine are not a good idea. ;)
Yep, the first time I did something like this in 1st edition, the players spent the whole time deciding how to get the doors off the hinges and carted them out of the dungeon. That was enough of a haul to make the rest a little anticlimatic. So no more Adamantine doors unless they are protected by high level magic that makes them unable to be removed, etc.
Well if it was only 1/12" thick then it would have 20 hardness but only 3 hit points to get through the Adamantine. Then it would be back to business as usual. So not very effective unless the culprit cannot do more than 20 hit points of damage, then it is unsurmountable.
|
I am not talking about a door so hard you can beat. I am talking about protecting various things from adamantine, and how you do it.
A door is one example.
How would Rome protect the base of its vast aqueduct system from adamantine?
How do you stop someone from sundering your bag of holdings or staff of power?
1) A government would likely have key infrastructure under guard and or restrict access to the material.
2) If you see a big guy with an adamantine weapon coming at you, you either Disarm him, SoS him, Dominate him, Destroy the weapon, or stay the hell out of melee. You do everything in your power to keep the guy with the sunder tool from being able to use the sundering tool on you.
I dump corpses into the reservoir.
Evil.
|
Here's what I hope is a unique thought!
Everyone assumes that Adamantine can be recycled like modern steel. But reading the various descriptions of Adamantine, it doesn't really say how adamantine is worked or if it can in fact be recycled (absent magical means). What if a GM simply decides that in his world (or to the extent that its undefined in whatever world he's running in) Adamantine ORE can be worked so as to create armor, weapons, etc., but once forged, cannot be recycled (i.e. melted down and re-used), or more likely, that the effort/cost of recycling is so high that you can't make alot of money recycling it. This can partially explain the high cost of adamantine items.
So, high quality Adamantine ore or unforged (not worked into final form) metal trade bars might be 300 gp per pound, but that 1000 lb Adamantine door might only sell for a pittance (1 gp per pound?) because (1) while very few people can work with Adamantine, even fewer can recycle it, and so you have a very small market, (2) the effort/cost of recycling that already worked adamantine is such that even those who can recycle it prefer to buy raw adamantine at 300 gp per pound.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Well, first of all, bypassing hardness doesn't kill something. It just means that the damage you inflict isn't reduced.
Stone, for example, has 15hp per inch of thickness. As such, a 1'-thick stone wall, literally, takes 180 points of damage to become ruined (destroyed).
So the guy with the pick will be working at it for a while -- which makes sense -- heck, (historically) miners have been doing the exact same thing for a long time and without the benefit of a tool that bypasses hardness.
Add to that the fact that stone (and hence, aqueducts) only has a hardness of 8 in the first place -- especially in the context of Golarion -- a world populated by a fair number of Giants and monstrous humanoids that are strong enough to reliably do enough damage to overcome that when wielding their greatclubs.
Realistically, adamantine doesn't look like a weapon of mass destruction, it's just something that speeds the process somewhat.
And, then, all of this is also in a world where a number of people that really, really, like trees and animals can just mutter a few words, put a hand on it and have the acqueduct twist itself into a pretzel. (Or those bookish folk that can point a finger and fire a green beam that turns a huge section of it to ash, for that matter..)
|
Here's what I hope is a unique thought!
Everyone assumes that Adamantine can be recycled like modern steel. But reading the various descriptions of Adamantine, it doesn't really say how adamantine is worked or if it can in fact be recycled (absent magical means). What if a GM simply decides that in his world (or to the extent that its undefined in whatever world he's running in) Adamantine ORE can be worked so as to create armor, weapons, etc., but once forged, cannot be recycled (i.e. melted down and re-used), or more likely, that the effort/cost of recycling is so high that you can't make alot of money recycling it. This can partially explain the high cost of adamantine items.
So, high quality Adamantine ore or unforged (not worked into final form) metal trade bars might be 300 gp per pound, but that 1000 lb Adamantine door might only sell for a pittance (1 gp per pound?) because (1) while very few people can work with Adamantine, even fewer can recycle it, and so you have a very small market, (2) the effort/cost of recycling that already worked adamantine is such that even those who can recycle it prefer to buy raw adamantine at 300 gp per pound.
You're right that nothing is said about the possibility of recycling adamantine. But even if we assume that it can't be recycled, that won't necessarily translate to a very low sell value. (Maybe not the full 50%, but certainly not the pitiful fragment you propose.)
See, you still have an adamantine door. Instead of melting it down, recycle it as a whole. Use the door in a new dungeon.
---
If the GM uses an adamantine door because he doesn't want the players to go into room X before they do Y, and the players respond by making it a priority to loot the door (rather than focus on the adventure), as a GM you really gotta ask yourself what you're doing.
Likewise, if you rely on adamantine doors to block the players, that will only work for a few levels, until the players start bringing Stone Shape. Then you resort to adamatine walls. They come with Knock. You add Knock-proof locks. They use Gaseous Form. You plug all the holes. They use Dimension Door. You lock that down. They send in the shadowdancer's Shadow Companion...
This arms race can only end in silliness.
In my personal experience, some GMs just go overboard with adamantine. We never ran into a solid steel door; adamantine or nothing.
|
|
If you want to avoid someone with a adamantine picaxe to do a tunnel. Patroll the walls.
If you want to avoid someone to sunder your staff, use invisibility.
Not only adamantine can sunder your staff, a well skilled warrior with a enchanted steel sword can do that. Even a strong minner with a regular picaxe can dig a tunnel in your city walls. That's why cities have guards, and casters invest in defense magic.
|
|
You're right that nothing is said about the possibility of recycling adamantine. But even if we assume that it can't be recycled, that won't necessarily translate to a very low sell value. (Maybe not the full 50%, but certainly not the pitiful fragment you propose.)
See, you still have an adamantine door. Instead of melting it down, recycle it as a whole. Use the door in a new dungeon.
Well, you actually have a broken adamantine door (or at least one with a hole in it) if the PCs hacked their way through it. :>
Even if the door isn't damaged/broken or you fix it (Make Whole?), your market may still be rather small or non-existent even for intact adamantine doors, particularly large ones. I could see people buying a regular size door, but how many people need some huge door for their business or home? And how many people are buying doors for dungeons? The real point is that they PCs may not get anywhere near what they might think of as "full value"... i.e. 150 gp/pound (300 gp halved).
|
|
The fluff for Golarion specifies adamantite is extracted from a special ore, but nothing's stopping GMs from ruling otherwise for their own worlds.
The point is that (to my knowledge) the fluff for Golarion does NOT specify how admantine items are made from the ore or whether such items can be re-made or recycled, so a GM running in Golarion can restrict the re-use value of Adamantine. Even if the fluff exists, unless you're playing PFS, the GM can still tweak Golarion.
