This has been on my mind for a while but mechanically lead has frequently had some kind of anti-magical property and a lot of things have some kind of allergy to cold iron, however these aren't really used to protect things from magic. From time to time I've seen anti-magic metals in fiction so I thought about what that would look like in Pathfinder and wanted to talk about and think about the reprecussions of doing such a thing.
The special material I came up with was Soldered Plate. It would be plates of cold iron soldered together in a kind of jigsaw fashion to make weapons and armor that could defend against magical energies.
The common trait of materials like this is that they cannot be enchanted and if applicable can eat up item slots.
Weapons and armor made from soldered plate have the fragile quality. Any items with the broken condition can be repaired within an hour using 100gp of alchemical reagents and a craft check (yet to be determined). They are intricate pieces and thus add 2000gp to the cost and +5 to the DC to craft it.
Damage from soldered plate weapons counts as continual damage for the one round for the purposes of casting spells. This damage does not stack. Ongoing effects and magic items can be dispelled with a sunder attempt. To dispel an effect on an item or creature you must have the Arcane Cleave feat and make a sunder attempt equal to or greater than 11+the spell's caster level. If there are multiple instances of ongoing effects you must target the highest caster level effect first. If successful, that spell ends. If not, compare the same result to the spell with the next highest caster level. Repeat this process until one spell affecting the target ends, or you have failed to sunder every spell. Whether or not you have succeeded, this gives the weapon the broken condition.
Arcane Cleave
Prerequisite: 5 ranks in Spellcraft, BAB +5, Improved Sunder
Benefits: You may attempt to make sunder attempts on ongoing magical effects.
Armor made from soldered plates grant the wearer spell resistance equal to 10+the armor bonus granted by the armor. Shield and armor bonuses stack for this effect. The wearer of any solder plate armor must also make concentration checks to cast spells while wearing the armor.
I'm thinking of a bit more as i go on but let me know what you think about this direction. I'm thinking of anti-scrying masks, a type of antimagic lead poisoning and so on. Is this too good? Is it just bad? does it make spellcasting unfun if a a campaign gets a number of enemies with this kind of stuff?
I saw Noqual but it seemed kind of piddly to me. No ability to actually disrupt magic and kind of overshadowed by a cloak of resistance. I'm more thinking of something along the lines of n'th metal or a darksword or something. Something that can shut down magic when it hits hard enough as opposed to just be replaced by something more magical very easily.
Noqual is outright useless since it's a resistance bonus. By the time you can afford anything made of it, well you wouldn't BE there to afford anything made of it if you didn't already have a better bonus to start with.
Noqual is outright useless since it's a resistance bonus. By the time you can afford anything made of it, well you wouldn't BE there to afford anything made of it if you didn't already have a better bonus to start with.
Which is the reason why I thought it was piddly.
As armor it grants a bonus that doesn't stack with cloak of resistance. the pricing is just under a mithral armor+cloak of resistance so it isn't much of a discount nor does it actually offer real protection because if your save is a bad save all these numerical bonuses are just a game of catch-up and that +2 is basically nothing unless you build for it, something I'm not that keen about repeating.
With weapons you get a bonus to two creature types and that's it. Nothing really anti-magic about it.
I know I doubled down on the downsides of my version, them being unenchantable and fragile but I wanted really significant effects that weren't just 'add numbers to x'. Spell resistance is rare and I didn't want to artificially jack up the price so I gave it a vulnerability. The weapon quality has the ability to actually shut down any casting if you deal enough damage (If I know my rules correctly the effect forces concentration checks on spells and spell-likes when it hits) which is something that I feel martials should be able to do but don't really. I wanted to put in something that actually functions as a magical defense so that worlds don't logically go full Tippyverse.
Planning to make a Lich's phylactery harder to find?
No but it does bring up the question as to whether or not putting a phylactery in a lead box would make the lich stop working? If it doesn't I think putting it in a lead box is already a viable way to make it harder to find so I don't need redundancy.
For the most part I want to deal a bit with high magic settings where martials still exist for some reason. I'm also just off a few pieces of fiction where there is some kind of anti-magic to handle overpowered beings and at the same time other pieces of fiction where one character is clearly overpowered but forgets that he has powers to make the plot work, and I really don't want to do that. Then there was an instance of high level monsters lately where there was literally no way to deal with it except with magic, but the other way around isn't true so some PCs just had to sit in a corner.
Lead is pretty much anti-divination rather than straight anti-magic, so a phylactery in a lead box should work fine.
The anti-divination thing is one reason I didn't go full lead or lead plated, and instead went for something more intricate and mysterious sounding. The general flavor is supposed to be cold iron plates that are arranged into patterns using soldering as a binding material (where the lead comes in). The combination of cold iron, lead and patterns are meant to disrupt magical energies since cold iron and lead alone never fully do the trick.
It also enables the fragile quality which I found essential to not making it a material that functionally makes playing a spellcaster unfun in situations that involve it. It makes sure there's ways around it but none that are too easy.
I'm trying to understand the ability of a Soldered Plate weapon to sunder an ongoing spell effect. Okay, the special material can disrupt ongoing spells... but only if the person holding it has a feat that pretty much gives them the ability to sunder spells anyway?
Assuming that the Arcane Cleave feat you listed is to be read correctly (and it's pretty short and straight-forward on what it allows) then once you have it... you can sunder spells whether you have a Soldered Plate weapon or not... and if you don't use a Soldered Plate weapon's special ability to disrupt spells then you don't have to worry about your weapon getting an auto-break.
I'm thinking of a bit more as i go on but let me know what you think about this direction. I'm thinking of anti-scrying masks, a type of antimagic lead poisoning and so on. Is this too good? Is it just bad? does it make spellcasting unfun if a a campaign gets a number of enemies with this kind of stuff?
There's nothing wrong with making an antimagic-type material. As for whether it is good or bad, that depends on how it's integrated and introduced. How much is the material? How easy is it to get? How powerful are its effects on magic?
The existence of the material doesn't necessarily make encountering foes with it 'unfun' unless the player never gets a chance to really accomplish anything or defeat any foe because of it. It's hard to judge how fun or unfun any particular player finds such a thing. Some might like the challenge assuming they have a chance to overcome or have some other in-game method that they can use to achieve their goals. It's no different than a rogue facing a lot of non-crit opponents. If the adventure is good and the rogue's party can help deal with the foes and the rogue has lots of other opportunities to use their many other abilities, some players might not care. Other's might be miffed. Some players might argue if they encounter an elf and that means the DM is being mean and unfair because they decided to know the sleep or charm person spells.
Really all you can do is come up with a reasonably believable material, try and spell out what it can and can't do and what it can be made into and give it a decent price structure. Maybe someone will see it and like, maybe someone will hate it, and most everybody else will think it's okay but probably never really have a use for it.
I'll try one:
Malwing
This leathery material is noted for its antimagical properties and abilities to disrupt ongoing spell effects. Created from the wing leather of creatures with high spell resistance (at least SR 20+) and treated with alchemical agents, this material is rare and expensive. Since most creatures it can be harvested from are either adult dragons or powerful outsiders like angels or demons, this makes even small amounts difficult to gather (and unlikely to be viewed positively by such creatures). Fortunately for most good outsiders, their wings tend towards the more feathered rather than leathery side of the scale, making them less-likely resources.
Malwing weapons are rare since leather weapons aren't very common, however it can also be wrapped around a bludgeoning (only) weapon, though this reduces the damage dealt by 1 unless the weapon is already soft or leather-equivalent (such as a whip or a sap). malwing weapons can dispel one ongoing magical effect from a creature or object per day. On a successful hit, the wielder rolls a dispel check as though with a CL 5 and checks it against all ongoing spell effects from highest to lowest until it succeeds against one or fails against all effects. When the dispel check succeeds, that effect is ended and the weapon no longer checks for dispel against future targets for the day. However, for the rest of the day, the malwing weapon will automatically count as dispelling that spell effect on any further targets it strike unless they are of a higher caster level.
Malwing armor can only be made in leather, studded, or hide versions and provides its wearer with SR equal to 11 + its armor or shield bonus. Armor and shield bonuses stack with the base SR of 11 though the wearer cannot voluntarily lower her SR even for spells from allies (spells the wearer casts on herself are unaffected).
Malwing can also line or wrap containers and other objects and functions as a sheet of lead for purposes of blocking divination spells or similar effects. Additionally, a malwing or malwing-wrapped object always counts as an attended object whether magical or not for purposes of receiving a saving throw against magical effects and it makes such checks with a +2 bonus or with its normal save, whichever is higher. This only applies if the exterior or affected area is protected, an inner lining of malwing inside a wooden chest would protect the contents against scrying or divinations but the chest wouldn't get a save against spells unless the malwing material was on the outside.
Malwing can only be used to make leather or predominantly leather items and it possesses the same hardness and hit points as normal leather. Malwing costs twice as much to enchant.
Then you just give it a cost, like 1,000 gp per pound of the weapon being wrapped, or per yard or something fair, like whether a medium weapon is typically light or one-handed or two-handed then you can double it for larger weapons and halve it for smaller one.
Just thought I'd try my hand at making a special material, I know this one isn't metal like the one you want though.
Create a new metal/material. Do not use cold iron as your base. fragile could still work though, the material is brittle due to being disconnected from the natural magic in the world. Without using something explicitly with spell resistance (as Pizza Lord did), you would also need to explain why no deities like this material enough to give energy to it.
Why cold iron shouldn't repel magic:
This idea is fairly prevalent in fantasy and has a historical reason. Said historical reason is really bad, however. Near the end of the bronze age (it was short), certain tribes had access to worked iron and others didn't. Obviously, the tribes with better technology thought they had a shot at conquering their immediate vicinity.
An iron blade can fairly easily break a bronze blade. the losing tribe decided that this new material dispels the enhancements their gods had placed on their blades. This completely ignores the fact that the other side likely had their own deities, and so also had magic weapons. If the enhancements are comparable, the contest of weapon durability goes to the better metallurgists, which did win in this case
metal and magic creating absurdities in PF:
Cold iron is a possible power component for the abjuration school. powdered iron (can't remember if it is cold) is also used as a material component for antimagic field. Yet somehow, a cold iron object enhanced with an abjuration effect (+1 defending cold iron longsword takes more to enhance than the same object made of conventional materials.
Suppose there was a multiclass cleric/druid who worships Sarenrae and takes the fire domain from both classes (probably also a goblin). if they were to cast their domain spells, it would be energy from the same source (Sarenrae), through the same storage (the character), used at approximately the same time, to produce the same effect (burning hands, which is on neither spell list). If they do so as a cleric, they can cast in metal armour, but not if they use their druid slots.
This has been on my mind for a while but mechanically lead has frequently had some kind of anti-magical property and a lot of things have some kind of allergy to cold iron, however these aren't really used to protect things from magic. From time to time I've seen anti-magic metals in fiction so I thought about what that would look like in Pathfinder and wanted to talk about and think about the reprecussions of doing such a thing.
The special material I came up with was Soldered Plate. It would be plates of cold iron soldered together in a kind of jigsaw fashion to make weapons and armor that could defend against magical energies.
The common trait of materials like this is that they cannot be enchanted and if applicable can eat up item slots.
Weapons and armor made from soldered plate have the fragile quality. Any items with the broken condition can be repaired within an hour using 100gp of alchemical reagents and a craft check (yet to be determined). They are intricate pieces and thus add 2000gp to the cost and +5 to the DC to craft it.
Damage from soldered plate weapons counts as continual damage for the one round for the purposes of casting spells. This damage does not stack. Ongoing effects and magic items can be dispelled with a sunder attempt. To dispel an effect on an item or creature you must have the Arcane Cleave feat and make a sunder attempt equal to or greater than 11+the spell's caster level. If there are multiple instances of ongoing effects you must target the highest caster level effect first. If successful, that spell ends. If not, compare the same result to the spell with the next highest caster level. Repeat this process until one spell affecting the target ends, or you have failed to sunder every spell. Whether or not you have succeeded, this gives the weapon the broken condition.
Arcane Cleave
Prerequisite: 5 ranks in Spellcraft, BAB +5, Improved Sunder
Benefits: You may attempt to make sunder attempts on ongoing magical effects.
Armor made from soldered plates...
you could potentially run an entire campaign around the discovery of and/or exploitation of such a metal's discovery.
Perhaps magic creates a sort of mutually assured destruction between different countries, and wizards use this to both maintain power for themselves and keep semblance of peace.
Someone discovers this stuff, and now can get extremely rich selling it to one side with the sales pitch being "with this, you can strike first and survive the counter strike. (or playing one side against the other).
Kingdoms would want it, might even kill the discovering party to take it for themselves (worse has been done in the name of the greater good).
Wizards themselves would be extremely interested in stopping the production and development of equipment made of it.
Outlandish Ring
To all test this seems to be a ring of spell resistance.
DM: When put on it shrinks to irremovable and creates a dead magic zone 10feet out from the wearer.
Obviously a spell won’t remove it. A magic hating character might cut off the finger to get it. It blocks further Shapeshifting and opening magic storage devices.
As a trap from the cleaves, it might be a bit much for most.
