Need a new material

In my campaign, demons and devils are kind of interchangeable. Anything that comes from the Pit is a Demon, and the Devils are just what we call the fallen Angels and Archangels (basically Pit Fiends), and they rule the Pit. I do use things like Hellcats and Bone Devils and so forth, but I call them Demons.

So the new DR materials, where silver is harmful to Devils and cold iron harmful to demons, is a bit of a pain, flavor-wise. Those materials belong to lycanthropes and fey, first of all. The new rules were trying to limit the number of special materials, so they reused them for the fiends. But since my campaign is currently demon-centric, I want a unique material that sounds like it should work against the Hordes of Hell.

Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance...

-B-

You could try galvorn. It's from the Silmarilion. It's a jet-black metal, as hard as steel but almost as easy to work as mithril. Or you could just say that it requires steel or silver from the celestial realms, or forged in divine fire, or whatever.

Mithril has some good-ish connotations, so that might work.

Orichalc (or orichalcum) was a term for a golden-colored metal first brought up by the Greeks, I believe. I think Plato mentioned it in his discussions of Atlantis.

Or you could use magic as the bypass for the damage reduction of outsiders.

-Dave

Well, if you're looking for something comparable to silver or cold iron, stay away from things like Mithral. Silver and Cold Iron are fairly common, and actually hurt the weapon they're placed on (cold iron makes it harder to enchant, silver is -1 damage), so they're not something you want on your primary weapon.

So, unless you want Mithral weapons to be really easy to find in your campaign (bad idea, IMO), you need to use some common material. Something about as rare as silver, and that gives small penalties to the weapon.
Possibilities:
1> Brass, or bronze: common, easy to make, but give penalties to the item.
2> Any organic material (wood or bone).
3> Crystal (some specific kind, or even just any crystalline weapon. See the Mind's Eye material on the WotC website for details.)
4> Going into old AD&D splatbooks, you could use Glassteel, a metal that acted like silver in every way that mattered.

DaveStebbins: Historically, orichalcum was just an alloy of 80% copper and 20% zinc or gold, and looked a bit like brass. It was just a lighter color of bronze, basically. The Romans used it for some coins.
But, like you said, it got linked with the whole Atlantis legend by Plato, so in a lot of game systems it's a magical substance.

The Plato quote (from the Critias):
"In the first place, they dug out of the earth whatever was to be found there, solid as well as fusile, and that which is now only a name and was then something more than a name, orichalcum, was dug out of the earth in many parts of the island, being more precious in those days than anything except gold."

In Shadowrun, for example, it was an alchemical combination of mercury, gold, silver, and copper. In some D&D books it's been a mithral/gold/mercury mixture or mithral/gold/adamantine. Either way, it'd be a high-end material, rarer than Adamantine, so not the sort of thing you should be using for a common DR type.

DaveStebbins said:

Orichalc (or orichalcum) was a term for a golden-colored metal first brought up by the Greeks, I believe. I think Plato mentioned it in his discussions of Atlantis.

Click to expand...

I wonder what that metal really was?

Maybe something a bit more exotic, like Wolf Iron (Tungsten), or Titanium?

Here's what I decided to go with, in a note to my players:

I like the new DR so much, I'm going to change it a bit.

The DMG advises against creating a lot of new materials, so the adventurers don't have a golf bag full of special weapons for all occasions. Trouble is that towards this end, they re-used alchemical silver for devils and cold iron for demons. Not only does this bug me flavor-wise, since everyone knows silver is for lycanthropes and cold iron is for fey, but since I don't distinguish between demons and devils it would actually encourage a golf bag mentality for fiend hunters.

Therefore, new material: Avernal Bronze - this rare ore, which despite it's name is not actually bronze, is coppery-green in hue with ruby-colored veins running through it. It is reputed to come from within the Pit itself. It is very difficult to work with, and reportedly requires divine-powered fire to work into any useable form. Once treated so, it develops a greenish glow, and the veins pulse red in the presence of fiends.

Weapons made from this metal have not been available to you as yet, so there is no need for retconning. Since the Pit has been sealed for over a millennium, it follows that any weapon made from this metal would be quite old. It replaces silver and cold iron as the special material for the purposes of defeating demon/devil DR.

...

I will probably give it the properties of bronze (-1 to hit and damage, hardness 9, etc...) but add about 500sp/lb (we are on the silver standard) to the price and +2 to the DC of any craft (arms and armor) check.

Nice!

I've thought about adding a salt-based material for fighting things from the Far Realms in my campaign...

In my steampunk gothic victorian horror-slash-swashbuckling campaign (), I've recently introduced blades that are woven from sunbeams rather than forged from base metals. They're very light weight (and do marginally less damage), but will be useful later when I begin to bring up infernal creatures of the pit.

I introduced it as a technique the fey use to get around their iron allergy - although less hefty for damage, the weapons are usable by them.