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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ColonelHardisson" data-source="post: 455902" data-attributes="member: 363">There is another logical leap here, that I think a lot of folk forget - in a world where magic exists, there will have been thousands of years of metallurgical and weaponsmithing discoveries that took that additional factor into account. It would be another element to deal with, like heat. Magic would help in the creation of alloys and the discovery of ways to strengthen and modify designs. At least, that's how I see it. The real world has also never produced human-like giants or flying creatures that bulk the same as a dragon, both because of basic principles of physics.I'm not trying to cop out here, and say "well, it's magic." I'm just trying to point out that there would be a number of profound ways in which a world infused with magic would differ from ours. A sword like the one being discussed, produced as the end result of millennia of experimentation with forces that don't exist in the real world, doesn't seem an unreasonable thing to me. Think about this - ancient castles never took flying attackers into account. Armorsmiths never took into account attackers so large as to be able to grasp the wearer of the armor in a hand or paw. If these things had to have been dealt with in the real world, how different would these things now look? How many innovations would have been made to them that would look nonsensical to us in our non-magical world?Look, I do understand that some dislike this particular concept. That's cool. It's just that this particular item leapt out at me as being an interesting touch that could lend a bit of wonder and exoticness to a campaign world. I have something like two or three pages of background material about how the mercurial swords came to be in my campaign world. Anything that sparks ideas like that, especially such a small thing, can't be all bad.</blockquote>

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