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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Spatzimaus" data-source="post: 1047723" data-attributes="member: 3051">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.</blockquote>

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