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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Agback" data-source="post: 772255" data-attributes="member: 5328">G'dayWotC are of course free to decide that in the D&D universe 'cold iron' is something special. And DMs are of course free to make whatever rulings they like about their worlds. Until they do (if they do) we must suppose that 'cold iron' means the same thing in D&D as it does in 'ordinary' poetical English. And in everyday English 'cold iron' is contrasted not with any other sort of iron but with hot lead. For example, read the poem Cold Iron by Rudyard Kipling.That's right, folks. "Cold iron" just means "iron".As for the suggestion that cold iron must be manufactured entirely without the use of heat, that would definitely require magic. Iron ores are not iron mixed with impurities, they are chemical compounds such as iron oxide. No amount of mechanical handling of any sort whatever will turn them into iron. You positively need high temperatures and a reducing environment.Metallic iron does occur in small quantities: for example in some meteorites, and as a spongy mass that precipitates ought of the water in some anoxic bogs. You might just manage to shape meteoric iron without magic. But you would never weld bog iron into a solid mass without heat.As for a contrast with cast iron and steel, in mediaeval technologies that amounts to no contrast at all. The Chinese have had cast iron since the first century, but it was unknown in Europe until the 17th century. And carbon was deliberately alloyed with iron to make that steel called 'wootz' or 'bulat' in mediaeval India, but steel was not made in Europe until the invention of the Bessemer Process (except that smiths inadvertently and without knowing what they were doing made a little mild steel on the surface of their workpiece whenever they heated iron in a forge). In mediaeval and ancient technolgy in the West there was only wrought iron, and it had all been heated (though none of it had been melted).There has been a lot of error and nonsense about iron and steel, cast iron and wrought iron, written in this thread. I would urge anyone who has not already done so to trust nothing that they have read above, but to read the article on 'Iron and Steel Making' in Encyclopaedia Britannica or some other trustworthy source.Regards,Agback</blockquote>

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