What are magic items made of?

[rasmuswagner]

I'm brewing on my new D&D setting (core concept: not-South America has just been opened up to exploitation development by not-Europe), and as always, questions of economy underlie everything.

From a rules perspective, everyone knows what magic items are made of: They are made of gold pieces. You pony up your gold pieces, spend a little time, and hey presto, magic item. And it doesn't take much to craft magic items. Once you know how to craft magic items (one feat, Spellcraft, a bit of spellcasting) you can craft away, rapidly and without requiring any actual crafting skills. Spellcraft does everything for you. It seems more like assembling than crafting.

One possible answer is "pre-crafted sub-assemblies", made by lower skilled workers, crafting the finest thread, polishing gems, droning incantations for days and days. But that doesn't invite adventure, and while it makes sense for enchanting items in the first place, it makes very little sense when you spend 3,000 gp to upgrade your cloak from +1 to +2.

Gemstones? Gems and D&D magic already have a well established connection. Expensive matrial components are almost always gems.

Body parts of magical creatures? It gets bloody. If body parts are valuable in one adventure, every adventure is going to end with the party plopping out a Bag of Holding worth of bloody organs and body parts. It encourages murderhoboism.

Ideas, please?

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Crystallized hope?

[Koumei]

Atelier Ryza has explained to me that you create a magic cloak via alchemy. You shove ingredients in a pot, and then a completed item jumps out. You upgrade items by... basically pressure-cooking more ingredients into them after they're complete. Because alchemy isn't just powders, liquids, goo and bombs, it also covers musical instruments, clothing, weapons, construction materials and cake.

[Stahlseele]

Depends on how complicated you want this to be.
Have you SEEN the hassle that is producing magic items in the shadowrun universe?
That is one end of the scale.
The other end is: throw money at it.
Go to somebody, tell them your specifications, ask their price, pay.
Use your time productively for other stuff. Get finished product.

[OgreBattle]

So in that setting does it take a wizard college education to craft a magic item instead of a really nice mundane item, or is a skilled craftsman able to craft magic items with magic materials + their skill?

For example in Monster Hunter & Resident Evil they make magic elemental bullets by having some know how and the right ingredients.

[Omegonthesane]

I refer you to Red Rob's take on the Wish Economy. Even if it's only as flavour test it includes a variety of interesting things items could be made out of.

[Thaluikhain]

Very much depends on how you get them, surely?

If you find them in ancient ruins, they can be from some precursor culture that's now extinct and the materials aren't that important. I personally am sick of that sort of thing, though.

If you can make them yourself, that's very different. If you want it to be difficult to make them, you can have some weird rare material (meteoric iron, say). If you want it to be easy, have them be made of just good quality of whatever normal stuff is made from.

[Josh_Kablack]

Whiskey.

No. Seriously.

You could do an interesting setup where the core "manastuff" needed for magic items is made by a fermentation process that has various specifications for mixing grains (or other plants) in a mash bill, controlling temperature and pressure for a specified period and then aging in controlled conditions for literally years - with different results depending on the type of wood the aging container was made from, and higher quality enchantments requiring more years of aging.

Any homesteader with access to a decent blacksmith can brew up basic manastuff for the common well-known sorts of enchanting in their backyard still, but the crazy high-end stuff is aged in pocket dimensions where it won't be disturbed. Specific mash bills have specific enchanting affinities -- such as wheat based recipes work best for enchanting metals, while rye is better for enchanting fabrics, etc. Master mana distillers run years long experiments to find new mash bills that open up new types of enchanting -- for example Iron requires three times as much manastuff to enchant as other metals and no one has yet found a way to enchant truesilver, so there are ongoing attempts to find more efficient or just effective recipes to fill those needs.

More importantly, this lets new grains/ magic-suitable plants discovered be huge opportunities / trade secrets for the colonial powers across the sea, and lets you set up plot points around them but in a way that takes longer-than campaign time to produce major changes to the world. (In the real world, we wouldn't have potato vodka or bourbon without new-world crops.)

[Artless]

Literal moonshine is an amusing image generated from that, (that being a specific kind of brew that needs to be aged in the presence of moonlight.) As is the image of the effects of a bootlegging operation in a fantasy backwater, with the well-documented explosive potential of both magic and fermentation.

You could extend the fermentation pun further by including a tidbit that the resultant mixture attracts wayward souls and spirits like rotting food and vinegar do flies, and the recipe for ghosttouch-adjacent stuff needs to be aged in actual caskets nearby to, or buried in, graveyards.

[Mechalich]

Most D&D magic items are ostensibly made from the same materials as a normal version of the item, just somehow 'made special.' Alchemy is probably the best framework - in a western fantasy context - for understanding this, and it probably involves a lot of treating you item with special reagents during the production process. Said reagents are probably rare substances that utilize all of the expected sources: gemstones, animal parts, rare metals, etc.

A useful comparison is actual materials that were extremely expensive but low quantity in medieval times, such as pigments and spices. Whole specialized artisinal works existed to make those and there's probably the same sort of thing for magical item reagents. In particular it would make sense to require specialize craftsmanship to smelt unusual metals or to distill specialized chemicals (which would, to continue the thread above, include highly concentrated alcohol, not something normally available in medieval times).

[JigokuBosatsu]

"Go get this rare component" is literally the oldest plot hook in human history and while it's obviously not so interesting anymore on its own, it does at least give a basic, solid reason to do... well, anything in a story. It's a pretty big foundation of the whole "adventuring" gig.

One way to tackle it in your example is to have the business of magic item creation be a sprawling one with widespread commodities trading. Take a little real world inspiration and you can get something like the PCs being mercs (murderhobos) working for a front company for a shady government organization (royal wizard council) to collect blood diamonds (crystallized hope) in exchange for some primo Cold War surplus (precursor artifacts). Or if finding the components isn't so hard, maybe the PCs become part of an Operation Paperclip type deal where you have to "give asylum" to some necromancers in exchange for them running your alchemy program.

Maybe that veers a little too much into Fiscally Irresponsible Elf territory, and you'd still need a decent framework for the actual crafting. But that's kind of where I would start.

[Prak]

Wizard dicks.

Except, you're not, literally cutting off wizard dicks and chopping them up fresh, you're actually using dried and fermented wizard dicks, harvested from dead wizards. The fermenting and drying are important, as it allows the magical essence to sort of condense and infuse the wizard dick fully, as well as disguise the nature of the matter. Most people aren't aware that the magical reagents they're buying and using are actually shaved wizard dick.


You can buy them in fancy wooden boxes that have a razor built in so you can shave off the proper amount.

[Orca]

Crystallised magic from various sources, which may be aspected to one sort of magic or another - see Dominions or Ars Magica for examples of sources.

Those natives are wasting most of their astral gems by sacrificing them to their gods, and outright eating whole rooks of animal vis! We enlightened not-Europeans have far better uses for the stuff, it's practically a duty - no, an actual duty - to take it off them and put it to proper use!

[owlassociate]

They are slowly manifested from the aether via intensive and specialized meditation. Once you learn how to craft an item, you simply plop down a certain amount of gold (or an equivalent value of other substances) in a circle, prepare certain spells to be consumed in the process, and then you meditate in that circle for 8 hours a day, slowly manifesting the item as the gold or whatever dissipates into the aether. This is why crafting magical items requires no tools or other skills, just time, money, a bit of magic and the right know-how. Upgrading a magic item would be adding to the pile of material in the circle and then manifesting a similar, but more powerful version of that item. Or maybe enchanting an item requires it to be soaked in a carefully maintained pot of magical penis bonito liquer, a wizard never tells.

[Dogbert]

Wizard dicks and fighter tiny tears.

Jokes apart, back in 3E, the basic weapon to enchant had to be masterwork, so there's your answer. It's the enchanting process that makes it immune to damage from everything but other magic weapons. It's not some unobtanium or anything (otherwise any muggle could do it and no spells would be required).

[rasmuswagner]

Hmmmm.....certain plants have trace amounts of magic in them, herbivores accumulate tiny amounts of magic, but to get amounts of magic worth carting around, you need to kill big predators. How convenient

[Grek]

Hermits.

The creation of a magic item requires the assistance of a muse, a sort of ethereal spirit which manifests in a geographically uniform fashion. They appear at a random location in space-time, then latch onto the nearest mortal mind in a burst of inspiration and mystic insight. From there, the inspired individual can either attempt to assemble the item which haunts their dreams directly or (more commonly) recruit a specialist who can supply all of the necessary craftsmanship, components and spell exposure required for the magic item to be realized.

This has naturally resulted in a cottage industry of people moving out into the middle of nowhere in order to maximize their chances of being struck by the forge frenzy, with particularly clever hermits perching themselves atop high mountain peaks (in order to capitalize on muse manifestations in the upper atmosphere) and at the bottom of deep caverns (in order to capitalize on muse manifestations deep within the planet itself). Although most manifestations only bring about trivial results such as potions or scrolls, every hermit dreams of being inspired with the seed of something truly great.

[Krusk]

in my heartbreaker, gemstones have some sort of magical essence you can suck from them and infuse items with magical energy. Anyone (with class levels) can do it. Once done, the gem goes dull, and gray. You can find broad strokes and early drafts of how it works on my old gemstones currency thread.

Adds a level of importance to gemstones beyond "pretty". Gemstones become the only way to make lasting magic.