So the original plan for this week was to do the Path of Stone Awakened path focus; but as I was thinking about that path I realised that it was probably necessary to break out magic items from that blog post otherwise the path focus would just become magic items + a bit of other stuff.
One of the design ideas I was thinking about when Gal Hadre first started coming together was how the dominant fantasy RPGs of the time, pathfinder 1st ed and D&D 4th ed, heavily leaned on magic items to give your player characters power and that a single character could go through a few dozen magic items, not including consumables like potions. This was one of the things I didn’t like about these systems, are you awesome or is your gear awesome? Getting a decent magical item for a character should be a story arc of its own, tracking down rumours of where one was lost, finding the location, battling whatever has claimed it and possibly other treasure hunters. Even lesser magic items shouldn’t just be something you find on the shelf of a store in a random village.
Thus magic items, including weapons and armour, are much less common in Gal Hadre than in pathfinder or D&D. A character is highly unlikely to even have a second magic weapon, let alone just sell it. Someone has to be really desperate for cash to sell a magic weapon when the entire Kingdom has a finite, known number and someone probably has documented every house that has one. See Valyarian steel blades in A Song of Ice and Fire.
Magic weapons and armour will have names, histories, perhaps legends about them; they almost become characters in their own right. And these will be far more interesting than “Oh another +2 magic weapon, but I use longswords and this is a battle-axe; let’s sell it the next time we are in town.” Production of new magic weapons thus is very slow. You won’t find entire units decked out in magical armour and weapons, more like the King, his champion and a handful of the nobles in the army have either a magical weapon or magical armour, maybe the King has both.
Making magical items in Gal Hadre is not easy, it requires mastery of at least one path of dragon magic to bind magic into an item in a way that won’t dissipate over time. Usually this is the path of stone awakened as it binds magic into metal and stone items best of all the paths. In principle, the use of path of stone awakened to bind magic into a metal item is basically the same as using the path of life to magically change a living creature. An argument more than one unethical experimenter using the path of life has tried to make. Because learning multiple paths adds even more time to the studying required to make a magic item, more magic items use path of stone awakened magic in their powers in addition to just binding the magic. More powerful magic items are more evenly distributed. One of the side effects of this is the most common damage type for a magic weapon to cause is acid, and the most common elemental resistance in armour is against acid.
Magic needs to be bound into an item as it is being crafted, you can’t take a sword and add magic to it later. Well you can but it won’t hold, any magic applied once an item is made is temporary. The magic must be bound into the fabric of the item; this also makes it hard to apply magic to something that is carved or simply cut from something else. Binding magic into a statue is hard but not impossible.
The vast majority of magical items in Gal Hadre are fairly simple, doing one specific magical thing in addition to their mundane uses. A magical blade will hold a keen edge forever or deal acid damage, making it do both is far harder. Probably most magical weapons and armour simply reinforce existing traits of the item rather than try to give it clearly magical properties. In most cases an incredibly keen edge that never has to be sharpened or magically hardened armour is more useful.
One of the things holding back the number of magical items is that even experts in their crafting frequently fail to successfully bind magic into an item and when successful it takes far longer than a mundane version. A human who trains from their teens to become a magical blacksmith might produce a handful of items in their lifetime, they will spend far more time learning and failing than making working magical items. The majority of magical item makers are either Tund or Werd as both species live significantly longer than humans and thus can spend a much higher percentage of their time making items rather than learning to make them.
Other than a few simple magic items that are successfully made when an apprentice is learning their skills, every magic item is made to order by something wealthy. You won’t find a magic item shop anywhere in Gal Hadre. If you want to get a magic item, you need to either find one that has been lost somehow, kill the current owner or be fabulously wealthy and well connected. Being Tund or Werd also helps given the distribution of mage-smiths and especially the Werd caste control on their products.
Weirdly this also makes magic items generally difficult to steal, not because actually getting them is necessarily that hard but selling them is nearly impossible. If a magical item has been stolen and someone in a nearby city suddenly has a magical item that appears to be the same one it is very clear where the stolen item ended up.
How do you feel about how magical items are handled in Gal Hadre? Is there something you think I should have covered but didn’t?
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