Artifacts and Artifice

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Collecting the Ingredients

Design Note: Artifact Design

Roll intervals for artifact design are set to make choosing high adventure over research and dice rolls reasonable. If they were too short, even the travel time to distant locations would be prohibitive, let alone the exploration and research. Creation is huge, and many places to visit may not be right next door.

Finding or possessing a complete artifact design is a huge benefit, especially for greater wonders. Storytellers should make them commensurately difficult to acquire—but highly rewarding. If finding partial information for a handful of successes is a month's work, cutting the crafting time by half should definitely take longer.

Before the character can turn her complete design into a fully functioning wonder, she must obtain the proper materials. This usually includes one of the magical materials. These substances channel and store Essence much better than anything else in Creation, so they tend to appear even in artifacts principally made of other things. For instance, a wooden artifact might hold a sliver of moonsilver or jade in its core. Still, some designs call for very specific constructions and cannot incorporate one of the magical materials. In other cases, artisans simply cannot obtain the magical materials and must make do with substances of lesser potency.

The sheer power of the magical materials can make them difficult to craft, though. If a character works with magical materials not natural to him (a Solar working jade, or a mortal working any material), his player suffer a -2 internal penalty on each roll. First Age artisans circumvented this limitation by working together, a practice that would work just as well today. Having a single qualified Exalted assistant of the ideal type eliminates the penalty.

Jade

Yellow Jade

Yellow jade is a mistake. It doesn't appear naturally, and no one knows how to create it. Dragon-Blooded alchemists try to create it with different mixtures of regular jade, but none of their experiments ever succeed more than once. Yellow jade only appears when a thaumaturge makes an unrepeatable error when following an intended formula, such as spilling in unknown exotic ingredients or leaving a mixture to simmer a day too long. If any intelligent force decides when and where yellow jade appears, it certainly isn't the Dragon-Blooded.

This is a shame, because yellow jade has a wide variety of uses. Artifacts made with this rare material often require less committed Essence or none at all. It is a primary component of many artifacts that mortals can use.

Jade Material Bonuses

The standard bonuses for a Dragon-Blooded hero who attunes a jade artifact reflect the Terrestrial qualities of preparedness and strength. Jade is a superior magical material for reducing the Speed of a character's attacks. However, some Dragon-Blooded artificers treat jade to bring out other latent aspects of its elemental nature. Each color of jade offers its own suite of advantages to artifact weapons.

White jade adds +2 to damage and +1 to the difficulty of rolls to resist knockdown and stunning caused by the weapon.

Green jade adds +1 to damage and steals one mote of Essence from living creatures that take damage from the attack, transferring it to the wielder.

Red jade adds +3 to damage due to intense heat. Black jade adds +1 to damage and adds +2 to defense.

Blue jade adds +1 to damage and +2 to Rate.

Each bonus is available to any Terrestrial Exalt who attunes the artifact (or other Exalted who make the effort), not just Dragon-Bloods of the appropriate element. Only one bonus applies, even when a weapon incorporates multiple types of jade. Bonuses apply equally to hand-to-hand and ranged artifact weapons.

The most common magical material is jade. Each of its five varieties forms in a place most suited to its elemental association and works especially well for certain kinds of artifacts, though they see use in all manner of wonders. An artifact whose power can be associated with a particular Ability requires jade of the element associated with the Dragon-Blooded caste that favors that Ability. Stealth artifacts demand blue jade, for example, and Survival artifacts need green jade.

White jade occurs beneath mountains and near large deposits of dense stone. It is incredibly plentiful beneath the Imperial Mountain, directly over the Elemental Pole of Earth. The Realm uses white jade for its official currency because it resists wear and is so readily available. White jade is ideal for artifacts that manipulate earth and stone or restrain another being's mind.

Green jade looks as if it grew like a plant. It develops in regions of plentiful vegetation, such as thick forests or jungles, often entangled among the roots of the greatest trees. Wood elementals and forest gods often become protective of the jade that forms naturally in their domains. Green jade is best for controlling plants, affecting animals and drawing ambient Essence into an artifact.

Red jade deposits appear in the hottest regions of the world—beneath active volcanoes and in the center of scorching deserts. Its location makes it difficult to harvest, sometimes requiring Fire Aspects, artifact-equipped mortals or summoned elementals to retrieve it. Red jade is warm to the touch and often flickers in the light. It is perfect for controlling fire or making people immune to it, as well as causing harm or heightening reflexes.

Black jade' forms in deep lakes where water pools for a long time and in large seas. The floor of the Western Ocean holds astoundingly quantities, but most of it is so many miles beneath the surface that even Water Aspects cannot easily obtain it. Even a thin shaving of black jade seems to hold infinite depth, making it highly prized as a meditation aid. Apart from controlling water, this variety of jade works well for affecting or communicating with gods, elementals and demons.

Blue jade looks almost translucent with misty shapes that appear and vanish. Occultists and soothsayers sometimes use these shapes as an alternative to reading entrails or the constellations. This jade appears in areas of rarified air or great cold, such as the heights of the Imperial Mountain or the glacial wastes of the North. Artifacts that control the weather or sense or affect thought are usually best made with blue jade.

Acquiring jade is sometimes very, very difficult and sometimes surprisingly easy. Most significant jade deposits are under the direct control of Realm troops led by a good number of competent Dragon-Blooded. For an outcaste or Anathema to access these sources of jade would require significant skill, luck and daring. On the other hand, the Realm uses jade for money. Someone with enough financial backing could visit a few banks and come away with a good deal of white jade. Removing currency from circulation is an offense punishable by heavy fines that the Imperial Treasury treats quite seriously, especially in this time of dwindling taxes.

One pound of jade is a Resources 3 expense, up to nine pounds is Resources 4, and a Resources 5 expenditure can procure up to 25 pounds at a go. Even if the final artifact does not require 25 pounds of jade, the creation process often requires more than one would expect—jade can be ground, melted, distilled and alchemically treated in a dozen ways that reduces the quantity while refining the quality.

There are also many tons of jade extant in Creation, already part of artifacts. Although few mortals would conceive of assaulting a Dragon-Blood for her panoply, other folk are less scrupulous (or scared). Jade in weapons and armor has been alloyed with steel, but that just means a would-be artificer must acquire more of it—after the reduction and extraction process, a character has about one-tenth the weight of jade as the alloy she had to start.

A workshop capable of working jade is a Resources 3 expense.

Sample First Age Exotic Materials

Heaven Leaf Fallen: In the densest jungles of the East, Wood-aspected arborists grew massive, broad-leafed trees with canopies large enough to support palaces. Instead, the master gardeners planted over them, growing more than a dozen layers of trees on top of each other. When the topmost tree brushed the firmament with a single leaf, the god responsible for keeping the sky clear smote the entire series from the very top to the bottommost root. Only the highest leaf survives, charged with the pure quality of towering height and fecundity with a flavor of hubris.

Smelting Procedures

The processes that smelt moonsilver, orichalcum, starmetal and soulsteel from their source materials are all Adept-level thaumaturgical rituals in the Art of Alchemy. In each case, the necessary foundry is a Resources 4 purchase (the reusable components for the ritual), while operating it long enough to produce a pound of the desired metal is a Resources 3 expense (the consumed material for the ritual)—not including the raw materials themselves. Characters may learn these rituals as Procedures. In each case, the Willpower expenditure represents the intense concentration needed to see the procedure through to a successful conclusion. To use these rituals, a character needs Craft (Fire) at 4.

Stabilize Moonsilver (2, Perception, 3, one hour): Raw moonsilver must be collected at night under the light of the moon. The raw moonsilver is still unstable with residual Wyld-energy. Through coaxing songs and careful taps and strokes with crystal hammers and probes, the artisan quiets the Wyldness remaining in the raw moonsilver so it becomes a stable metal. Pacify it too much and it freezes into silver; hit it too hard, and it shatters into drops of quicksilver.

Distill Orichalcum (2, Stamina, 3, one week): Purifying gold into orichalcum can only be done at a source of molten lava. It also requires large, high-precision mirrors to concentrate sunlight on the molten gold. Boiling the gold continuously for a week, using magma and sunfire, to drive out impurities, is not intellectually challenging... but the prolonged, constant attention to direct the mirrors and keep the lava from contaminating the gold is remarkably fatiguing.

Smelt Starmetal (2, Wits, 3, one day): Pulling starmetal from its ore should be easy. It uses the same smelter and tools used to extract mundane iron—but everything must be consecrated and purified: the clay and charcoal of the furnace, the tree from which the charcoal was made, the spade that was used to dig the clay... The small gods of the forge know the smith works on the remains of their kin, and will spoil the process if not suitably appeased. And then, the smelter engages in a frantic battle of wits to keep the furnace going and the forge uncontaminated as everything that could go wrong, does, driving the smith to his limits through sheer frazzlement.

Alloy Soulsteel (2, Manipulation, 3, one day): Hammering souls into the sooty ore from the Labyrinth involves more than strength. It is an exercise in cruelty and domination, breaking the will of the captive ghosts so they would rather accept an eternity trapped in black metal than the continued blows of the hammer, the scorching of bonefire and the bitter quenching in bile.

Doing the Work

Charms

• Words-as-Workshop Method