Bront's Forums

Yeah, I have been somewhat printing impared until recently, so I have to re-print the Players Guides and those will have all the 'cost per favor' guidelines. I was also thinking that we need to have all the judges meet and walk through MI creation so we are all on the same page.

And the pentad should correct the balance issue.  To me it would be by shifting the made to order stuff, to be only availible to noblity.  With a plain chart that showed what a noble or (to a lesser extent) a gentry could order, and then the rest of the magic only available in a festival and then only with a pre-advertised number of favors and money.  This is easy to work into the story line.  The higher classes have the shapers busy, so only those of high class could have made to order stuff.  The rest is sort of cast off stuff the upper class would rather have the money than the lesser of the three magic swords they've commisioned.

This is not the same as a D&D magic store.  At the festival we should have a pre-planned stack of titles to specific magic items for sale, once sold it's gone.  If things don't sell they stay in the stack for next festival.  If players sell stuff back to the bank (so to speak) it goes into the stack for some else to buy at festival.  There are details to work out but it is doable. 

yeah, I agree, those things should count too.

This makes it seem like Social Class is less important than Money and Favors???  Cultures that employ Class distinction seldom let money and favors be little more than tools the upper class uses to maintain control.   I appologize if this seems argumentive, but Nobility and Gentry should be more than fancy clothes and talking funny.

If I understand, right at the moment all magic items are frozen, and you will soon open that up again based on your attached rules.

It seems that as you let people buy magic again, the Nobles should go first, if there are any magic labor hours and materials left, then Gentry with the Orders and Societies, then if anything is left everyone else. 

But, rather than this become a burden of additional things to concider, let it be a way to slowly unravel the Freeze.  Let only Nobles buy custom made magic, only at festivals, say from now 'til gencon.  It no Noble steps up let Gentry buy.  This will let you slowly see how players respond to the new rules and not have the feeding frenzy of rules lawyers (we say weasels in Michigan).  I would sugest that each new custom item be reviewed by a commitee you appoint, and would have a need to build it time equal to the time it takes to review. 

If you adopt that, you should have a few off the shelf items availible at Festivals.  These would be completely controled by creating the Title ahead of time and when the item is bought the title is handed to the new owner and is no longer publicly availible.

This methodology should releave you the high volume of demand on your time as the weasels jocky to get you to approve their lastest gizmo.

Something else I just remembered about creating magic items, and for the sake of this post I will use weapons for my example. In DI we have allowed the use of Obsidian weapons which do not have to be treated as heavily with precious metals, but there is not an infinite supply of Obsidian, so (at least in my mind) all enchanted Obsidian weapons were a custom order.

Now, on to enchanted regular weapons and armor (good old steel)...
Monetarily speaking, to enchant steel, the item needs to be first True Silver Gilded to negate the disruption that the Iron has on the flow of manna. That gilding makes the item 180x normal cost. Then if you factor in the 120x cost for Enchanted Weapon that equates to 300x the normal cost of the item. Using Broadsword as an example, which costs 20 SS, that would make an enchanted steel broadsword cost 6000 SS.

And this is why there are no 'standard magic items' available for sale at Festivals.

It is in the section about Magic and gilding weapons to overcome the Iron to allow for the flow of manna. I spoke with Verne some time ago about this and was told that for any Steel item to be enchanted it would have to be true silver gilded to overcome any and all disruption to the flow of manna to allow for the enchantment to take. That is not specifically in the book, probably something that they thought was a 'common sense thing' to overcome Cold Iron.