This is for Camrish, mostly.
In vanilla exalted, there are 5 mystical materials: Orichalcum, Jade (5 colors/elements), Moonsilver, Starmetal, and Soulsteel.
In our world, "jade" is the default, for things made with true elements. I don't think anyone's attuned to this (although I could imagine Windlings being attuned to Air, Obsidiment to Earth, an Tskrang to Water)
Orichalcum is supposed to be *the* spiffy adept material, but is exceptionally rare.
We've got a beastmaster, mechaniced by a lunar...is he still attuned to Orichalcum, or is he attuned to Moonsilver?
Moonsilver...I can see moonsilver corresponding to blood charms and racial magics (jouneymen, in particular, seem like they would enjoy moonsilver, and I can imagine Sweetums with moonsilver claws and pendants)
Starmetal is odd...are walkaways starmetal?
Soulsteel, I assume, is the material of choice for horror artifacts--emphasize the terror and destruction of it's creation, the darkness and twistedness, and deemphasize the death (probably...making this tuff does seem like an excellent use for horror victim's souls...I can just imagine, each cadaverman has a tiny seed of soulsteel in the skull or torso somewhere that shatters and evaporates when you finally kill them for real. I'd also bet those soul jar gems we found were made with soulsteel in the process)
The disciplined mages also seem to correspond roughly to the materials...Jade for Elementalists, Starmetal for Wizards, Soulsteel for Nethermancers. Moonsilver for illusionists, for its mutable qualities?
--zebediah
what about "enchantment by use"?
Walkaways are little widgets that were with you when you survived a disaster; they usually aren't Starmetal. I love the Soulsteel description above. Blood Charms were traditionally Living Crystal with Orichalcum tracery, but... well, I think I know where Starmetal and Moonsilver are going to get found. --bts
This is a complete departure from "reality"--just of lot of things that seem to me to make sense, trying to approach artifacts from the old view of camrish more than the new exalted system.
Orichalcum is a niftykeen material. It's also quite rare, and it doesn't seem to far off to think of it as solidified karma. Some of it exists in the world, but if there's an "enchantment by use" mechanic for adepts, it's probably a residue of karma building up on this oh-so-spiffy item.
Soulsteel can probably be considered kernals solidified taint in the same sense, and would be associated with horrors.
Kernels of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water are like jade, and make the most common artifacts. I can also imagine kernels of true elements acting a little like hearthstones...each kernel generates 1 mote of essence/hour, or can be consumed at once for a whole day's worth of motes +1 (i.e. 25 motes of essence) to fuel an alchemical reaction or a spell. If you've got enough in one place, the accumulated essence might be spent creating new kernels of true foo, or converting nearby material into foo.
Wherever we had moonsilver before, substitue blood & living crystal. Beastmaster or Sweetums has "moonsilver" claws exude from his pores? Make that blood welling up and solidifying into sharpened crystals. Blood pebbles is armor bound to your skin that moves with you, giving no mobility or fatigue penalty (I think that's what moonsilver did). Weapons of blood and bloodcrystal are extensions of yourself, twisting to help you strike, etc. This also seems to indicate that those little living crystal artifacts are like "moonsilver" in some ways. Orichalcum is too rare, and too attached to whatever it first gets attached to, to be used for tracery on something as common as blood charms.
So...the typical artifacts in old karmish were enchantment-by-doing (orichalcum), blood charms ("moonsilver," some relationship with cyberware), bad horror artifacts (soulsteel), physical matricies, which were usually powered by true elements (jade), blood, or karma (orichalcum), or Threaded Items. threaded items is the only thing not mentioned above...some of those are probably enchantment-by-spiffiness and elementally powered (orichalcum & jade) or blood-powered (like spike bombs. "moonsilver").
So orichalcum is very rare in raw form, but adept-attuned. Enchantment-by-doing is attuned to the person who did the doing, but may be able to be enhanced into a normal orichalcum artifact. True elements are the standard, though there's no "true wood," and they do the booming thing when you try to attune them. Bloodcharms, likewise, have some installation issues, though living crystal has some neat properties on its own that don't require attunement (mostly the glowy effect, and the fact that it grows).
(for "enchantment by doing" you would spend your LP as they were sung on the artifact in question, rather than yourself. To make an N dot "legendary" artifact, it needs somewhere between 1/10 and 1/5 the LP needed to get to Essence N-1, as the good, karmic legend solidifies onto orichalcum upon it.)
I think that's it for the commonly-known enchantings in Carmish. whee. --zebediah.
Oh, you mean real LP from ExaltedHackingAdvancement --- I just tossed a rebuttal based on a misinterpretation as XP.
I think you meant N+1, since there is no LP req for Ess 0,1. That would make Artifact 1,2,3,4,5 costs be 0.1 to 0.2 times 20,50,90,150,200: 2,5,9,15,20 to 4,10,18,30,40. Hm. I do think this is a neat riff off the D3D-style "spend XP to make magic items" idea, and want to run with that. I think it requires looking at the B3C Artifact rules first, as they were pretty cool. --bts
In ExaltedHackingSphereDistribution, I suggested that spheres of magic are roughly equivalent to threadweaving tallents, and different for each discipline. Mystical Materials (other than kernels of the 5 elements) weren't a big facet of enchanting in ED. Rather than making artifacts correspond to one of the 5 mystic materials from Exalted, how about making them corrspond to the 15 spheres? Most artifacts that could be thought of as Soulsteel belog to the sphere Necromancy, Pickpocketing Gloves belong to movement, helms of mind control to the Influence sphere, weapons are skattered among various spheres depending on their Cool Effects. This also makes objects built to favor a particular discipline easy--beastmen are likely to get artifacts from the Life sphere, for example. To get the real benefits of the item, you need to know it's Name and tie a thread to it, using the appropriate sphere, to get the next, noticably higher level of power you migth need the next sphere, or you could do the "pay double cost and risk blowing up" thing--and there might be an even more powerful effect in some artifacts, only available when you have the 3rd level of the appropriate sphere. This seems much more in flavor with the Threaded enchantment of old earthdawn--the only things that fall outside this system are Blood Charms, which can just be generic to all disciplines. Most horor artifacts are probably necromancy or other spheres warped in some bad way, true elements each have their own sphere, and any given magical item could probably be thought of as a "physical matrix"--a general term for an object that has a discipline magic effect. --zebediah.