Difference between revisions of "Material"

Revision as of 21:27, 28 September 2015

There are many materials that are unique to Hökaland. Some are minerals, which either has physical differences or magical differences to Earth minerals and others are organic, coming from flora or fauna.

Compounds

Glass

Glass was used in the time of the empire but much of the skill was lost. Much of the continent uses a variety of different glass-making techniques with varying quality. There is art made from most types of glass, but the Artipellin crafts are by far the most exquisit and expensive.

Gwenport glass

The capital of Artipellin, Gwennport, was the only settlement that retained crafters of the ancient glass, nowadays known as Gwennport glass. Most scholars use Artipellin-made crafts from Gwennport glass for their work. Other types of glass are regularly used for windows or other less critical types of work. It is a very high quality glass similar to Venetian glass in medieval Europe. The secret is kept tightly by the Gwennport Glass Crafter's Guild and is sold only as finished products. Other crafters can recycle the material to create new advanced glass creation such as lenses or pieces of art, but rarely as skilled as the crafters in Gwennport.

Part of the secret is the sodium-rich plant ash used as alkali flux, a secret only a handful of crafters know of outside of the Master Glassmakers of the Gwennport Glass Crafter's Guild, and all of those are Gwennport Master Glassmakers who have been sent to other Artipellin cities to craft the famous Artipellin glass art. The other part is simply learned skill from many hundreds of years ago. It is said the Gwennport Glass Crafters' Guild is even more secretive about its work than the Alchemists' Guild.

The Master Glassmakers outside of Gwennport are still not allowed to make the actual glass, however, just creating equally skillefully made products using existing glass. Instead they rely on transportation of glass ingots from Gwennport. Gwenport glass is only made in the guild quarters of Gwennport.

By law, anyone who is found making Gwennport glass outside the city walls is punished by death. This is rather extreme for Artipellin (which sports relatively low severity of crime punishment) usually relying on forced labour and markings on the body of the criminal, but they take glass-making extremely serious.

Paper

There is a variety of paper types in Hökaland that has become more common in the past few hundred years and while it can be a little expensive it is now more common to use than parchment and a lot cheaper. Especially increased organisation and administration has increased the need for better paper as well as the general interest in reading and writing by the populace. The material is partly substituted from recycled hemp clothing, ropes, rags, fishing nets and other hemp waste which is then reconstituted into paper form. In many cases other fibres are also used such as linen rags or even used paper.

The fibre is then punded into a pulp in a Paper Mill powered by either water or wind and made into paper sheets.

Rice Paper

Naturally white paper that is rarely found on the Hökaland continent.

Minerals

Black Iron

Black iron is a ferrous alloy fused with unknown material that creates a potent magical effect. These were primarily used before the great wars and most of the secrets on how to use the material is lost even to the elves. It has been known to be used in artefacts to channel, enhance or control other magical components.

Physically, black iron has the same weight and density as normal iron but has a higher melting point and a noticeably higher hardness but a little bit more brittle.

Facts:

Mohs scale: 6
Melting point: 1741 °C

Dragon Silver

Dragon silver is famously used to kill dragons. It acts both as an allergen as well as a poison to dragons exposed to the substance. Dragon silver is a magical alloy of silver that does not exist naturally in the world but is created through a fairly simple process if infused silver is mined from a ley line or magical node. The infusion can also be done artificially, but is a very longwinded process. Appearance-wise, there are no obvious differences between regular silver and dragon silver. Some people claim the reflective light from dragon silver has a reddish hue but others say this is rubbish.

Pitch Quartz

Pitch quartz is a oddly occuring mineral similar to quarts affected by carbon atoms and the magical lattice. The mineral got its name from its "pitch black" colour (though it is somewhat opaque from 5-10% of angles) and likeness to quartz. It crystalises very similarly to quartz and becomes shiny if polished, however the colour is solid black somewhat reflective surface with no opacity even at a millimetre. An unusual pleochroismic effect makes one side of the mineral to have partial opacity but diminished at lower or higher angles from 90 degrees, down to >135 / <45 degrees where opacity is zero and looks like the other side.

Pitch quartz is a rarely occuring mineral on the planet, but are found in large quantities where it is found. Its hardness and brittle structure makes it very hard to work with, and its pleochroism is unclear to figure out in a useful manner. The material is also often confused with obsidian, because of its colour and fracture. It is nevertheless a most prized find if found and used for coloured glasses and sculptures. A piece of art made with pitch quartz is valued higher if its pleochroism and/or impurities are used in a clever manner. Because of how the material fractures, tools are usually very fine for minor adjustments or very large and rough to make blocks out of a lode.

Very rare and expensive items made with pitch quartz include windows and weapons. Pure pitch quartz also conduct magic well and both responds well to it as well as affects it reliably. Magic can also be used to modify the pleochroism of the material in different ways.

An existing piece of pitch quartz crystals can be synthetically grown in extremely high temperatures (above 1500 °C) in the presence of ground down quartz and a very small amount of graphite. However, this creates such a random pattern of the pleochroism that the grown material is simply black.