Mana Welder
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aye - twas in an email… adding it here, now for “prosperity”
So the details may be a little fuzzy, but if I remember correctly Malathon invented the mana welder (or was that Arg?), and it could weld/attach two or more magic items together fusing them into an effective single magic item (i.e. welding four elemental rings in a single ring). Anyway did Malathon write any of this down? What I don’t know is how hard was that to make? Is that magic item considered a artifact/ancient level item?
How many mana welders were there? Did one every make it into use within V’Ral?ahh, the Manawelder - one of malathon’s most proud accomplishments the device COULD weld two or more rings together, in the fashion that you’re suggesting - but one of the nifty properties of the welder was that it could HARMONIZE the magics, so that two items could work in unison… which, up until that time, was something of a barricade to merging items into one coherent whole. what that effectively meant was that MAGIC ITEMS could now work ON MAGIC ITEMS - and not only on people or the environment.
so, say - you could take a ring of regeneration and a shield +5 and weld them together - under “normal” conditions, the shield would grant the bearer simple regeneration as the ring… which was layered magic. the manawelder tho could HARMONIZE the effect, so not only would it grant the bearer regeneration but it’d also regenerate the shield if it were broken, attacked by a rust monster, etc.
further experiments with the ring of regeneration wound up with malathon creating self-refilling ohm-gems, self-refilling wands (charge regeneration), necklaces of endless missiles, auto-repairing golems - all kinds of fun stuff. of course, that’s not to say there weren’t some spectacular mishaps along the way
items that were too powerful ALREADY tended to eat both the ring AND the manawelder, sometimes inverting into stranger shit - a vorpal sword that lernaean-ized victims (malathon spawned a tribe of BADLY fucked up 3 and 4 headed ettin-like humanoids from that one), a helm of brilliance became a Prismatic Sponge that ate all light, fire and prismatics (he’s a little worried its becoming a SHADOWSTAR), and a regenerating staff of magi started spawning insane clones of a frazzle-haired red-eyed wizard calling himself Melvinius (which malathon promptly dropped off in a forest of Thay)
it’s known that Malathon produced several different models of manawelder (including a psi-welder) for his own use, as well as gifting them to Daren (who was still a powermaster at the time, and filed it into his trinket drawer), Arg (who put it in a pocket and accidentally sat on it, shattering the device) and Zarach (as a sort of pre-emptive maneuver to slow down Mystra). Zap also “acquired” one, unbeknownst to the managanger.
no actual manawelders were delivered to V’ral… BUUUTTT malathon did visit on several occasions to enter and “work” on the city’s obelisk. a few spellcraft checks cough cough BRIBES cough to the crystalline entity would reveal that the managanger left behind encrypted blueprint data on virtually everything (items/spells/etc) that he’d created over the years.
you or daren (whomever was drinking with me that night at the temple) might remember that i told you malathon had figured out a way (using his sphere) to encrypt spells and such with a single-use decryption code - thus allowing him to cast/sell both single use, multishot or unlimited versions of his magic without worrying about anyone being able to reverse engineer it. >:) ((what, dwarf remembered drunk speech ?? is this a first ??))
so, cloud willing, you could purchase the self-erasing one-shot data on how to build ONE manawelder for around 100k. if you weren’t feeling particularly crafty, you could buy a compiled prebuilt one from the obelisk for 3x that. should Varalla want to drain her coffers, she could prolly buy the unlimited “source code” for around 600k - tho oddly it’d remain encrypted in her mind, should anyone try to slurp it from there. yes, it is considered an ancient level item - largely due to the fact that when the City Ancient of Argopolis handled one, he couldn’t figure out how to deconstruct it without blowing himself into the wall. then again, he didn’t have a decryption sphere…
I do remember some of this now, though it does seem like a lifetime ago. I specifically remember Malathon telling me about his encryption decryption method for single-use one shots, multishot, etc… I do have to admit i completely forgot about it, until you brought it up. Does sound a lot like Daren, hey look a manawelder let me stuff that in a drawer next to my staff of magi (with a lamp shade on its head) I’m using for a reading lamp. A few years ago, i did go thru the many many various character sheets of Daren and realized he has a truck load of magic items in that tower of his, many of which are strewn about half of which he cares nothing for, and the other half aren’t really much use but for some reason he has them. Its the short list he carries with him that matters.
Probably going to have to go down the road of buying a prebuilt one from the obelisk, 100k is a decent price, but i doubt Kargin has the skill yet to pull off reconstructing a Ancient item equivalent even with the blueprints. Gonna have to start pimp’n out Rorek to bring in some cash here soon.
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doesn’t seem to wanna paste for me
twas in an email chain you sent on 8/12/18
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Copied from Email - 8/12/18
From: Kargin
So the details may be a little fuzzy, but if I remember correctly Malathon invented the mana welder (or was that Arg?), and it could weld/attach two or more magic items together fusing them into an effective single magic item (i.e. welding four elemental rings in a single ring). Anyway did Malathon write any of this down? What I don’t know is how hard was that to make? Is that magic item considered a artifact/ancient level item?
How many mana welders were there? Did one every make it into use within V’Ral?
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Copied from Email Chain - 8/13/2018
From: Dregnoth
ahh, the Manawelder - one of malathon’s most proud accomplishments
the device COULD weld two or more rings together, in the fashion that you’re suggesting - but one of the nifty properties of the welder was that it could HARMONIZE the magics, so that two items could work in unison… which, up until that time, was something of a barricade to merging items into one coherent whole. what that effectively meant was that MAGIC ITEMS could now work ON MAGIC ITEMS - and not only on people or the environment.
so, say - you could take a ring of regeneration and a shield +5 and weld them together - under “normal” conditions, the shield would grant the bearer simple regeneration as the ring… which was layered magic. the manawelder tho could HARMONIZE the effect, so not only would it grant the bearer regeneration but it’d also regenerate the shield if it were broken, attacked by a rust monster, etc.
further experiments with the ring of regeneration wound up with malathon creating self-refilling ohm-gems, self-refilling wands (charge regeneration), necklaces of endless missiles, auto-repairing golems - all kinds of fun stuff. of course, that’s not to say there weren’t some
spectacular mishaps along the wayitems that were too powerful ALREADY tended to eat both the ring AND the manawelder, sometimes inverting into stranger shit - a vorpal sword that lernaean-ized victims (malathon spawned a tribe of BADLY fucked up 3 and 4 headed ettin-like
humanoids from that one), a helm of brilliance became a Prismatic Sponge that ate all light, fire and prismatics (he’s a little worried its becoming a SHADOWSTAR), and a regenerating staff of magi started spawning insane clones of a frazzle-haired red-eyed wizard calling himself Melvinius (which malathon promptly dropped off in a forest of Thay)it’s known that Malathon produced several different models of manawelder (including a psi-welder) for his own use, as well as gifting them to Daren (who was still a powermaster at the time, and filed it into his trinket drawer), Arg (who put it in a pocket and accidentally sat on it,
shattering the device) and Zarach (as a sort of pre-emptive maneuver to slow down Mystra). Zap also “acquired” one, unbeknownst to the managanger.no actual manawelders were delivered to V’ral… BUUUTTT malathon did visit on several occasions to enter and “work” on the city’s obelisk. a few spellcraft checks cough cough BRIBES cough to the crystalline entity would reveal that the managanger left behind encrypted blueprint data on virtually everything (items/spells/etc) that he’d created over
the years.you or daren (whomever was drinking with me that night at the temple) might remember that i told you malathon had figured out a way (using his sphere) to encrypt spells and such with a single-use decryption code - thus allowing him to cast/sell both single use, multishot or unlimited versions of his magic without worrying about anyone being able to
reverse engineer it. >:) ((what, dwarf remembered drunk speech ??
is this a first ??))so, cloud willing, you could purchase the self-erasing one-shot data on how to build ONE manawelder for around 100k. if you weren’t feeling particularly crafty, you could buy a compiled prebuilt one from the obelisk for 3x that. should Varalla want to drain her coffers, she could prolly buy the unlimited “source code” for around 600k - tho oddly it’d remain encrypted in her mind, should anyone try to slurp it from there. yes, it is considered an ancient level item - largely due to the fact that when the City Ancient of Argopolis handled one, he couldn’t figure out how to deconstruct it without blowing himself into the wall. then again, he didn’t have a decryption sphere…
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Copied from Email Chain - 8/14/2018
From: Kargin
I do remember some of this now, though it does seem like a lifetime ago. I specifically remember Malathon telling me about his encryption decryption method for single-use one shots, multishot, etc… I do have to admit i completely forgot about it, until you brought it up. Does sound a lot like Daren, hey look a manawelder let me stuff that in a drawer next to my staff of magi (with a lamp shade on its head) I’m using for a reading lamp. A few years ago, i did go thru the many many various character sheets of Daren and realized he has a truck load of magic items in that tower of his, many of which are strewn about half of which he cares nothing for, and the other half aren’t really much use but for some reason he has them. Its the short list he carries with him that matters.
Probably going to have to go down the road of buying a prebuilt one from the obelisk, 100k is a decent price, but i doubt Kargin has the skill yet to pull off reconstructing a Ancient item equivalent even with the blueprints. Gonna have to start pimp’n out Rorek to bring in some cash here soon.
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Well i’m probably going to need to establish a laboratory outside of V’Ral and the Dwarven Mountain… to many experiments in the works with Manacite, the Mana Welder, new creations, disassembling a artifact… to many opportunities for magic to go crazy and cause booms, or chaotic events as Malathon described earlier.
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spell encryption talk forked
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@halfgiant said in Mana Welder:
Copied from Email Chain - 8/13/2018
so, cloud willing, you could purchase the self-erasing one-shot data on how to build ONE manawelder for around 100k.
So how complex is the manawelder to make? Do you have to be into Epic levels to Craft one? Or high pre-epic, assuming we drop the gold for the self-erasing one-shot blueprint.
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as they retail for 300k, the build cost would be 150k - most of which is eaten up by the cost of the encrypted blueprint. so WITH that, it’d cost the builder around 50k worth of high-grade materials (30k easy for a pound of Stellar Admantium to craft the welding tip… and another 10k for the Meteoric Geode to extract the interwoven gem lattice from)
given that its classed as an Ancient Item, a normal mage would likely need to be a minimum of 24th level caster to even attempt such a thing WITH the blueprint. if you hit full Ancient, you could do it 2-3 levels earlier. cloud can adjust that up or down as he deems relevant.
as the 50th level Ancient in Argopolis couldn’t suss out its inner workings, it’s doubtful anybody in the sphere who wasn’t a ONE would ever stand a chance. maybe a different 30th level managanger who’d sampled Arg, Daren and a 50th lvl Ancient then got chemically altered on Manaweed and Jamos beer
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Ok so it will be a bit then before I can roll with one, unless i go buy one. I’ll drop it on the to-do list.