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5 years ago ::
May 19, 2008 - 9:58AM
#131
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I wouldn't mind a little clarification here. How is the word mana the "correct" word for material components for magical item creation? The only 2 meanings I've ever come across are 1) bread in the desert, and 2) casty points for spells.
It's also the standard word for magical power from the fields of anthropology and folklore. Go through any of the seventeen volumes of Frazier's The Golden Bough and you'll find it all over the place. And here's one of the citations from Dictionary.com:
ma·na
Pronunciation[mah-nah]
–noun Anthropology. a generalized, supernatural force or power, which may be concentrated in objects or persons.
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[Origin: 1835–45; < Polynesian]
Other synonyms in English would be the very old English word dweomer, and the more modern English borrowings of mojo and juju.
I have no problem with coining new words, but "residuum" just sounds dorky and pretentious, as if putting in a Latinate version of "residue" will make you sound wizardly.
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5 years ago ::
May 19, 2008 - 10:48AM
#132
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Date Joined:
Jan 25, 2004
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It's also the standard word for magical power from the fields of anthropology and folklore. Go through any of the seventeen volumes of Frazier's The Golden Bough and you'll find it all over the place.
Funny, they have the abridged version of "The Golden Bough" complete on Bartleby.com, and it doesn't contain the word "mana" once.
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5 years ago ::
May 19, 2008 - 11:50AM
#133
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Funny, they have the abridged version of "The Golden Bough" complete on Bartleby.com, and it doesn't contain the word "mana" once.
I never bothered with the abridged version.
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5 years ago ::
May 19, 2008 - 1:02PM
#134
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Date Joined:
Nov 29, 2001
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The core point remains: you shouldn't be able to melt down a magic item dedicated to evil -- no matter what its power level -- and get generic "magic dust" that you can then use to, say, craft a holy avenger.
You're not melting it down. You're performing an hour-long grueling ritual that unbinds the magic surrounding the item, expels the demonic forces within it, and eeks out the small amount of magical dust that remains usable for other items: only a fifth of the magic dust that was used to make it. The other 4/5ths is lost forever, maybe because it is too tainted with evil. Then you're taking that generic magic dust, and handing it off to the high priest of Pelor. He then performs a separate hour-long grueling ritual where he prays over the dust and asks Pelor to bless it and remove all impurities from it, and eventually transforms it into a holy avenger.
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5 years ago ::
May 19, 2008 - 1:18PM
#135
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Date Joined:
Aug 29, 2007
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I wouldn't mind a disenchanting in order to swap enchantments, or disenchanting to build up a pool of enchanting points (similar to Unearthed Arcana's craft point variant) at all. I don't like the tangibility of DEing items to get mats that are, presumably, physical in nature.
Is there a major theatrical or cosmological problem with the energy of magic being distilled into a tangible form? Like concentrated energy?
It's more like a natural capacitor for electricity than the 'chanting mats in WoW. Note, there's only kind of material from disenchanting, rather than WoW's plethora of shards, dusts, and essences.
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5 years ago ::
May 19, 2008 - 1:23PM
#136
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Date Joined:
Aug 29, 2007
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Funny, they have the abridged version of "The Golden Bough" complete on Bartleby.com, and it doesn't contain the word "mana" once.
The abriged versions are, without a doubt, some of the worst travesties to the treatise on the occult, occultism, magical practice and thought, as well as anthropological overviews of such, in the world.
I don't see how anyone can logically condense 17 long volumes to one book.
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5 years ago ::
May 19, 2008 - 1:47PM
#137
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You're not melting it down. You're performing an hour-long grueling ritual that unbinds the magic surrounding the item, expels the demonic forces within it, and eeks out the small amount of magical dust that remains usable for other items: only a fifth of the magic dust that was used to make it. The other 4/5ths is lost forever, maybe because it is too tainted with evil. Then you're taking that generic magic dust, and handing it off to the high priest of Pelor. He then performs a separate hour-long grueling ritual where he prays over the dust and asks Pelor to bless it and remove all impurities from it, and eventually transforms it into a holy avenger.
Yep, that's right here. See? Look:
Or you can just skip the whole business of making evil items, smashing them for 1/5 residuum, and then sucking up to Pelor for mana laundering and just have your Eberron artificer use the standard Eberron artificer rules along with the rules from the Book of Vile Darkness, torture virgins for Vecna, run their souls through a food processor (presumably with a soul-crushing blade attachment and the "frappe" button depressed), and have a Holy Avenger spit out the other end.
Alternately, you can look at actual metaphysics rather than game rules and come up with something more flavorful and less twinky.
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