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NobodyRemembersThis wrote:

Let's not forget that broken prophecy weapons, ala Tolkien, can be broken down and reforged.

Siegfried did it in The Ring long before Tolkein.

However, it's one thing to reforge a broken sword, it's another to smash the Tarnhelm and turn it into a bunch of potions and a magic ukelele.

Kevin Andrew Murphy wrote:

However, it's one thing to reforge a broken sword, it's another to smash the Tarnhelm and turn it into a bunch of potions and a magic ukelele.

Yeah, I'd really like if there was some control on what you can make with residuum,maybe at the very least the residuum should keep the property tags of the item. So If you convert a flaming sword, you get fire residuum. And you can't use fire residuum to create a frost sword, but it's actually better at creating fire items.

Similarly melting a weapon should give you a martial tag, armor should be a defensive tag and so on. So that you're better off making new weapons out of old magic weapons and so on.

Kevin Andrew Murphy wrote:

That's pretty much what I did with Resonance for MAGE for White Wolf: As I argued then and still do now, you do not break into the grisly gray graveyard of the Euthanatos and find a magic-filled skull, then use the magic in the skull to summon Care Bears and butterflies. Zombie roadkill cubs and death's head moths, sure, but not Care Bears and butterflies.

It reminds me of the anecdote about McDonalds getting into Russia and needing American cheese, and the Russians said, "How do you make it?" and McDonalds said "Just bring us some cheese and we'll process it" and the Russians said "What sort of cheese?" and McDonalds said "Doesn't matter. It'll be American cheese by the time we're done with it."

In other words, Residuum=Velveeta.

Yeah, there's some degree of tolerance when it comes to reducing enchantments to pure generic magical energy. Still I think it's pretty wrong on all levels that you could potentially melt down the rod of orcus and forge it into a holy sword.

Archtyrant Terevoth wrote:

Yeah, there's some degree of tolerance when it comes to reducing enchantments to pure generic magical energy. Still I think it's pretty wrong on all levels that you could potentially melt down the rod of orcus and forge it into a holy sword.

Hell, if you follow the rules in the Book of Vile Darkness, you can torture virgin nuns and sacrifice their souls to Orcus for Dark Crafting XP, which can then be used to make the aforementioned holy sword.

What it basically boils down to is an overly technological base paradigm where anything without crunchy numbers behind it is "fluff" to be dismissed out of hand.

About the only way to crunchify it to keep people from pulling this sort of nonsense is to make the "residuum" (mana by any other name) flavored/colored, and even then someone will still come up with some sort of mana-laundering device to flavor the mana, and another to redye it, and you still make the souls of the tortured virgins into a holy sword, just with a couple steps in between.

Simplest thing to do is to say that this generally doesn't work. Magic items are not generally recyclable. They may possibly be repairable, but are generally not recyclable. And if artificers want to disassemble items for spare parts, they should be disassembling obviously technological items like the Apparatus of Kwalish and not doing ludicrous MacGuyverisms like building an Apparatus of Kwalish out of a pot of Keoughtun's Ointment and an unraveled flying carpet.

And if you have an evil item that you want to make good, use the Redeeming rules from the Book of Exalted Deeds, with the parallel that good items can also be Damned if the forces of evil work hard enough to defile them.

Kevin Andrew Murphy wrote:

Simplest thing to do is to say that this generally doesn't work. Magic items are not generally recyclable. They may possibly be repairable, but are generally not recyclable.

Well there's nothing too wrong with recycling items, so long as they're similar. Taking a wand if fireballs and merging it with a flaming sword kinda makes sense. We're even probably okay with taking a generic item, like a +X sword and combining it with any magic to make it stronger as +X is generally just generic power.

It's really just that sometimes you want tainted residuum, whereby residuum you get from evil objects still bears the taint of darkness. And you also want to not allow residuum to apply to opposition effects. Cold can't make fire and so on.