Magic item

The flow of mana across the world produces many strange materials with anomalous properties. It is also speculated that some of the materials are products of living magical creatures, even if they don’t exactly look like it – places were large amount of magical creatures die and pile atop one another have been known to produce strange objects and magical zones if they are for some reason undisturbed by scavengers and looters. These processes generally take for too long to be observed or exploited by humans, so it’s hard to either prove or disapprove these kind of theories.

In any case, it is generally easy for a mage to tell when a material is magical rather than mundane. Magical materials resist magic in the same manner as living beings, and they cannot be reproduced through alteration. A spell that can shape normal steel will fail when presented with magical steel, and there is no known way to make a piece of normal steel innately magical. Magical materials can be combined and processed with alchemy to change and refine their properties, and certain procedures can strip them of their magic and render them mundane.

Magical materials are still made from normal atoms and molecules – no unknown magical elements are involved in their construction. Magical silver is still silver, and will behave like one in most ways. Rather, their magical properties seem to be a consequence of stable mana constructs imbued into the material. These mana constructs tend to be extremely complicated and hard to study, and have never been successfully reproduced by a human mage.

Mana is the mysterious substance upon which all magic rests, and usually it behaves like an invisible, odorless gas that has the ability to seep into solid objects given enough time. However, deep beneath the earth, where concentrations of mana are incredibly dense and accompanied by other, yet unknown environmental pressures, mana is known to crystalize and assume solid form. This ‘crystalized mana’ takes the form of translucent blue crystals, and seem to persist in this form indefinitely.

Though usually blue, it also comes in other colors. There doesn’t appear to be much difference between them, and patches of strangely-colored crystalized mana are no less or more effective than their more common blue counterparts, but some mages believe otherwise.

Crystalized mana has baffled humanity ever since it was discovered. It defies many of the properties one usually associates with mana. It has weight and acts like a solid object, but if it’s ground into small enough pieces it will vaporize and turn into ambient mana. It is not, as some people suspect, a regular rock imbued with mana – pure crystalized mana will evaporate into nothing when broken up into small pieces, with not residue left behind. Most crystalized mana isn’t 100% pure, however, so a certain amount of dust and gravel is bound to be left behind.

Crystallized mana has started to become intensively mined in modern times, as it is a very stable, convenient source of mana for magical machinery. While spell formula can be used to make mana batteries, these cannot match the densities present in crystalized mana and are prone to exploding if damage or sabotaged. Crystalized mana, by comparison, is relatively inert – hitting it with most attacks will simply cause it to evaporate into ambient mana, which is rarely harmful on its own.

The conditions under which crystalized mana is created are not currently understood by humanity, and cannot be replicated. Crystalized mana is thus mined from the ground, usually in dangerous conditions of the Dungeon, which makes it an expensive commodity to most. Finding deposits of crystalized mana is not terribly hard in the dungeon, but finding ones that are sufficiently abundant and accessible from the surface to be commercially mined is a rather rare thing. As magical machinery starts to become more common and more power-intensive, however, more and more countries are starting to scour their underworld for possible sources of this resource.

• Beginner's cube: the standard training tool for spell formula.^[5]
• Burglary Pocket Watch: a ward scanner, designed to guide and enhance divination spells meant to seek out weaknesses in complicated warding schemes so they could be broken or bypassed or easily.^[6]
• Combat staff: spell formulas are imprinted on it to cast specific spells quicker and easier. ^[7]
• Divination compass: used to find people you are 'familiar with'.
• Haslush's Ring: imprinted with an alteration spell that converts alcohol into sugar. ^[8]
• Heating plates.^[9]
• Lamps.^[10]
• Lighter: a more inconspicuous version of Zorian's explosive Beginner's Cube. It was still a cube, though a much smaller one made of a combination of wood and stone. sending a pulse of mana through it would make it explode. Zorian started making two of them in each restart and attaching them to his key so they would appear as an ornament. Effectively a suicide switch. ^[11]
• Magic key ^[12]
• Rod of magic missile: casts the 'magic missile' spell when mana is channeled through it.^[13]
• Scroll seal: unable to be removed manually, pouring mana into it will break the seal, and channeling mana in a very specific way peels it off intact. ^[14]
• Teleport rod: programmed to transport whoever is holding it to a specific place. can be set with a delay.^[15]
• Telepathic Relays: Zorian made six stone discs that drastically improved the ability of aranea to coordinate their actions across large distances. A fairly large disc made out of solid stone, not very inconspicuous or portable, with a lifespan of 2.5 months. A pretty shoddy magic item because he took a lot of shortcuts in order to make so many. ^[16]
• Xvim's Cards: used for unshaped mana practice. the cards are made out of mana absorbing material. Seemingly ornamental sigils on the corners expel any mana the card gather, radiating it away into the surroundings. It takes a lot of mana to affect them in any way. ^[17]

A perfectly straight piece of wood that fits well in a hand. Can be grasped at each of the two ends without any change in effect - that being a bolt of force emerging from the tip of the rod pointing away from the caster.

using a spell rod is almost insultingly easy. One doesn't even have to think about it much, just point the rod in the desired direction and channel mana through it - the spell formula in the rod does almost everything by itself.^[18]

1. motheroflearninguniverse.wordpress.com/2020/04/