Magical lead being hard to work feels super weird, because being really, really easy to shape (it's softer than gold or human fingernails, and you can melt it over a passively ventilated wood fire) is probably lead's third most famous property behind "really dense" and "highly toxic".
Yeah, but it keys off how heavy lead is and fills a niche I need in my game.
It can kinda work. If the notion is that you make Magical Material Lead by, say, taking normal lead and pumping a shitton of Essence into it until it becomes denser and denser and denser, you could end up with some kind of really tough and heavy material that's now a pain to work with and also brittle. In the first age, this conversion was done while forging the end product, in specialized Factory-Cathedrals. In modern Creation, most forging uses pre-existing supplies of Magical Material Lead, either melted down and reforged from old Artifacts or mined from veins of lead in areas saturated in Essence for long periods of time, like around Dragon Lines.
Point of order: it can be tough, or it can be brittle. Pretty much definitionally, it cannot be both
Sure it can. In the hands of a skilled wielder, who can ensure that a blow falls onto the right angle, it's basically impossible to destroy, able to take blows that would bend Orichalcum without any visible impact. But if you just hit it randomly though it has the tendency to chip or shatter.Point of order: it can be tough, or it can be brittle. Pretty much definitionally, it cannot be both
Think diamond or the mighty oak. It doesn't bend but it breaks. It can withstand tremendous force, but when it breaks it shatters, making it hard to forge in the desired shapes as you don't forge it so much as you chip it like obsidian.Point of order: it can be tough, or it can be brittle. Pretty much definitionally, it cannot be both
So it's shaped like Chiaroscuron Glass tends to be?
Ah, so basically you turn lead into something resembling iridium, osmium, or tungsten
Sure? Whats that shaped like?
I'm pretty curious too; I'd always assumed that smiths would gather up shards of Chiaroscuran glass from the arcologies, then melt them down in one of a handful of high-end foundries (thus also creating market chokepoints, because there's only so many smelters in Chiaroscuro that are up to the task) and cast them into weapons/armor/etc.
Eh, I don't remember that, wouldn't someone eventually make armor with it if that was the case?
Communism is not magically prohibited from working, nor is it a violation of the fundamental order of the cosmos, no. Exalted magic doesn't tend to care about political positions like "This particular economic system is Literally Impossible (TM)". Solar magic can create any kind of system you care to think. How well it works and the mechanization of doing so are up to the Solar player and the Storyteller in question.
So, in theory, a powerful enough Solar can do things like create a nation of farmers like Pol Pot wanted, or to carry out a successful Great Leap Forward, or even carry out the plot of Victoria?
A Bureaucracy Supernal Solar with enough time and the right supplementary abilities (You want Presence so you can sway other Exalts and local gods to your cause so the whole thing doesn't fall apart the day an assassin comes for you) could make a nation that works on HappyBucks, which are social credits for smiling and being superficially friendly to others. It would be likely worse than most other economies, but that's where the magic and supernal skill at understanding how to properly manipulate large groups of humans comes in, your mad utopian vision functioning at a basic passable level or potentially surpassing "normal" economies. Communism isn't that far out.
The impression I got was that they mostly just took the indestructible glass shards and then built whatever weapon's hilt around a piece of the right size. Sort of like obsidian weapons.
Seems like it'd have a good run for Abyssal Lead, and then just have it be what you get from purifying Labyrinth Ore without alloying souls into it?
I kinda assumed Chirascuran glass is just mildly more durable than steel and holds an edge better than anything. Like, it's not a magical material, just super hard, durable glass. Heat it right the hell up until it melts, then recast it, and you have a weapon that you never need to sharpen and is both lighter and tougher than steel.
Magical lead would be more like obsidian where you chip into shape
