I feel like a Transmutation Wizard with Fabricate and Alchemist Tools Proficiency could synthesize diamonds from another source of Carbon. Like coal ash, or graphite.
Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive has a neat transmutation based economy. You need specific tools that are extremely rare and use gemstones as the resource with different tools and gemstones being required to produce different materials such as metal or grain. So gemstones make up the currency with their value depending on the material they can be used to produce. The idea of metal being the currency seems strange to them since gold is as rare as steel.
The gems aren't consumed, they lose their stored stormlight when used and can be infused in the next high storm, empty gems are still spendable but suspicious.
The primary use of gems (at least why they're used for money) is soulcasting, which is why emeralds are the most valuable: they are needed in soulcasting food, and soulcasting often does shatter the gem.
Fighter (with his dying breath) : "Please... revivify me..."
Cleric: Yes of course! ...Shit. I'm out of diamonds.
Wizard: No worries I got one
Cleric: BY THE POWER OF THE LIGHT, I SACRIFICE THIS DIAMOND TO GIVE BREATH T... What the fuck it's not working. Wizard are you sure this is a diamond???
Wizard: Of course it's a diamond! I made it myself!
Cleric: You.... MADE it??? DO YOU NOT THINK THAT THE DIETY WHO POWERS MY SPELLS CAN TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A REAL DIAMOND AND A DIY PROJECT?? YOU ABSOLUTE IDIOT, THE FIGHTER IS DEAD NOW BECAUSE OF YOU
Wizard: ME? YOU'RE THE CLERIC WHO DIDN'T PACK ENOUGH DIAMONDS!
Fighter: (splutters and coughs as he comes back to life)
Cleric: WHAT? BUT HOW?
Rogue: (throwing away an empty healing potion bottle) Um.. yeah you guys were bickering so I just...
Why do you assume the real world physical composition is the only factor, rather than the necessity of it being a sacrifice being part of the casting of the divine spell that can return the dead to life but only at a cost?
Are we sure that's 100% the reason these Spells need diamonds? Could just some representation of purity, or some metaphysical property for channeling Soul Energy back into the Material Plane.
This is wrong. The spell requires diamonds worth a specific amount (1000 gold in the case of resurrection). The value of diamonds within the setting is the main deciding factor. Not the diamonds themselves.
For a setting with such a rule set to be even remotely internally consistent, this would need to be the case. As the value of a diamond is entirely arbitrary, and depends on their perceived economic value within a social structure at any given time.
I.e. Why would you still require the same quantity of diamonds to revive someone, if you were forced to purchase them at exorbitant costs due to their regional scarcity?
I'd argue it has nothing at all to do with the perceived value of a diamond(or lack thereof), and has more to do with the metaphysical properties of a diamond that allow it to act as a soul transmuting reagent of sorts. It may even be the case that there is nothing special at all about a diamond, and that it is the zeitgeist belief that a diamond is required, which gives it such a property.
Yes, this is certainly what diamonds on a world with no magic are. But D&D is not a world that runs on materialism.
For example, people are just arrangements of a number of different elements in a nonmagical world. But in D&D people have souls, which are extremely crucial to their continued existence as people: if the soul can't or won't return to a body, there's nothing you can do physically that will turn that body back into a person.
There's no reason there couldn't be a similar thing going on with other objects: a diamond created in the ground may have a certain spark of the world's creation in it, a spark that can't be replicated no matter how you arrange carbon atoms.
This is the start of an adventure. You're protecting the wizard from the diamond mining family who want to kill him for creating diamonds and selling them for cheap.
I could see this. Homebrewing a value of maybe 1/10th the value of your carbon source. 10gp worth of coal would give a 1gp diamond.
Just spitballing, because now that it's written down it seems wrong somehow. Anyone got any better ideas?
Edit: after a few replies, I have confirmed my own stupidity. My first though was way off base. I have since concluded that the gp value should only go up by a small percentage due to the effort put into the transmutation. However, based on the way natural diamonds are created, I have also concluded that it's the weight that should be the big change factor here. A large amount of coal (with variation due to purity), would render fairly small diamonds. The secondary factor would then be time and spell components expended during the process. Depending on your dm, and the world's economy, it may end up being more expensive to craft your own diamonds than to just buy natural ones.
It's already easy to manufacture wealth like this. Magic always will, and has always, broken the game. Buy some steel and fabricate full plate. Repeat. Become wealthy. Do in ten minutes which takes a mundane crafter weeks (with a chance of failure).
You would also need proficiency in smiths tools in order to fabricate any full plate worth buying, per the spell. But so long as you check that box, yeah you’re correct
That's my thought too, but then you'd have players who buy 1,000gp in coal to sell for 10,000gp in diamonds. Maybe a weight trade off, but keep same value instead. 1,000gp in coal is probably like half a ton of coal. But a 1,000gp diamond is roughly fist sized.
Also, as they flood he market with diamonds, the cost of diamonds go down. So the profits start to become lower and now they would need even more diamonds for their spells since their worth has dropped.
It feels wrong that the amount of diamonds needed for spells is linked to their market value.
Although, it would be a cool premise for a character that tries to artificially raise the price of diamonds so that they would need less diamonds to cast spells.
If you make diamonds priceless, would you be able to use one diamond infinitely in spells?
This. Your average shopkeep won’t be able to afford nor be interested in buying 10kgp worth of diamonds lol
Realistically they’d need to go to a very large city and find a filthy rich. That makes sense lore-wise, and it’s a perfectly reasonable way to balance it I think
Though I’d say 10:1 diamonds:coal is too high a ratio. I wouldn’t do more than 5x
Just make it take a long time. You want to turn 1000g of coal into 1500g of diamonds? Well look at that, this complicated magical process takes just as long as it takes to make an equivalent cost magic item as per the side hustle rules. What a coincidence.
The diamonds are useful as material components for spells etc, but are cloudy, flawed and ugly. No jeweler would buy them for their aesthetic, they are only fit as material
It prevents the limited natural resources from running out, so at a certain point diamonds‘ relative value would go up more than the coal simply because the demand isn’t declining, so an equilibrium of 1000gp of coal getting transformed into 1000gp of diamonds is strictly enforced by the immortal lich D‘Aebierzh‘s company to keep him in power over the resurrection market by controlling large scale coal mining, smear campaigning and sabotaging wooden coal transmutation… annnd we‘re back to reality.
That would make the price much higher than just buying a normal one. Maybe doing it not about the price but the quantity? Coal should be a somewhat cheap enough product for people to buy to survive the winter, or as a product more kind to beign transported than lumber, but the quantity they have is relatively small.
So, make it so that big quantities, enough for beign able to form diamonds, are not on stock on most of the world except in the cities with more trading market or in town with coal mines. Maybe at 1/2 of the original diamond cost so players have a real incentive to do the travels to those places.
Heck, you could even make it a social problem in your campaign / world. Some asshole wizard bought practically all the coal supply in the market and now most of the city won't be able to pass the winter.
If say a typically sourced diamond is 10gp, then you can have the "crafted" diamond at 1gp.
But then say, maybe you need 5 or 10 times the weight of the desired diamond in coal (or any factor you desire).
This amount of coal likely wouldn't be anywhere near 10gp to make a standard sized diamond; but as long as you keep that value above the 1gp sell value (maybe even go to or above 5gp), then you have some kind of trade off without it also being exploitable.
(And as its a homebrew, you could play around with the world's coal scarcity/supply, making this action less or more desirable. For example: low world supply and your party are in Arctic tundra, do you really need the diamond when making that fire could be the only thing keeping you alive?)
HOWEVER this does all assume max value is used at each step. So I would balance this by both requiring the PC to already have a high degree of familiarity with high end blast furnaces and alchemy tools (see below), and have the output value scale with time and use count to represent tool practice and to prevent ridiculous amounts of "free" resources from showing up until they can regularly pull somewhere in that range from a quick dungeon trip. You might also make it more difficult to find large amounts of pure enough carbon to get more than a few GP per cast initially. Maybe they're not anywhere near a coal mine so the locals just burn wood into crappy charcoal, or maybe it's a warm enough climate to make campfires rarely needed since oil lamps are a good enough light source.
You also can't use it to create items that ordinarily require a high degree of craftsmanship, such as jewelry, weapons, glass, or armor, unless you have proficiency with the type of artisan's tools used to craft such objects.
I have an Alchemist Artificer that is 100% going to try this. The cleric always needs more diamonds and diamond dust, and I'm tired of lending him gold because he spends all his shares of treasure on spell components.
Yeah but you just know some wizard is going to spend their life studying exclusively that, and then completely neglect economics and completely trash the value of diamonds
As a jeweler this is the answer. Diamonds did have a cost that was originally controlled by debeers, but that was 50+ years ago. There is a BUNCH of mines churning out diamonds now, and 90%+ of what they mine up is industrial quality. And it costs MONEY to do it in scale the way it's done now, thus there was a cost to the stones. But lab stones you'll get twice the quality at less than half the price usually. And it's what's being used in industries for lasers, satellites, medical devices, etc. The cost of production and the actual markup from production to customer is usually lower on lab diamonds as well as they pass through fewer hands.
There is a couple of companies that it's rumored are testing in certain markets for direct to consumers from the grower which will make a large difference in cost as well.
I have to ask this: What's up with diamonds exactly? Ok they are the hardest thing on earth, but what does that mean? If my diamond ring falls, does it still break? And if I step on it?
Is a diamond sword really the best type of sword or was it all a lie just like with the cake?
Hardness in this case really just means “scratch or cut resistant.” There are no materials other than diamonds that are capable of cutting or scratching diamonds. That being said, they are also very brittle. A diamond sword in real life would be terrible because it would break relatively easily. A diamond edged sword might actually work well. This would be similar to diamond tipped drill bits or cutting wheels that have diamonds pressed into the metal edge.
A diamond-edged sword will actually be quite useless on soft objects. They're mainly used in industrial grinding applications to cut stones. Next time hold your finger up to a spinning diamond-edged tile saw and feel it do absolutely nothing to your finger.
Diamond teeth on a saw blade might be useful, but a diamond-edged sword would be terrible. One blow that strikes a shield or piece of armor, and you've likely cracked your edge. Also, due to the crystalline structure, it probably wouldn't even be able to hold as sharp of an edge as steel.
Why we value the hardness is because hard minerals are resistant to scratching and abrasion. This means you can make a very smooth and lasting polish, which is great for surfaces where you want friction reduced (moving parts in a watch, for example), or places where you want the diamond to abrade something softer, such as on drill bits.
This incidentally makes them great for jewelry. On top of that, diamonds with good color and no inclusions sparkle when cut and polished in ways to direct light. This is because crystals have optical properties that I took a whole horrible class on, and is why I'm in paleontology now and never want to look at a thin section again.
The optical properties of various crystals have lots of different uses, and lasers is one of them.
in short, diamonds aren't useless. They're no more useless on a ring as any other stone, for that matter, since the only properties we care about there are prettiness and not falling apart on you.
DeBeers really pushed the marketing of diamonds to the next level, but it's not like they weren't prized in antiquity. Diamonds are rare. If you stripped all the guff off of marketing and markup etc they'd still not be cheap.
lab grown diamonds are changing that, but DeBeers doesn't hold all the power anymore, and hasn't for some time now.
Lab grown rubies are very inexpensive, but again they're used in scads for lasers and fine moving parts.
You also need to factor in cutting the stones. That's an art and a hands-on skill that will always involve skilled labor, so there is a baseline cost that will always exist unless all you want is an unpolished lump. Those do not sparkle, and they break easily.
Diamonds are only found in the dregs of weird volcanic leftovers in 2 billion+ year old rock, as far as we know. So no matter what they will never be "common". Things like garnet, spinel, tourmaline, and amethyst are common, as they appear in many different rocks if you want an example of a "common" gemstone.
You can smash a diamond with a hammer or a hydraulic press. Hardness isn't toughness. Hardness is a measure of structural resistance to deformation. ("Squishing")
Take a piece of steel for example. Steel is wonderful because it can be hardened to a relately wide range of values.
Mild steel is relatively soft. If you hit it very hard, it will bend, and stay bent. If you harden it, however, it won't bend when struck, but will instead break. With the right amount of hardened steel and softer steel, you get a spring, which bends, but returns to its previous shape. Of course, you can still snap spring steel, it just takes a lot more work.
To answer the question above, a diamond blade would be sharp as fuck, but shatter if you hit anything substantial with it. The best way to use diamonds in sword design is the same way they do in industrial applications: use the diamond only for the edge.
There are a number of creatures that are immune to bludgeoning damage from non magical attacks, but the demogorgon seems to be alone in having immunity to non-magical bludgeoning damage regardless of the damage coming from an attack or any other source.
I think it would probably be slashing immunity and perhaps vulnerability to bludgeoning if you were to represent the properties of diamonds in mechanical D&D terms; they're very hard and pretty scratch proof, but will sheer or shatter far more easily
Hardness in this case is the resistance to being scratched. Diamond is a ten on the mohs hardness scale (the very top) which means if you try to scratch it with anything other than diamond it won't leave a mark, in fact, most likely the other thing you use to scratch it will most likely be damaged in some way. Diamond is still pretty brittle meaning it'll shatter if hit with enough force
Diamond is hard, which means it's difficult to scratch, and it scratches other things pretty well.
Your diamond could shatter or chip if it falls, but it depends on the specific structure of your stone. They all have specific cleave lines and can break if hit at the specific angle. There's a lot of luck involved.
If you step on it barefoot against carpet it would probably be fine, but as soon as there's something hard on either side of the diamond applying pressure I would guess there's a risk.
If you had a solid diamond sword in real life, it would break along a cleave line before the edge dulled.
As a general rule of thumb, hard things hold an edge well, but are brittle and either shatter or chip easily. Softer materials can absorb energy and deform rather than chip or shatter, but their edges dull faster. For some sort of blade or edge you usually want a balance of the two, or you combine two materials to get what you want (obsidian weapons for example use volcanic glass stuck into wood).
A diamond sword would probably be pretty awful, because although diamonds are extremely hard when it comes to scratching or other types of wear, they also have mineral cleavage, which would make them easy to break when subjected to lateral forces. You could probably snap a diamond sword in half with your bare hands.
You might be better off having a regular sword made out of metal but with some small diamonds along the edges. Maybe something like this, but with diamonds. Even then they'd probably break and get crushed against steel.
There's more to good physical properties for swords than hardness.
A macuahuitl ([maːˈkʷawit͡ɬ]) is a weapon, a wooden club with several embedded obsidian blades. The name is derived from the Nahuatl language and means "hand-wood". Its sides are embedded with prismatic blades traditionally made from obsidian. Obsidian is capable of producing an edge sharper than high quality steel razor blades.
Man-made diamonds produced in scale is a relatively recent development though. For a long time the process was too expensive and time consuming to be practical.
But then again, when man made diamonds were not available, there wasn't the demand in industry. Both offer and applications came in the same time period, roughly.
Man made diamonds are better. Natural diamonds are only expensive because of artifical supply restrictions. Natural diamonds only sell at the prices they are at because people are convinced they need this particular rock to get married and for the vanity of wearing something that's expensive for no reason.
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u/niancatcat Nov 13 '21
Yes but on earth we make man-made diamonds which are much better than natural ones.