Dwarves Making Diamonds

[Conners]

How hard is it to make diamonds? I'm wondering how much fantasy tech or magic would be needed to make diamonds, in a medieval-type age.

[the_david]

You don't make diamonds, you mine them.

[silphael]

In fact, you may make them now... It will require a large bunch of tech or magic, yes.

[Rakmakallan]

I believe OP was referring to synthetic diamonds. If you are dealing with medieval-level tech, you can pretty much forget about it. Synthetic diamonds started being made extensively by the early 20th century. The most popular methods (according to a 5-minute trek on wikipedia), are HPHT (high pressure, high temperature) which requires hydraulic presses and materials capable of withstanding high temperatures and currents (namely Tungsten), and CVD (chemical vapour deposition) which, if I understand correctly, functions as a more complicated protein crystallization process, needing hydrocarbon gas and temperatures high enough to sustain materials in the plasma state. Both would be entirely infeasible in a fantasy setting. The only method that would seem probable would be with magic, provided the dwarfs in question have knowledge that diamonds are pure carbon, info on their crystallographic properties and natural geological formation. In that case, with wall spells (wall of iron) and an inferno of fire, maybe you would have some rough approximation. An alternative would be to assume that the Meteor Swarm spell creates actual meteors of composition and properties identical to their real-world counterparts. If that holds, go out in the field and start shooting at will; smaller diamonds have been observed to form on meteors or on their impact sites.

tl;dr You won't be able to make it with technology. Your best shot would be some really creative spellwork.

[Thiyr]

Arguably not even clever spellwork. Aside from one line allowing for the argument that you couldn't (but not by RAW), you could do it fairly easily with Fabricate (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/fabricate.htm). Diamonds are just a form of carbon, so you could get a large quantity of carbon in some form and use fabricate to reform it on the atomic level to change its structure. It can be argued that this would require an extremely high skill check to pull it off, but it is in theory at least possible. Only thing that would cause issue is that if the DM says you can't change the quality of the carbon, but when you get down small enough, you're making structural changes, so for an open-minded DM, it could work. the only question then is the ratio of carbon-to-diamond you're getting, and the value of the output diamonds (and if that's dependent on cut, fabricate does wonders in helping that issue as well)

[Kobold-Bard]

How hard is it to make diamonds? I'm wondering how much fantasy tech or magic would be needed to make diamonds, in a medieval-type age.

Scroll of Plane Shift is 2275gp (Arcane) or 1125gp (Divine). x2 for a way back.

There's lots of diamonds there. After that you just need to be able tough enough to get them via one or two level appropriate random encounters.

[the_david]

Actually, dwarves would be quite good at finding natural deposits of precious metals and gems... That must be why they spend so much time underground. Who would want to adventure when you could sniff out gold!

Dwarves are rich!

Edit: And they could hire kobolds to mine for them!

[Grimsage Matt]

Why not add it into your crafting system? Pale gems (As in, little more then glass) would need 10gp in raw meterials, and a DC 25 craft check.

For a diamond? At least 3,000gp in metrials, and a DC 50 craft check.

And, because it's on topic (Kinda), if you want the Smaillials? Need some minior artifact level componets, 5,000,000 gp in addtional meterials, and a DC500 craft check.