Raw (unworked) adamantine prices

[Yogibear41]

In the DMG it lists the prices to have armor or weapons made of adamantine and the prices for armor, shields, and other items by the pound to be made of mithral, but it does not list a price for adamantine by the pound, or for just a chunk of ore in order to forge something that is not a weapon, say a half golem adamantine arm for a medium sized character. Is this spelled out anywhere or should I just guestimate?

[Firechanter]

Afaik you can only reverse-engineer the cost from the price list for special materials.

Adamantine Full Plate weighs 50 lbs and incurs a +15000GP surcharge.

As per craft rules, raw materials cost 1/3 of the final price.

So the raw adamantine required for a full plate costs 5000GP. Which comes down to 100GP per pound. Which is not so expensive, if you think about it. Just twice as much as gold.

However, you'll notice that this doesn't match with the prices of Mithral items. +500GP/lb for a crafted Mithral item implies a cost of 166GP per lb of raw mithral. But Adamantine armour is a lot more expensive than Mithral! What gives?

One thing is that Mithral armour only weighs half as much, but that does not explain everything.

Well, the long and short of it is that the designers have never run these numbers. The prices for special materials are based purely on their (assumed) usefullness in game. That's also why a Mithral chain shirts is so cheap - there's hardly any benefit to it when you could also get a Mithral breastplate that also counts as light.

So in short... I guess I'd make adamantine items about x1,5 the price of mithral, though I can't really see an application for it.

[Yogibear41]

Mainly just trying to figure out how much taking http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=179202 this is going to cost me, I know it lists 100 gp as the entry price but that just seems unrealistic to build an adamantine arm with. Not to mention convincing the DM that a level 3 artificer would have the knowledge to pull off something like this.

[Phelix-Mu]

Draconomicon has tables in it for building dragon hoards. One of the tables involves bars/ingots of valuable raw materials, to reduce the coinage amounts, I guess (though most of it is valued by weight, so I don't totally see the point of subbing in platinum bars for platinum coins). I'm fairly certain that adamantine was on the list.

In any case, it's a pretty cool set of tables to look through, speaking as a DM.

The main problem with this whole conceit is that many a DM will look at the flavor in the adamantine entry and reasonably rule that it's way too rare to be bought as a raw material. Why it's supposed to be rare, and then is noted as being not terribly expensive, goodness knows. Going with the meteoric metal theory, perhaps a great many meteors have fallen in the setting.

But all of this gets into supply and demand and the economy in a world with magic, concepts so heavily discussed elsewhere that I'm probably running the risk of gravitational collapse even touching on the matter here.:smallamused:

[Gemini476]

Here's (part of) a table of trade goods in Draconomicon:

01–02 Adamantine (100 gp)
03–22 Copper (5 sp)
23–27 Darkwood (10 gp)
28–37 Gold (50 gp)
38–62 Iron (1 sp)
63–72 Lead (5 cp)
73–75 Mithral (100 gp)
76–80 Platinum (500 gp)
81–95 Silver (5 gp)
96–100 Other
Do note that this is for the ore, or so I assume.

Now, here's another table of trade goods, except this time from the Player's Handbook:

1 cp One pound of wheat
2 cp One pound of flour, or one chicken
1 sp One pound of iron
5 sp One pound of tobacco or copper
1 gp One pound of cinnamon, or one goat
2 gp One pound of ginger or pepper, or one sheep
3 gp One pig
4 gp One square yard of linen
5 gp One pound of salt or silver
10 gp One square yard of silk, or one cow
15 gp One pound of saffron or cloves, or one ox
50 gp One pound of gold
500 gp One pound of platinum

As we can see, the prices of copper, gold, iron, and platinum are all the same. If we assume that all the other metals from Draconomicon are priced by the pound as well (the only sensible assumption, to be honest,) then Mithral and Adamantine have the same cost, while platinum is five times as expensive.

Clearly Adamantine is more common than platinum, or at least in less of a demand.

As for why Adamantine costs more than Mithral once applied to weapons, I can only assume that Adamantine is harder to work. Given the clear inspiration of Mithril -> Mithral, this should not come as a surprise.

[Phelix-Mu]

Do note that this is for the ore, or so I assume.

Did it say that? Hmm. Well, the prices exactly correspond to precious metal values by-the-pound for coinage, which is clearly refined. I would think that ore is worth less in most cases, so that table from Draconomicon really doesn't make any sense if it's values for ores.

Though, as you go on to say, they publish nonsense all of the time. IMHO, and probably in future incarnations of my setting, adamantine and mithral won't be for sale; if you want it, you'll have to find the ore yourself or melt down an existing item (heresy in many crafting circles). But I've already set about tackling the spells that provide unlimited access to raw materials and such, so this would be par for my course.

Hmm. I wonder if you could use a wall of lava to refine ores....:smallwink:

[Yogibear41]

Phelix, it is without a doubt going to be a pain to find/buy. I can only hope the random dice of supply/demand/availability falls in my favor. Worst case scenario if I know I have the money to buy it + a few hundred gold extra, I find me a nice inn in the city(city would be the only place I would be able to find it to begin with) and have a nice 6 month vacation and see if any happens to come in while I relax.


Alternatively, I find a high level wizard(probably even rarer in this setting) buy up a bunch of iron and have him polymorph any object it into adamantine permanently. Forgot you can't polymorph any object into adamantine :smallfrown:

To be honest, I'm not exactly sure how much the actual replacement armor would weight, probably at least 25 pounds maybe up to 50.

[Chronos]

Compare to titanium, in our world. An ingot of titanium isn't all that expensive (a few dollars per pound), but things made from titanium are, because it's difficult to work.

[Shackled Slayer]

When considdering the price of adamantine, one must also considder the difficulty of working that material. Raw adamantine is little more than really hard metal rocks. Raw ore is always cheaper than refined ore because there is a great deal of metalurgy that goes into the conversion, and even more to take it from being an ingot into armor/weapon form.

Using the pathfinder core book (it's my preferred system but close enough to 3rd that we can theoretically substitute) making a weapon out of adamantine adds 3000 gp to the weapon's price. Deviding that by the highest weight of a common weapon (heavy mace, 8 lbs.) we get 375 GP per lb of adamantine in pure ore, and i would halve that for raw ore and round up to 188 GP (because i hate cutting coins into copper and silver)

Now let's apply that to mithral. Wee need to apply the same calculation to mithral weapons where we can actually note something interesting; unlike adamantine, which improves hardness and sundering, mithral only really applies to weight. Mithral weapons dont get any bonuses bebond their heft, but even then becoming lighter doesn't make them a lighter weapon category.
So, mithral weapons add +500 GP to their total cost. 500 ÷ 8 = 62 GP for mithral per lb., and 31 for a lb. Of raw mithral ore.
Some of you may notice the math is off by a bit. This is because i left out the price of a heavy mace (12 GP) in my calculations. I did this because we are only looking for the price of the material, not for making it into a mace as well. I also divided it by the highest weight of a one handed weapon, 8 lbs. I did that because realistically that's about as much adamantine as your going to find on the material plane in one place. I also didn't count the cost of masterworking, which pathfinder adds that naturally because by using mithral or adamantine it is always assumed to be a masterwork item, due to the metal's cost, and we can therefore assume that to be apllicable to the metal's natural properties, because it's ALWAYS assumed to be that way.

So, in short, adamantine is 188 GP

But then there's one more thing to considder in all this, which is the material rarity. Mithral is more common than adamantine and is assumed to be naturally occuring onbthe material plane, but adamantine (in pathfinder at least) is assumed to always come from meteorites, and therefore is not naturally occuring. This rarity means you would have to go meteor hunting, which recquires specialized knowledge, gear and expertise, to find deposits of adamantine. That, or you would have to travel to the plane of elemental earth, where huge expanses of earthen material exists in infinite surplus. But then that requires the services of a high level caster.

So either way you have to account for rarity as well, but then you knew that.

Sources are pathfinder core book and bestiary 2 (adamantine golems discuss the sheer volume of adamantine required to forge them)

[ericgrau]

Compare to titanium, in our world. An ingot of titanium isn't all that expensive (a few dollars per pound), but things made from titanium are, because it's difficult to work.

An ingot of titanium is expensive too because it's also hard to refine. I found plates for about $33 a pound, retail. In bulk a site suggested $8-$32 a pound for ingots might be possible, but it was pretty vague. Titanium ore is plentiful and pretty cheap though.

In the end I think you should make up a price or go with the table of 100 gp a pound and move on. And when players try to make it into armor it somehow ends up costing what it costs due to difficulty and expertise.