Looking for a Material. Might have been in a Dragon Mag issue.

[Metahuman1]

So, my current game has the vast majority of official books open, save for Psionics. And the DM has been allowing Dragon Mag intermittently, but is trying to mostly steer clear of homebrew for now.

So, a few sessions back, one of the other players brought up this material to the DM. Showed it too him on a computer. The DM though it was published somewhere, and so did the player because it was on the Wiki. D&D Wiki. No, neither one of them knew the pitfalls of the site.

Fast forward to session before last, we fought a bunch of monsters made of this stuff, who were immune to slashing and stabbing themed attacks. And then last session I discovered this. When we first fought them I though the DM was using Riverine, but it turns out that it was this other material. Called Godsteel. Which they found on D&D Wiki.


Now, I know the sites rep, and I know it's not in a book with 99% certainty. But the DM did ask a question I don't know. "Was it maybe published in dragon magazine or something similar at some point?".

So, I told him I would look, because he doesn't want to use it if it's not at least published in Dragon Mag.


As to why the other player brought it up to him, he was apparently interested in getting weapons made out of the stuff.




So, Godsteel, is it a material in 3.5 D&D, and if so, what source book or dragon mag issue does it come from?

[Morof Stonehands]

From the looks of it, it came from a small "book" Called Planar Metals. It's an 11 page document by Ken Lipka that talks about different materials from different planes, and gives stats for each. Upon further searching it seems to be from Planscape. (Someone might need to check that out). Godsteel is indeed in there, though it is not immune to slashing and piercing damage like the one you were up against.

[Metahuman1]

Huh, interesting. Know were I might be able to find a copy of Planar Metals legally?

[Morof Stonehands]

I just looked it up on Google, there is a PDF of it, it was the first result.

[Metahuman1]

Cool, I'll be looking into that then, thanks. =)

[Metahuman1]

So, having looked this supplement up, is it official 3.5, 3rd party, or just a designers home brew? Just to confirm.

[tyckspoon]

Pretty sure it's homebrew; it only exists on a personal web site, when I googled for terms from it everything was more "hey, does anybody know where this came from?" (and considering what godsteel does, if it was even halfway official you'd hear about it in every crit optimization thread/I want to hit things hard with weapons thread), and the author refers to rules for masterworking that don't sound anything like D&D.

(Tangential: the only real difference between "3rd party" published material and ssome dude's homebrew is often production values of the book/PDF/website. They have exactly the same degree of officialness as rules and roughly the same chance of being good design.)

[Bullet06320]

I did a little digging, looks like the author was involved with planscape in some fashion back in 99 for TSR, and gencon 99, possibly part of the development team.
looks like the material was last updated in 03
I would consider it 3rd party, I don't think its official, and I didn't see OGL listed either

[atemu1234]

Pretty sure it's homebrew; it only exists on a personal web site, when I googled for terms from it everything was more "hey, does anybody know where this came from?" (and considering what godsteel does, if it was even halfway official you'd hear about it in every crit optimization thread/I want to hit things hard with weapons thread), and the author refers to rules for masterworking that don't sound anything like D&D.

(Tangential: the only real difference between "3rd party" published material and ssome dude's homebrew is often production values of the book/PDF/website. They have exactly the same degree of officialness as rules and roughly the same chance of being good design.)

I've found third party to sometimes be better, and homebrew varies wildly. High-quality stuff can be found in the more evaluated things; homebrew sometimes doesn't have that.

[Metahuman1]

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the value of good homebrew and 3rd party supplements.

But the DM is trying to make it clear that he's still not got a full handle on all the stuff from official supplements (This campaign is the first one were he's made use of Unearthed Arcana, Magic Item Compendium, Spell Compendium, none core monster manuals and there offerings, and Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords.), and as a result, he wants to keep to offical supplements in order to keep a better handle on what's coming form where and what does what.

Which, I respect.

And when the other player brought in God Steel, and I'd never heard of it any any thread about wanting to Crit better or hit stuff harder before, I though it was homebrew being mistaken for official material.

But anyway, at best, it's 3rd party. Ok. So, I'll know now to make them aware of that. Thanks! =)