[3.5] Salvage

[Deth Muncher]

So, as anyone who's ever played more than five digital RPGs knows, at some point, you'll be asked to go find scrap parts and bring them back so that the master artificer can make you the Super Doomaflotchy. Or, maybe it's just a sub-event in the game itself, where you can find spare bits on enemies that you can use to fix your gear or build better weapons (I'm looking at you, Fallout 3).

So my question is, other than the actual artificer class itself, which has the ability to sap magic items for their power and turn them into other things, are there anything in the Item Creation rules about using old materials to make new ones? The scenarios I could see this applying are like follows:

-Bob the fighter finds a longsword, broken in half. A quick Appraise check from Bob the wizard determines that it's steel. Once they get back to town, Bob the fighter asks Bob the blacksmith if he can reforge it. Bob the blacksmith agrees, and cuts him a discount since most of the materials were provided.

-Bob the wizard encounters a large construct of some sort. A well placed Inflict Critical Damage (y'know, the construct specific Inflict spell) makes it fall apart. As every good adventurer these days carries some sort of extraplanar storage, he scoops up the bits and takes them back to town, where he asks the local magic blacksmith, Bob, if he can make anything out of these parts. Bob determines that as these were previously magical, anything made from them could do X.

Etc. Etc.

Also, then, if nothing really exists, what could a reasonable houserule be on the subject?

[bosssmiley]

Metamagic components - the use of sweet lewts and bodyparts in casting/item creation.

[DueceEsMachine]

Well, the way I would work the longsword - the material is mostly there, so all you'd have to pay the blacksmith for is the time that it would take to actually fix it, so figure out how much time it would take him, and charge appropriately. I think it is 1/5 the cost to make it, so a Masterwork longsword would cost the smith 62 gp to fix? That's not bad at all, especially for lower-level characters.

As far as the construct, maybe take what it was worth, and have that be the price you can fetch for it. If it was make out of five thousand gp worth of Mithral, your character can salvage that, but you'll just find less treasure as the result. That way players don't exceed the given WBL. I don't know, just a thought.

If they found a broken magical sword, I would reduce the cost to fix/ re-enchant it appropriately.

[Starbuck_II]

-Bob the fighter finds a longsword, broken in half. A quick Appraise check from Bob the wizard determines that it's steel. Once they get back to town, Bob the fighter asks Bob the blacksmith if he can reforge it. Bob the blacksmith agrees, and cuts him a discount since most of the materials were provided.

This works for magic weapons. It costs less to repair a broken magic item than make a new one.

[Deth Muncher]

This works for magic weapons. It costs less to repair a broken magic item than make a new one.

Howzabout if you have several of the same broken item? Could two broken flaming longswords turn into one fixed flaming longsword?

[Dimers]

Basically OT: Ancestral Relics and kensai and OA samurai class feature weapons allow you to turn anything with value into exactly what you want.