Legends: The Origin Of Adamantine

[brian 333]

In the olden days of role playing, adamantine was a white, diamond hard metal stronger than steel. Wolverine's claws look like steel but cut it like butter. Over time it has morphed into a black metal, apparently to distinguish it from Mithril. (Is Mithril actually iridium alloyed steel?) But whatever it looks like in your campaign, did you ever wonder where it came from?

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Legends say the dwarves make adamantine, but they have never shared their methods with others. But the dwarven loremasters and priests know that adamantine is the bones of the Earth.

In the chaos before creation, gods came to be and fought other gods. From time to time a god died, and eventually dissolved back into the chaos. But for a time their corpses formed a safe harbor in the void for lesser gods.

The gods of the dwarves gathered such corpses into piles, building ever larger and stronger islands of safety and refuge. When the Smith began to forge the world, these corpses formed the materials of the caverns and mountains, seas and skies.

From time to time in their delvings the dwarves will encounter broken bits of the bones of the ancient gods, hammered into the ground, embedded in stone. Extracting the Bones of the Earth requires master miners. Smelting, casting, and forging the metal from its ore is a secret of the dwarven priests.

For those who doubt these legends, go to the mountains and see the bones of dragons they harvest from time to time buried in stone: a part of the stone. If dragon bones can become stone, why can the bones of the gods not?