Pure metals for Alchemy

[MercuryAlloy]

I want to make a word with alchemy based on real medieval alchemy. But some ideas of real alchemy based on seven known metals and my world is a fantasy world with adamantine and mithril.

Since there is only seven metals in this world, adamantine is count as a purest iron and mithril as a purest silver.

Purest copper is an orichalcum – metal that shins like fire and easy to enchant, and purest gold is a mystery, because it is too hard to purify it.

Do you have any ideas what kind of properties could have purest tin, lead and mercury?

I don't want to make them just another super-metals, that can cut through anything.

[Grek]

The Gramarie system already did this idea. Their list was:

• Copper into Carmot, a magical metal which preserves all that it touches against age and decay.
• Gold into Sunmetal, a 'radiomantic' elemental which poisons everything around it with negative levels.
• Lead into Cursed Lead, which cuts off areas enclosed by it from access to magic.
• Mercury into Quicksilver, which bestows speed (and mercury poisoning) to anything it touches.
• Iron into Phlogiston, an everburning metal that is eternally blast furnace hot.
• Silver into Moonsteel, which is tangible (and sheds light) on both the material and ethereal planes.
• Tin into Alkahest, which can be mixed into water in order to create an anything-dissolving solvent.

Since you've already got four of the seven accounted for, you can easily steal the three ideas above which appeal the most and assign them new metals. Alkahest works pretty well without changes, Phlogiston works just as well as purest lead, and purest mercury can be a twist on moonsteel - a flammable silvery liquid which, when burnt, casts an eerie silver light that dispels invisibility and incorporeality.

[Yanagi]

I want to make a word with alchemy based on real medieval alchemy. But some ideas of real alchemy based on seven known metals and my world is a fantasy world with adamantine and mithril.

Since there is only seven metals in this world, adamantine is count as a purest iron and mithril as a purest silver.

Purest copper is an orichalcum – metal that shins like fire and easy to enchant, and purest gold is a mystery, because it is too hard to purify it.

Do you have any ideas what kind of properties could have purest tin, lead and mercury?

I don't want to make them just another super-metals, that can cut through anything.

I've done a version of "perfected" lead that's profoundly nonreactive and resistant to almost all magic. It handled more like high-viscosity liquid than a malleable metal, and was mostly referred to as alchemist's tar. It was in demand as an anti-magic measure, a means of concealing an object from scrying, or a means of containing volatile magical energy. It also was also a supernatural poison akin to regular lead--but with more exotic effects--and if processed correctly, could be made into arrow poison that inhibited magical powers and injured magical entities.

"Perfected" mercury came in two forms:

One was magic mirror, or oracle's mercury which behaved as a solid at rest, but would recoil and deform like a liquid if pressure was applied. It name derives both from its natural tendency to pool, forming a lens-shaped solid with a flat reflective surface, but also from it's natural affinity for magic involving far-seeing and scrying. Even without being enchanted, individual pieces of mirror sometimes "connected" with distant pieces, with sights and sounds captured by a different piece being transmitted through unknown means. The absolute height of magical wealth was a pool of mirror big enough to summon extraplanar entities through. Mirror could also be ingested to boost spells that involved the senses and divination, but would cause users to experience far-sight and see into other realms involuntarily.

The other was seed mercury, which was a jelly-like substance with a faint red tint that possessed vast and not-well-understood necromantic properties. It was prized as a means of creating especially complex and sophisticated forms of undead, and was theorized as a means to create true immortality. It was literally the rarest substance in the setting, with virtually no one having practical experience with its usage, only awareness of its existence and witness to some of the especially nightmarish undead animated by it.

I didn't actually get to a version of "perfected tin" that I settled on, but I thought it should the name should reference the old stories of the Cassiterides.

My ideas were either to riff on the malleability of tin, with its better version being something like a memory material that "healed" damage and re-formed and thus was the perfect material for construct making or magical prosthetics, or to have it be a mystical variety of "glass"--riffing on tin's application in LCD--with application in projecting thoughts and creating illusions.