I have a few.
Caerulium: a blue, non reactive metal with a similar cultural role to yinrih as gold has for humans. Claravian sacred objects such as thruibles and aspergillia are often made of caerulium. The Commonthroat word for caerulium is rdfsjHg, which means “sky-metal”
Tailstone: a magenta-colored crystal that’s used for FTL communication. Partisan Territory is the largest supplier of tailstone to the rest of Focus. The word tailstone is a somewhat inexact translation of the Commonthroat sKGqrCg, which uses the word rC meaning to flick with the tail. To flick oneself on the side with the tip of the tail, as though shoeing a bothersome insect, is similar to a human dismissively waving the hand.
Polymerite: A material that can be molded or extruded like plastic. After being cured through exposure to gamma rays, it becomes as strong as steel. Polymerite comes in a number of grades, all of which are naturally neon-colored and translucent. This gives a lot of yinrih tech a distinct late 90s aesthetic.
Floatstone: This one’s fictional in-universe. It’s a substance said to be able to negate the effects of gravity. Many yinrih choose to live permanently in orbital colonies without any artificial gravity in order to free up all four paws for grasping and manipulation. Many dream of having the convenience of living planetside with the freedom of movement afforded by microgravity.
Yes, though only one has been used in my fiction, since it’s the only one that made sense outside of a ttrpg setting.
Heartstone. It’s a magically altered form of quartz. However, the alteration only occurs naturally" in that the quartz crystals have to grow in the presence of an adequate magical field. You can’t just cast spells and make it. So far, there’s never been a point to having someone figure out how to make it happen in a controlled way, but it would be possible.
Heartstone has properties useful for magicians and psychics, such as the ability to amplify or store energies of that type. It can function as a backup pool of energy you can use to cast spells and such, or make those actions more potent.
However, the biggest property it has, and the only aspect that’s shown up in fiction rather than gaming, is that it can resonate with people, allowing them to channel energy into it at scale (when the crystals are big enough) in a way that forms a field. This field has different physics inside it, and one of the properties is that the speed of light is no longer a barrier.
So, FTL ships running an Imagical drive can achieve very rapid travel within a galaxy, and speeds high enough that other galaxies are reachable in theory. The limitation is that the crystals have to be big enough as individuals, or have to be shaped enough that multiple crystals can be in perfect attunement as they vibrate. Since there’s limits to how much you can shape them at all, and the biggest crystals aren’t big enough to actually go fast enough to reach another galaxy in one human lifetime, there’s still a practical speed limit.
But you can travel between the farthest inhabited planets in a month or two, depending on the drive’s capability. Between closer planets, it’s days or weeks.
That’s the most significant one. It’s basically magical trilithium in a way, but it does differ enough in the details that it’s not the same thing, and it does a lot more.
In ttrpg only, there’s a magically crafted alloy of Heartstone and vibranium that is a much more powerful amplifier of magic energy, and can generate intense sonic effects when shaped the right way.
Obviously, that one will never be used in anything published, because I ain’t fucking with Marvel lol. Which, I’ve used vibranium, adamantium, Nth metal, and other comic based materials in ttrpg settings, and have cooked up other alloys with them as well.
I thought adamantium was public domain? I feel like I’ve seen it used elsewhere.
It may be, I’ve not checked.
But it’s still not something I’d risk without full verification, and I wouldn’t really want to use it in my writing tbh. It’s already been chewed gum.
There’s not really any truly new ideas at this point, but directly lifting someone else’s creation defeats the purpose of writing for me.
I stole the aesthetic of Bonemold from Morrowind to create Chitinous [whatever]. The concept is “higher floor, lower ceiling” when creating items out of it.
For weapons, it reduces the damage die but increases the quantity or output:
- 1d4 > 2d2
- 1d6 > 1d4+1
- 1d8 > 2d4
- 1d10 > 1d8+1
- 1d12 > 1d10+1
- 2d6 > 2d4+2
For armor, you dump the protection for damage reduction.
- AC 12 > AC 10 DR 1
- AC 20 > AC 10 DR 10
