Knights & Knaves Alehouse

Forgive me if this has been brought up before, but I was wondering how you as DMs handle iron weapons. In particular, monsters such as demons can be hit by iron weapons even when they are not magical. (btw The circle of protection from evil is effective vs ghasts when iron is used).

Now isn't normal steel (most of PC weapons) an iron alloy? Wouldn't almost all weapons affect demons then?

Obviously this is not the intention of the authors, but how do you handle iron weapons. Do you treat them as 'softer' when they are used? Do you make them any harder to come by? Do you assume PC weapons are bronze?

Interestingly, the DMG tells us on page 164:

Armor of +3 bonus is of special meteorite iron steel, +4 is mithral alloyed steel, +5 is adamantite alloyed steel.

Do you assume magic weapons of similar quality are made of the same materials?

For the most part I just ignore it, as there is not much explicable about it.

harder to come by and inferior to steel (save vs demons, ect). "cold forged iron" or "cold iron" is the oft used term. Meteoric iron alloys (or any alloys) are it (though a +3 weapon generally works fine!).

This would seem to have it as regular plain ol' iron (though not nec. steel)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_in_folklore

I assume the rules pointing out "iron" means specifically pure iron as differentiated from the default iron-alloy steel (because otherwise why bother -- just state that the monster is damaged by normal weapons). Iron weapons would need to be obtained specially (but I'd guess probably shouldn't be any harder to obtain or any more expensive than normal/steel weapons) and are less durable than alloyed steel. The latter is probably handled by some sort of breakage/fumble roll -- a flat 1 in 20 chance is almost certainly too big (as we saw in Grodog's game at SCMC4Loko, where high-level fighters vs. 0-level bandits ended up getting fumbles almost every round) but perhaps something like on a roll of 1 make a d% roll with a cumulative 1% chance per check of the weapon breaking (i.e. the first check the weapon only breaks on a roll of 01, on the second check it breaks on a roll of 01-02, etc.). That's fiddly extra bookkeeping, but since it's not something that's likely to come up very often (only when the player specifically goes out of his way to get an "iron" weapon, presumably for the sake of getting a bonus against demons, or the GM specifically states that some recovered treasure (presumably of ancient origin) is iron) it's probably not too onerous.

How about this. Assign -1/-1 penalties to iron (and bronze too, though bronze vs. iron would be straight-up) weapons used against opponents using steel armor and/or weapons. No extra paperwork, and you've assigned a game gimp for using your special-made sword against the wrong opponent.

Of course, you could always run an iron age game and avoid the conflict altogether.

But the issue with iron vs. steel isn't that it's "softer" (the way bronze is), it's just that it's more brittle and doesn't hold an edge as well, right?

T. Foster wrote:But the issue with iron vs. steel isn't that it's "softer" (the way bronze is), it's just that it's more brittle and doesn't hold an edge as well, right?

IANAM, but as I understand, iron and bronze are comparable as weapons. What ushered the iron age was that it became easier and cheaper to make iron weapons than it was to make them of bronze. So, if you wanted your kingdom to survive, you made as many weapons as you could, and that meant using iron.

Deleted by OP.

T. Foster wrote:But the issue with iron vs. steel isn't that it's "softer" (the way bronze is), it's just that it's more brittle and doesn't hold an edge as well, right?

Summon P&P

My impression is pure iron (rather then alloy) as well. As far as cost and avlblty, I suspect it would be somewhat rare (since its inferior as Foster points out) but not particularly expensive to have made, based on holy symbol costs: wood 7 sp, iron 2 gp (I'm assuming pure iron), silver 50 sp. A church might have iron weapons in storage for such problems and heroes suspecting demonic activity.

There is a movie Captain Kronos (Hammer) where certain vampires have to be killed with iron piercing the heart. He has his sidekick henchman hunchback professor buddy make one for him while he waits in some sort of drug induced meditation. He uses it in the battle and then after killing the vampire tosses it (likely as it has little value other then this completed task).



(Thats right Tony, thats the chick from Golden Voyage of Sinbad... )

I believe another movie that featured iron as a way to kill an evil vampire like creature was Life Force (1985ish) Wheggie will remember this flick because it had some naked chick walking around sucking life energy out of googling guys. Then there was Quartermass and the Pit (70s Hammer) where a crane is pushed into the mass of a floating alien energy creature (if I remember correctly) the crane grounds it to the Earth effectively killing it. I have no idea where this idea of iron being used against evil things comes from (perhaps the idea of grounding)? Would be interesting to know. I'd only heard of silver in mythology.

http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/index.php?title=Iron

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_iron#Cold_iron

http://www.themystica.com/mystica/articles/i/iron.html

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ColdIron

Interestingly from the last link:

There's no agreement about what "cold" actually means in this context. Sometimes it just mean that the iron, at the moment, isn't hot. Sometimes it's cold-worked iron. Or something more complicated, like the iron that has never been smelted. Or this may be a poetic reference to any iron, just because metals that aren't hot feel cold thanks to heat conductivity. Which may be pulled as "magic vs. technology" symbolism. It may also be a reference to the fact that heating magnets to a certain point causes them to lose their magnetism, so "cold" iron is iron that still has its magnetic (magic) power.

This is interesting, but I want to know if you guys ignore it like Matthew, or actually employ the concept.

darnizhaan wrote:This is interesting, but I want to know if you guys ignore it like Matthew, or actually employ the concept.

If the players made an effort to discover this type of knowledge I'd figure out a way to work it in. I wouldn't make it mandatory for success. I think it's one of those things that might enrich the sense of the world but it also shouldn't be any kind of lynchpin that could undo the game.

FWIW, I interpret iron, and cold iron, weapons to be iron, as in, not steel.

TRP wrote:FWIW, I interpret iron, and cold iron, weapons to be iron, as in, not steel.

Me too.

Philotomy Jurament wrote:

TRP wrote:FWIW, I interpret iron, and cold iron, weapons to be iron, as in, not steel.

Me too.

Ditto. I always thought of "cold iron" as wrought iron, as in the stuff you see on French Quarter balconies worked into fleur-de-lys or the odd fire-poker.

But, if memory serves, there's a long tradition in English literature of cold iron and faeries not getting along.

As to the OP's actual question: I ignore this tidbit. I've never had players involved enough to know or care. And I don't generally use demons and devils in my games anyway.