With adequate raw material, and not going to be bothered by much, I set about making my Crafting Set.
I found the adamant vein the ash giants had dug their find out of, and found a lot of cooling semiprecious stones and crystals scattered here and there, many Energized from fire mana. Wealth is a super power, but I could only process so much of it at a time.
The biggest thing, of course, was that this whole place was a Fire Node.
I turned that golden throne into a Focus for the Node, carving out the symbols and geometric formation into a shelf of magma I sliced and cut down to laser-tight smoothness with the first adamant chisel I forged off my Floating Forge. I then melted down the gold into the channels I'd cut for those symbols, using the Acidic edge of Tremble to help bond metal to stone and feeding 20k in goldweight into the Focus to start on its powering-up process.
My Forge still had more days required to get it to what I considered proper functionality, but drawing on the heat of the lava to help it out, it could finally smelt down adamant. I got to work on my Tools promptly.
I had a lot of Tools to make, for a lot of trades. Helpfully, they didn't individually take a lot of adamant, and I had alternate metals if needed. Smithing required hammers more than anything, but tongs, molds, chisels, dyes, stamps, clamps, files, saws, and the like were all needed. Finesmithing required more delicate stuff than working the heavier metals, as did gemcrafting and whitesmithing precision instruments. I also had to make a set of butcher's knives, stonemason and stonecarving tools, carpentry and woodcutting tools, painting, scrimshaw, instrument-making, glassmaking, alchemical instruments…
With my Vajra, my fingers were more precise carving and molding instruments than any 5-figure calibrated instrument made by science, as I could measure and mold down below the cellular level. I moved with superhuman speed and surety, and this only increased as I made the Tools I needed to increase my speed.
QL 40 stuff was my goal, simply because working with anything less set off a tic in my cheek. As I was making a Floating Forge, I was making Shaping Tools, sets of Tools that shared among themselves a common magic that doubled the speed at which one could work, and also gave a flat +5 Equipment bonus to increase that speed yet further.
The Node was pumping out 3k a day if you were working with Fire, so I could pop 1k into my Tools and leave 2k for my Forge, no problem. The Focus I'd dumped the entirety of a gaudy golden throne into was also charging up rather happily. The Tools would take 10k worth of Karma to fully activate.
Which left the last item, the Anvil of Silent Thunder.
This item also doubled the crafting speed of all items worked upon it. It centered 100% of the hammering force into objects atop it, which meant, among other things, that hammering on it made almost no noise, no matter how hard you hit it. The only sound was to the smith, to which the item would sing of its purity… granting a +5 Morale bonus as you worked towards the perfect noise of what you were trying to make.
I didn't make it out of pure adamant, instead making it a blend of pretty much every stand-alone metal and alloy I'd collected. I had to melt them, blend them, shape them, form them while they were white-hot, make the Runes inside the Anvil and outside it of the different metals as they set and melded into one another.
The rules for making stuff in the game had been pretty in-depth. There were two levels of difficulty: Technical and Material. Technical difficulty was all about the technique, how much work you had to jump through to do it. Material difficulty was simply the difference between working in, say, cloth or steel. Material difficulty affected the speed at which you could work, subtracting a certain number from your production roll. Technical difficulty subtracted from your quality roll, meaning it was harder to make a high-quality item.
So, items of bronze were faster to make than items of iron, which were way easier than working with adamant. Knives were simpler to make than short swords, which were much simpler than bastard swords. Chain mail was easier to make than a decent breastplate suit, which was far, far simpler than a suit of full plate, which seemed like child's play next to skinplate or shieldplate. Making a bicycle was easier than making a grandfather clock...
Rolling for production speed used all your Bonuses, especially magical ones. I rolled that against my target QL, divided by ten, and I had gold pieces per day in production , which was then multiplied by a material modifier, which went from 1 down to almost zero. If you were making straw rope, you weren't going to make 100 gold of it per day unless you had some utterly massive modifiers on hand and the rope was basically spinning itself together, or something.
QL received only natural bonuses, magic never affected QL. So Stats, Feats, Ranks, Masteries, and Class bonuses all affected Quality Level, the QL that was so essential when making magic items. Casting spells and having magic items that granted bonuses did not affect QL, only production speed. Your Skill Ranks represented Hard Limits on what you could make, as they represented knowledge and familiarization with techniques that you simply didn't have and couldn’t understand otherwise.
And that was all fine, because production speed and Ranks were extremely important to me as a Runesmith.
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There were three ways to greatly increase Crafting speed of production in the game.
One, have magic items that did so. Ergo, my set would each double the speed of work done using them. You added those together, ending up at x4 speed, instead of them multiplying one another. Four days of work done in one day with the important Weapon and Armor smithing.
Two, get your Skill Mastery in that Craft to Five, you worked at double speed as a bonus. Stacked with any magic bonus.
Three, you could take 10 off your Quality Level to double the speed of your work. So, if you could usually make something at 50, you could make something at 40 twice as fast, and at 30 four times as fast. That all went on the stack of multipliers with magic.
The fourth way was to work on the item(s) for a week straight, at which point you got a cumulative momentum bonus of measuring your production in gold, i.e. x10, after seven days instead of ten days. So, almost a 50% bonus just for working at the same thing for several days in a row… or, more accurately, every seven days worth of continuous production.
Basically, you wanted your Production modifier and your Quality modifier as high as possible, then tried to acquire multipliers, which was exactly what I was doing.
The reason for all this was that I was going to make my Weapon, Armor, and Shield when I got my Tools all equipped, stacked my modifiers, and did some real Runesmithing!
Runesmiths had a huge advantage on Powered Smiths. They could make stuff to any desired QL, only needing to acquire raw materials worth 1/3 the required value, blah blah, final product.
Prices were given for various goods, but 20 was the 'golden level', the minimum QL for cantrip, or single enchantment only items, i.e. Master's Work. As items went up in QL past 20, they could be used for more powerful spell effects, or you could 'pay' Quality to have them acquire various non-magical bonuses. Silk ropes instead of hemp. Fire resistant ropes. Cut-resistant ropes. Items of rarer materials.
There were scales for increasing the value of items; you paid more for QL 26 armor than you did for QL 20, it just made sense.
But Powered could only increase the value of their Crafting by adding raw material cost. Sure, a QL 30 silk fire-resistant wire-hard rope was more expensive to buy. For magical items, it was just a QL 30 rope, and you didn't get to put any of that additional value towards the cost of the magic item. You would pay the same, say, 6 goldweight to make it as if you used a QL 30 hemp rope. Sure, some materials you couldn't use to make high quality levels, and QL30 was the limit for hemp, silk went all the way to 35. If you could add gold thread, or diamond dust to the thing… yeah, you could increase its value. Powered tended to add gold engravings and jewels for exactly this reason to items that were going to be magical.
Runesmiths, however, got to add Karma just from their skill level. As long as the item satisfied the basic requirement, Runecrafters could basically just work Karma into a magic item, without requiring more material cost. Powered, with inherent magical bias of their own, couldn't do that with magic items.
The amount was +100 Karma per QL over 20, cumulative. So, QL 30 was potentially +5500 gp value that a Runesmith could work into a Weapon, Karma that a Powered Artificer would not have to come up with to make the thing. They could just spend gold and buy it!
Moreover, it meant that if you wanted to work long and hard at something, you could potentially make some extremely powerful stuff just by plugging away at it. You always had a use for your downtime. Runesmiths could thus directly turn crafting skill into cash!
Lastly, since it was based on a production roll, you could potentially 'make Karma' by Crafting at insane levels much, much faster than you could Invest or Infuse, whose limit of 2 goldweight, or 1k of gold value, a day, was only bendable by some Ten Artificers, and then only by 25%.
That was exactly what I was trying to do: break the daily production rules and get my core Gear back as swiftly as possible.
I did it first with the Tools, since Forge was already Furious as long as it could draw on the caldera's heat.
My Blacksmithing check was quite high.
10 Ranks, +3 for a Class Skill for Melee,
+5 Cunning from Scout Levels and Advanced Classes,
+3 from Runesmith Class for crafting checks,
+7 Intellect,
+6 Mastersmith Skill Focus Feat,
+4 Tradesman Feat,
+3 Synergy bonus for Ranks in the Classes the Tools were being made for,
+5 Mastery,
+7 Wisdom bonus from my Trembling Domain,
+9 Strength bonus towards production speed,
+5 Equipment bonus from the Forge,
and a +2 and rapidly increasing bonus for Tools as I first made the ones I'd need to Smith, to help me towards making the rest.
Base 10, check +53 for Quality Level, and +69 for Speed. x4 base. Taking -20 from QL to make my Tools at 43 for another x4, and -10 from Speed because of adamant being damn hard to work with.
Average effort, take 10, 43 QL x 69 PL = 296.7 of production, x16 = 4747.2 gold of production per day. Since the Shaping Bonus was shared between all Tools in a set, the 10k value represented the entire collection of Tools, which meant as soon as I had the Smithing Tools made, speed went up to a full +5 bonus, and stacked on another multiplier. 43 x 72 x 20 was now 6,192 gold of production per eight-hour work day… I could make something magical much faster just Crafting away than I could sacking gold or Karma from magical items to it.
Which didn't mean I didn't do that, too. After all, I was sitting on a Node, and didn't have to babysit an Array, just defend it against the occasional Fireborn that came ambling in to investigate the place. In addition, the natural value of the adamant itself helped drag in magic to the Runecrafting I was doing, subtracting from the total 10k of work I had to do and reducing it down to 7k.
I worked 12-hour days, accelerating the amount of crafting I did, using the extra time to either gather materials from the volcano, and zipped around the volcano snuffing Fireborn with prejudice to make sure I got my Naming Karma in for my Blade otherwise.
Making the Anvil used pretty much the same modifiers. The value of the various alloys approximated the adamant as I blended them to create a unique internal sound and resonance for the Anvil. Again, a 7k value, less than 3 days of work.
Base multiplier x5. Another +5 to Production Level.
Six days of crafting in the caldera, spurts of violence inside and out, and it was time to start making my Sword, Shield, Autobow, and Armor.