Exotic Equipment Materials

Sometimes, you encounter a foe that needs a specially made weapon to defeat. Famously, these are silver for lycanthropes, and adamantine for golems.

But sometimes you want weapons or armor made of other materials for other reasons. Mithral, for instance is excellent for both purposes, being a lightweight material, making it excellent for both arms and armor.

The Exotic Materials table contains a series of special materials, what they're useful for, and how costly they are to turn into equipment.

The first set of columns denotes whether an object would benefit from being made of that material. For instance, you could make a longbow out of adamantine, but it's not going to affect the arrows.

Leather Armors. This category contains leather, studded leather, and hide armor.

Metal Armors. This category contains every other form of armor in the Player's Handbook.

Shields. Shields are a form of armor, but do not cover a majority of your body, so cannot benefit from the benefits of adamantine, or orichalcum.

Wooden Weapons. This category contains blowguns, clubs, greatclubs, hand crossbows, heavy crossbows, light crossbows, longbows, quarterstaves, and shortbows.

Metal Weapons. This category contains every other weapon in the Player's Handbook except nets, slings, and whips. It also contains arrows, blowgun needles, bolts, and firearm and sling bullets.

The second set of columns denotes the price modifier for each item set. Many of the prices listed here assume that the prospective adventurer has provided it. Dragonhide is not an easy material to come across, nor is it easy to work.

Held Items. This category refers to weapons, ammunition in sets of 10, and shields.

Worn Items. This category refers to light, medium and heavy armor.

Ironbark

Ironbark is a special tree that is cultivated by elven druids. The bark of this tree is tricky to work, but is as hard as steel.

Armor. Armor made out of ironbark functions identically to armor made out of steel, but is usable by druids.

Mithral

Mithral is a metal known for is resilience despite its relatively light weight. This lightness allows smiths to achieve ridiculous results with their weapons and armors.

Armor. Armor made out of mithral weighs half that of regular armor of the same type. Additionally, armor made out of mithral loses its strength requirement if it has one and the wearer does not gain disadvantage on Dexterity (Stealth) checks because of wearing it.

Weapons. Weapons made out of mithral do the following:

• They lose the heavy property if they have it.
• They gain the light property if they don't have the two-handed or versatile properties.
• They gain the finesse property if they don't have the two-handed or heavy properties.
• Weapons with the versatile property deal their versatile damage when held in one hand.
• Melee Weapons with the two-weapon property may be wielded with one hand.
• The range of weapons with the thrown property is doubled.

Orichalcum

Orichalcum is a magic absorbing metal. This grants it fantastic defensive properties against spellcasters, but also grants fantastic benefits to spellcasters who wield it.

Armor. While wearing armor made out of orichalcum, the wearer has advantage on all saving throws against spells and magic effects, and all spell attacks against the wearer are made with disadvantage.

Weapons. Weapons made out of Orichalcum can act as a spellcasting focus. In addition, if a spell calls for a melee spell attack, you may use a melee weapon attack in place of a melee spell attack. On a hit, you deal the weapon's damage in addition to the spells effects.

Silver

Silver is a soft metal, and is unsuited to be used for weapons and armor. However, thanks to an alchemical process, silver can be bonded to the surface of metal objects to grant them their properties.

Weapons. Weapons coated in silver ignore the damage immunities of lycanthropes, and the damage resistances of devils.

Optional Rule: Exotic Materials as

Weaknesses

Some creatures, devils, golems, and lycanthropes (and if you follow the sidebar on the previous page, fey) in particular are immune or resistant to bludgeoning, slashing, or piercing damage dealt by non magical weapons that are not silvered/adamantine(or cold iron).

Now, due to the abundance of magical weapons in bands of adventurers, that second condition is largely irrelevant. To encourage the usage of such weapons, one can grant the following vulnerabilities:

Damage Vulnerabilities bludgeoning, slashing, and piercing from silvered weapons

Damage Vulnerabilities bludgeoning, slashing, and piercing from adamantine weapons

Damage Vulnerabilities bludgeoning, slashing, and piercing from cold iron weapons