Bloodstone

Bloodstone is an extremely rare and powerful material that harbours unpredictable powers. Any arcane spellcaster willing to take the risks can strengthen their magic with it.¹

Nature

Bloodstone can be found in nature, where it resembles a mineral. Many scholars regard it as solid magic: the materialisation of arcane magic where it connects with living beings. Dwarves tell a different story, believing that bloodstones form when the remains of dead wizards or magical creatures are pressed between layers of earth.²

Some people can produce the substance from their own bodies. They have formed a two-way bond with the material from which their magic comes.¹

Value

Wizards use bloodstone to enhance their power, and some will pay hundreds of gold coins for a single gram.³

The Bloodstone Plague

The Bloodstone Plague is the name given to a mysterious phenomenon in which bloodstones form and grow inside living beings, for no reason anyone can explain. Despite its name it is not contagious, yet once it begins in one person it cannot be stopped, and it usually strikes several people in the same area at once. Its victims lose their minds but not their mobility, and become creatures that attack anyone who carries magical power.³

The plague is one of the most feared conditions in the Empire. When it was first recognised it struck mostly at spellcasters, and healers and wizards across the Empire were thrown into panic. It proved neither as fast nor as widespread as they feared and became a rare occurrence. Soon the afflicted, covered in rough pieces of the stone, came to be seen as a valuable source of bloodstone to be harvested by powerful wizards and sorcerers, who hire adventurers to bring them back to their towers.⁴

Even this horrifying sight is not enough to deter the wizards who want the stone.³

In Mürekkep ve Çelik

In the campaign Mürekkep ve Çelik ("Ink and Steel"), bloodstone is a red stone found in the south of the Empire. A magical desert that had crept northward was driven back, and as druids cleansed the land and turned it green again, the red stone came to light. Used correctly, it is said to increase a wizard's power greatly.⁵

The Empire wants the stone to strengthen its war mages and the Archon, not to give power to common people. Only licensed nobles may mine it, yet illicit digging goes on beside the lawful mines.⁶

It is rumoured that alchemists who know how to work the stone can turn an ordinary person into one who wields magic, and some speculate that it grants immortality. Castor says that bloodstones turn people without magic into spellcasters carrying a power they cannot control.⁷

The stolen stones of Razel

The wizard Traumir tells Castor that about two kilograms of bloodstone have vanished from a mine bound to the Empire. He sends Castor south, not to save the townsfolk, but to learn how the stones were processed and used and to bring them back before imperial intelligence arrives.⁸

In an empty room beneath a village of South Razel, Castor and Leonard find a metal chest floating in the air beside footprints that end suddenly, which Castor reads as the trail of a mage who fled by magic. Opened, the chest fills the room with flashing red light. It holds about two kilograms of processed bloodstone that glitters like diamonds. Leonard feels nothing, but Castor feels an unpleasant tingling spread through his fingers from thirty feet away and senses his own power rising. The stones prove far stronger than he had been told, and the companions come to think that devices built to amplify magic had been altered to process them.⁹¹⁰

A piece of about fifty grams is enough to strengthen a spell noticeably: Castor holds one while casting the spell that puts the guide Aypol to sleep. The companions leave him fifty grams, with a note claiming they found only a kilogram and a half.¹¹

Castor's ring later warms, the sign of The Hand. On Traumir's word he keeps the chest until a trusted courier who is no mage comes for it. The hooded courier shows his own ring, makes the chest vanish with a second ring, and writes down Castor's report on how the stones were processed, disguised as a friend's letter about warm wine and spices.¹²

The Warforge

Later in the campaign, the council of the Archon's colour-named masters supplies about two kilograms of bloodstone, its source unstated, to power the first prototype of the Warforge Project. The stone is valued there as a store that can be renewed and recharged, though no one knows whether it will one day give out. A disabled prototype is thought repairable as long as its bloodstone stays in place.¹³