Tal-Shie weapons and metals

Veilglass (also known as Lénoraël)

• Appearance: Translucent, pale opaline with swirls of silver-blue that shimmer like heat haze.
• Origin: Mined from the shattered boundary between the Prime and the Fae Veil.
• Properties: Disrupts planar bindings and illusions; weapons of Veilglass pass harmlessly through illusions and glamours, striking the truth beneath.
• Uses: Tal-Shie blades and arrowheads designed to pierce illusions, enchantments, or fae magic. Ritual daggers are often made of it.
• Weakness: Brittle under extreme cold or necrotic corruption.

Umbracite

• Appearance: Black-violet metal with a surface that absorbs light rather than reflecting it. Faint purple runes crawl across its surface in the presence of strong magic.
• Origin: Harvested from the bones of dead stars in the Shadow Expanse, or refined from shadow-beast carcasses.
• Properties: Masks magic; weapons forged of Umbracite suppress auras and resist detection. Shields made of it grant concealment from divination.
• Uses: Stealth armor, anti-mage shackles, and blades used by Tal-Shie assassins.
• Special Trait: When wielded by one attuned to shadow, Umbracite can “drink” a spell once per day.

Sélvarine (Living Silver)

• Appearance: Liquid-looking silver with veins of deep turquoise that ripple with motion. Slightly warm to the touch.
• Origin: Distilled from living waters touched by elemental spirits of renewal.
• Properties: Shifts shape with intent; ideal for armor that flows or heals. Armor formed from it can adapt to its wearer’s form or wounds.
• Uses: Ceremonial armor, healer’s gauntlets, and polymorphic tools.
• Special Trait: Responds to strong emotion—armor may shift into weapons in moments of rage or sorrow.

Embershale

• Appearance: Ashen-black with glowing red fissures that pulse like breathing coals.
• Origin: Smelted in volcanoes where elemental fire meets the corpse of a dead god.
• Properties: Burns without heat; imbues weapons with psychic searing rather than physical fire.
• Uses: Wielded by Tal-Shie fireborn warriors and war-singers.
• Notable Effect: Each blow may cause the target to relive a moment of failure or guilt—psychic combustion.

Aeryllith

• Appearance: Featherlight silver-gold alloy with a frosted sheen; constantly emits a faint hum or chime.
• Origin: Refined from airborne crystal motes harvested in the upper planes of elemental air.
• Properties: Negates gravity slightly; allows for gliding, leaping, or hovering when forged into light armor or weaponry.
• Uses: Skyblade hilts, dancer’s spears, scout armor.
• Fun Detail: When two Aeryllith blades strike each other, they emit harmonic echoes that resonate across dimensions.

Sandquartz Alloy (also called Draekir Duststeel)

• Appearance: Gritty-textured bronze with sparkling grains of glass and glowing red-orange specks.
• Origin: Forged in stormglass furnaces using powdered desert spirits bound in obsidian cages.
• Properties: Erodes defenses; blades made of it wear down both armor and mental focus over time.
• Uses: Primarily wielded by Earth Tal-Shie shock troops during prolonged sieges.
• Special Feature: On critical hits, Sandquartz weapons may turn a portion of the target’s armor to brittle glass.

Voidmirror Iron

• Appearance: Reflective only in absolute darkness, showing inverted and impossible images when looked into.
• Origin: Drawn from veins near planar rifts to the Null—a realm of absence.
• Properties: Disrupts causality; blows may come before the swing is seen.
• Uses: Used in dueling blades and high rituals. Always forged with a curse engraved backward.
• Warning: Prolonged use leads to dissociation, memory loss, or the bleeding of time.

The Unease of Tal-Shie Arms

Crafted not only from rare extraplanar metals but also forged under elemental laws, dreams, and forgotten names, Tal-Shie weapons resonate with forces mortals barely comprehend. Their weight, sound, and even presence in a room seem off. These are not forged for mortal hands. Those who wield them without Tal-Shie blood or binding rituals often suffer subtle and mounting consequences.

General Traits of Tal-Shie Weapons (When Used by Mortals)

• Unsettling Resonance: Weapons hum with no wind, vibrate during silence, or pulse like they have heartbeats.
• Dream Bleed: Mortals who rest near them suffer intense dreams, visions of ancient battles, or feel the weight of past wielders’ emotions.
• Elemental Recoil: Striking with them may lash the wielder with excess energy—heat flashes, pressure drops, cold burns.
• Memory Dissonance: Users sometimes forget moments during battle or hear voices murmuring unfamiliar names in their minds.

Earth Tal-Shie Weapons

The Hammers of the Deep Burden

Preferred Metal: Sandquartz Alloy, Umbracite

Signature Weapon: Cairnbreakers

• Description: Gigantic stone-forged hammers with blackened iron hearts. Runic patterns shift and sink like tectonic plates.
• Effect: Every strike resonates like a fault line cracking. Vibrations break stone, shatter bones, or disrupt magic glyphs.
• Mortal Recoil: Wielders feel heavier with each strike, as if carrying the weight of ancient ruins. Eventually, some can’t lift their arms or move without feeling turned to stone.

Unique Weapon: Gravecall Mauls

• Effect: Animate the dead beneath the earth momentarily as grasping hands or moaning faces to pin or unnerve foes.

Fire Tal-Shie Weapons

The Swords of Grief and Glory

Preferred Metal: Embershale, Veilglass

Signature Weapon: Ashwrought Blades

• Description: Curved, flame-shadow swords that glow like cooling lava. The blade “sings” mournfully when unsheathed.
• Effect: Inflicts psychic burn—causing emotional pain or trauma flashbacks in enemies. Fire damage manifests as ghostly flame.
• Mortal Recoil: Wielders often feel euphoric or enraged in combat, forgetting allies and burning through fatigue too fast. After battle, many experience deep depressive crashes or aphasia.

Unique Weapon: The Emberkin Fang

• Effect: Upon slaying a foe, the sword releases a burst of red ash that screams with the victim’s last fear—unsettling all who hear it.

Air Tal-Shie Weapons

The Bows of Whispers and Distance

Preferred Metal: Aeryllith, Sélvarine

Signature Weapon: Whisperbough Bows

• Description: Gossamer-limbed bows strung with threads of humming crystal. Arrows seem to “wait” for command before loosing.
• Effect: Arrows alter their arc mid-flight, curving around cover. Whispers ride the shaft as it flies, unnerving the target.
• Mortal Recoil: Archers feel a delay in their own thoughts—reality feels lagged. Words come wrong. Reflexes sharpen but memory slips.

Unique Ammunition: Echo Arrows

• Effect: On impact, these arrows create a loud replay of a sound from earlier that day—a voice, a scream, a thunderclap.

Forging Principles & Spiritual Weight

• Tal-Shie do not forge with flame alone, but with memory, regret, intention, and weather. Their weapons are “sung into form” as much as they are hammered.
• These weapons often remember their wielders. A sword may become heavier or resistant if taken up by someone unworthy. A hammer may drag a betrayer’s hand toward the earth.

Excerpt from “The Anomalous Veins of Turarnadalos: A Field Treatise by Kluvm of Eoranth”

Published by the Hallowglass Society of Alchemical and Planar Study, Volume XVII

“…It is not the heat that burns you first in Turarnadalos, but the sound. There is a pitch—an endless, rising tone—that vibrates the marrow before ever you see a fumarole. This is not merely the screaming of gas or rock, but the echo of spells that were cast long before our ancestors learned to speak. Spells that still function. Some without caster, without anchor, without logic. Yet function they do.”

*I do not embellish when I write this: I have walked upon slate that bled ash like sap, waded through pools that reflected skies I cannot name. And in this place—this alchemical madness made land—I have found metals that ought not be here.”

On the Unnatural Presence of Aeryllith

“Aeryllith is a floating metal. Featherlight, tuned to the upper elemental reaches of Air. It should require cloudforging—spires of condensed air-wells, crafted only on the highest altitudes of the Wind Realms. And yet I saw veins of it suspended mid-air over a sulfur lake, humming. They did not anchor to stone but sang between geyser columns, impossibly stable. I took a shard, and it has not touched the ground since. I store it in a glass cylinder and it rotates of its own accord when I lie.”

On the Lurking Threat of Umbracite

“I am hesitant to speak of the Umbracite spire, for it was not a deposit so much as a presence. It grows downward, as if crawling back into the earth from where it was birthed. It absorbs not light but attention. One of my assistants, Hern Faln, stared at it for too long and began reciting names from my ledger—in reverse. He remembered nothing afterward, save for an overwhelming desire to bury himself.”

“I chiseled off a sliver. It remains lightless. I sometimes forget where I placed it, even when it is in my hand.”

On the Impossible Blossoming of Sélvarine

“Sélvarine requires the memory of living waters—streams touched by elemental spirits, guided by emotion. How it forms in Turarnadalos is logically impossible, for no water here is truly alive. And yet beneath the Crater of Sighing Heat, I found mirrored stalks blooming from bone-colored mud. They curved toward each other, as if dancing. The substance was malleable in warmth, coiled like muscle, and released fragrance when held—a scent of distant grief. When cooled, it became silvery armor, flexing with breath.”

“It is alive. Not sentient perhaps, but aware. When worn, it responds to mood, thought. I tested this by touching it in joy. It recoiled.”

The Blasphemy of Presence

“These metals should not be here. They are artifacts of planes that do not touch this world directly. Their presence in Turarnadalos suggests convergence, or perhaps, contamination. The spells that scream across the geysers, the creatures that ripple through impossible geometries—these are not remnants, but symptoms of an ongoing wound.”

“I believe Turarnadalos is no longer a place. It is a breach. And the metals are the tears it sheds.”

“For now, I return to Mithrin. I am weaker, and yet my mind… sings. My colleagues say I whisper in my sleep, that I flinch from iron, that my eyes sometimes glow faintly in glass. Perhaps I brought something back. Or perhaps I left something behind.”

Creatures of the land of dead magic. Turarnedelos

1. The Caustwing Leviathan

Sky-Horror

“It broke the cloud layer like a breaching whale, but there was no water. Just hot wind and the smell of rotting metal. Its skin shimmered like the surface of an oil slick, fins trailing mist that reeked of vinegar and ozone. It screamed once—no sound, just a pressure change that made my teeth bleed.”
—Kluvm

Description: The Caustwing resembles a deep-sea leviathan with no head—just a maw ringed with spiraling, translucent teeth. It swims through the sky with slow, undulating motion, trailing mucus that hisses when it hits stone. Massive, hauntingly beautiful, and utterly disinterested in gravity, it feeds by inhaling flying creatures mid-glide or skimming geothermal vents for energy.

Avoidance: The party hid under a fumarole cave lip and coated themselves in ash and lichen to mask scent and heat. The creature hovered overhead for hours before spiraling away in lazy loops.

2. The Basalt Stalkers

Predatory Subterranean Leapers

“The first we saw was a shadow in the mist, then a spray of blood and feathers. It leapt higher than a wyvern’s glide path—dragged a thunderhawk from the air and slammed it into basalt like meat into mortar. I believe they hear through stone. Perhaps they hunt by listening to the weight of wingbeats above.”
—Talmith Adros, Geomancer (Missing, presumed dead)

Description: These creatures resemble a fusion of mantis, wolf, and stone serpent. Their limbs are armored in obsidian-hued chitin, jointed in unnatural ways, and tipped with hooks. When underground, they move like liquid. When they strike, they explode from the stone with terrifying velocity, snagging airborne prey with barbed tongues or clawed forelimbs. Their tunnels collapse behind them like sealed wounds.

Avoidance: The party scattered iron shards in concentric rings around camp—disturbance would alert them. They slept in hollow basalt columns suspended by ropes, far from direct stone contact.

3. The Mireheart Slough

Amorphous Acid Pool Entity

“It moved like a suggestion of shape—a ripple in thought. It was never there, until it was. The pool bubbled and shimmered with false reflections, but there was no sky, no clouds. Only an eye—round and without iris, forming and unforming, as if trying to understand what we were before deciding not to.”
—Kluvm

Description: The Mireheart is a vast, slime-like intelligence spread thin across multiple geothermal pools. It is sapient, though alien, communicating only in thermal pulses and chemical hallucinations. It feeds on memory and dissolved organic matter, and can extrude pseudopods with fractal “fingers” of bone or coral-like structures. It mimics what it sees, but imperfectly—mimics people wrongly, like dreams remembering faces.

Avoidance: The party crossed on stones treated with quicklime and coated boots in volatile salts. Even a drop of acid touching flesh induces short-term memory loss or hallucinations of other lives.

4. The Emberkin Brood

Burning Fae-Spirits of the Rift

“We called them fireflies, until we saw what they truly were. Infantile things, like if a burning doll tried to mimic a person. Faces too smooth. Bodies of ash and flicker. They play—but their games melt skin. One followed Drend all night. In the morning, he said he couldn’t remember what warmth felt like.”
—Notes from Field Assistant Yuli Vash (Died of “emotive rot” two days later)

Description: Emberkin are child-sized, semi-corporeal entities of living fire and sorrow. Believed to be the residue of sentient spells or grief-bound spirits, they float through vents and steam corridors. Their presence causes heat to drain instead of increase. Touching them causes frostburns and emotional numbness.

Avoidance: Mirrors and obsidian masks confuse them. Joy repels them—they seem pained by laughter or music. The party burned incense and recited nonsense poetry to keep them away.

Caustwing Leviathan

Gargantuan aberration (elemental), Unaligned
Challenge: 17 (18,000 XP)

Armor Class 18 (natural armor)
Hit Points 280 (21d12 + 126)
Speed 0 ft., fly 80 ft. (hover)

STR	DEX	CON	INT	WIS	CHA
25 (+7)	12 (+1)	22 (+6)	4 (−3)	18 (+4)	8 (−1)

Saving Throws Con +11, Wis +9
Damage Resistances Acid, Lightning, Thunder
Damage Immunities Poison; Bludgeoning, Piercing, and Slashing from Nonmagical Attacks
Condition Immunities Prone, Charmed, Exhaustion
Senses Tremorsense 120 ft., Blindsight 60 ft., Passive Perception 14
Languages —
Flyby: The Leviathan doesn’t provoke opportunity attacks when it flies out of an enemy’s reach.
Gravity-Warp Aura (30 ft.): Creatures starting their turn within this aura must succeed on a DC 17 Strength save or be pulled 15 ft. toward the Leviathan and have their movement halved.
Skybreach (Recharge 5–6): Bursts 100 ft. straight upward or downward in a geyser of pressure, dealing 6d10 force damage in a 30 ft. radius at departure and arrival points (Dex save DC 19 for half).

Basalt Stalker

Large monstrosity, unaligned
Challenge: 11 (7,200 XP)

Armor Class 17 (natural armor)
Hit Points 161 (19d10 + 57)
Speed 40 ft., burrow 60 ft.

STR	DEX	CON	INT	WIS	CHA
20 (+5)	16 (+3)	17 (+3)	4 (−3)	12 (+1)	6 (−2)

Saving Throws Dex +7, Wis +5
Skills Stealth +9, Perception +5
Damage Resistances Bludgeoning, Piercing from Nonmagical Attacks
Senses Tremorsense 120 ft., Darkvision 60 ft., Passive Perception 15
Languages —
Earth Ambush: The stalker can burrow through nonmagical stone and soil without leaving a tunnel. If it moves at least 30 ft. underground and erupts into a space with a creature, that creature must make a DC 16 Dex save or be knocked prone and take 3d10 bludgeoning damage.
Leaping Rend: Melee Weapon Attack: +8 to hit, reach 10 ft., one target. Hit: 21 (3d10 + 5) slashing damage. If the target is flying, it must make a DC 16 Strength save or be grounded.

Mireheart Slough

Huge ooze, neutral evil
Challenge: 13 (10,000 XP)

Armor Class 15 (natural armor)
Hit Points 195 (17d12 + 85)
Speed 30 ft., swim 40 ft.

STR	DEX	CON	INT	WIS	CHA
18 (+4)	10 (+0)	21 (+5)	6 (−2)	15 (+2)	8 (−1)

Saving Throws Con +9, Wis +6
Damage Resistances Fire, Lightning
Damage Immunities Acid, Psychic
Condition Immunities Blinded, Charmed, Frightened, Prone
Senses Blindsight 60 ft. (blind beyond), Passive Perception 12
Languages Understands Deep Speech but cannot speak
Acid Pool Aura: Creatures that end their turn within 10 ft. of the Slough take 3d6 acid damage.
Memory Leech (1/day): Target one creature within 30 ft. that has failed a Wisdom save (DC 16). That creature loses 1 spell slot (highest available), forgets the last 10 minutes, and is stunned until the end of its next turn.
Pseudopod Slam: Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 10 ft., one target. Hit: 18 (3d8 + 4) acid damage and DC 15 Con save or 1 level of exhaustion.

Emberkin Brood

Small elemental (spirit), chaotic neutral
Challenge: 5 (1,800 XP)

Armor Class 16
Hit Points 55 (10d6 + 20)
Speed 0 ft., hover 40 ft. (no hover fall)

STR	DEX	CON	INT	WIS	CHA
6 (−2)	18 (+4)	14 (+2)	10 (+0)	12 (+1)	16 (+3)

Saving Throws Cha +6
Damage Resistances Fire, Necrotic
Damage Immunities Cold
Condition Immunities Exhaustion, Charmed, Grappled, Restrained
Senses Darkvision 60 ft., Passive Perception 11
Languages Understands Sylvan and Primordial but does not speak
Emotion Siphon: Creatures within 10 ft. of an Emberkin must succeed on a DC 14 Cha save or have disadvantage on all saving throws against fear or charm until the start of their next turn.
Burning Touch: Melee Spell Attack: +6 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 13 (3d6 + 3) cold damage and target is Frightened until end of their next turn.
Whispers of Ash (1/day): The Emberkin sings. Each creature within 60 ft. must make a DC 15 Wis save or be Charmed for 1 minute, following the Emberkin like a parent. They can repeat the save each time they take damage.