[RPG] Searching for a lore-backed mineral that generates heat

dungeons-and-dragonsloremagic-items

In my current D&D campaign, I'm an artificer. Part of our role playing is me inventing numerous weak magical trinkets for my allies. I like to write the item descriptions for these in a WotC-style language to make them feel more real.

Currently I'm looking for a vanilla mineral that generates constant heat. This feels like something that would have been described at some point in the sprawling Dungeons and Dragons lore, but my Googling's turning up nothing.

What mineral from any D&D published lore is described as generating heat?

As an example, I'm currently substituting "two small pieces of infernal jadeite, pulled from the elemental plane of fire," which I made up. There aren't really any limitations on this; the more exotic this mineral the better, and the method by which I need to acquire this mineral doesn't really matter. The only consideration is that ideally it would be quite small.

Best Answer

There's (potentially) a lore-backed mineral that generates heat right in the 5e PHB.

The Trinkets table, p. 151 of the Fifth Edition PHB, contains a reference to the following:

A shard of obsidian that always feels warm to the touch

Because trinkets are supposed to be mysterious oddities and potential adventure hooks, there is no narrative explanation provided for why the shard of obsidian generates heat. The very appearance of the shard on the Trinkets table arguably implies that it is special in some way, and that its heat-generating quality is unusual. (Ordinary, real-world obsidian doesn't meaningfully generate heat, after all.) It could be, for example, that something has been done to this specific shard to cause it to generate heat. But it could just as easily be that all obsidian in your game's setting generates heat -- although that might diminish the uniqueness of this particular trinket. For that matter, the fact that it "feels warm" could arise from something other than actual warmth -- an illusory feeling in the mind of the person touching the shard, for example.

In any event, if you're looking for precedent, there it is.

There are other (potential) options from the 3e Forgotten Realms supplement Magic of Faerûn.

MoF includes numerous "special materials" that can be used to craft items. A couple of those materials, if used to create weapons, provide bonus fire damage: fever iron, a magic metal from volcanic craters (p. 178), and hizagkuur, a magic metal from the Underdark (p. 179).

Curiously, neither entry explicitly says the materials feel warm or otherwise generate heat in any way except dealing fire damage. Nevertheless, it stands to reason that a substance that deals fire damage would have to generate heat somehow -- on impact at the very least.