So I promised some more details on the grades of dust and their workings today and then forgot and posted some more lore and a pet post instead, amazing. Anyway I’ve remembered now so here we go.

Your normal everyday find it on the ground dust is called grade one, it is mostly just powdered crystal and appears colorless and translucent although finding anything larger than a grain of sand in this state is rare.

Once all the dirt and salt and other detritus has been cleared out of it it is called grade two, this stuff is used for fuel by a lot of magical devices as it is common, easy to collect and gives a good power to work ratio but it destroyed very quickly breaking down into loose particles and often fusing with the various parts of the engines it’s used in if they aren’t treated, this build up is called scabbing. Touching the dust at this grade will make your skin tingle and if left on the flesh for an hour or so will begin to blister and become raw, the most common situation where this happens is when it gets into a shoe or boot.

When you clear the dust of the larger chunks of crystal and grind it down into a fine powder and then heat it to about four hundred degrees before swiftly cooling it you get grade three dust, the casting grade. This dust is used in bullets, cannons and in casting gloves as a magical medium. It is highly dangerous to exposed flesh as it causes welts and burns on contact, if you were to breath in a cloud of this dust you would choke quickly as your throat both burned and froze at once before it settled into your lungs and almost certainly killed you.

Grade four is what you get when you take grade three and put it through resonation which is a process where the dust is placed in an array of larger crystals and then activated until it disperses and clings to the crystal they share the most affinity with, this is repeated dozens of times for each handful of dust until they are all sifted out and the dust is then judged to be aligned and is marked accordingly. After such intensive work the dust at this stage will damage the person who touches it depending on it’s element, fire will burn and water will freeze and so on, the level of injury at this stage is liable to cause the person exposed to it to go into shock almost instantly. The use for grade four dust is primarily magical weapons like bombs, grenades or as fuel in some advanced magical craft or casting dust for the very rich.

I got an email last night about the different economies in Eir, there are about three major currencies in circulation and two minor ones. The three main coins are the gwarven “tend”, the elva “gond” and the nome “buri”. The northern wastes have their own currency which is called “toom” and is carved from whale bones. The humann lands have the “kenna” which is a curious currency made from copper and humann bone shards.

The exchange rates for different coinage is pretty unregulated and most people just try to get as many coins as they can and hope for the best.