Umbor

Umbor appears, to many, as a somewhat dull, yet polished chunk of grey metal, and is often confused with lead at first glance. In fact, most veins of the stuff are only found after a magic user begins to have trouble siphoning energy from the River, and deduces that the leaden material must, in fact, not be lead at all. Beyond that, the stuff is about as heavy as lead, but lacks the strange toxic properties. It is often found in thin veins buried within surrounding rock, and can only be separated from the rock through an intensive extraction process. In fact, the chunk of ore given to Felclaw to work on was the first of its kind and was incredibly expensive to produce.

While the malleability and other metallurgic properties of Umbor are of great interest to blacksmiths and armorers, I, and likely you, am not interested in it nearly as much as its ability to "deaden" magical energy when activated. Activated, is, of course, the technical term for the quite complex art of drawing out the latent energy of the Umbor to create an anti-magical bubble, within which all spells and magical things lose power. Once discovered by Urbahg Felclaw Sabahgsson (a mouthful, as dragonborn names always are), the demand for the stuff shot up, and remains high to this day.   You see, my dear inquisitors, when umbor is "activated," it emanates an energy field which somehow "cancels out" the energy of the River, partially weakening any magic that crosses its boundary. It cannot totally cancel a spell, but can only reduce its power by a percentage. The highest yet achieved is a 99.72% reduction in spell-power crossing the boundary (flame-based spells are often used to test this as the amount of heat inside the bubble is proportional to the percentage of cancelled energy).   The strength of the reduction field, the technical name for the bubble, depends on, chiefly, the skill of the enchanter activating the umbor and the purity of the sample. Activating umbor is somewhat complex, but is well-known to many skilled enchanters. The difficult part of activation is ensuring that all of the material is activated, for, you see, umbor, like yllurian, has an innate capacity to hold magical energy. In this case, that stored energy serves to create a reduction field, and it takes quite a bit of skill to fully utilize the total amount of potential within a given umbor sample. Additionally, not all umbor samples are created equally. A totally pure sample is often prohibitively expensive and entirely unnecessary for its intended use. Thus two chunks of umbor of the same weight may not be equal in potential if one is totally pure and the other is not. The impurities in the sample are caused by an imperfect filtration and extraction process, with full extraction costing exponentially more than partial extraction.

Umbor has only ever been found in deserts, though the reason it hasn't been found anywhere else is unknown. Perhaps there is some magical property about deserts that is a prerequisite to its formation? Whatever the cause, all of the deserts of Ultor, large and small, are scoured for the stuff. The most noteworthy deserts, which have confirmed umbor deposits are the Abakan, of Galzhür, the Aljabal of the same, the Dragon's Crater, and the desert on the isle of Culcerna. Bal'a Koraha of Jin-El Aethis also has an umbor deposit, but the quantity there is unknown, as the elves keep it for themselves.   Digging in the sands, of course, will yield little of the stuff. Rocky outcroppings are the most promising places to start, especially if the River feels particularly dry there. Umbor has very rarely been found poking out on the surface of the rock, but is most often several feet under the surface rock. As such, many prospectors will just use explosives to blast away the surface rock before they begin more "gentle" extraction methods. Luckily for them, adding more rock dust to the desert won't hurt it, else an old druid such as myself might have a word with those prospectors...

Umbor, being among the rarer metals commonly traded throughout the world, is quite valuable even in its unrefined form. In fact, most prospectors who look for the stuff don't bother to refine it at all -- the process is complex and requires a great deal of knowledge of metals and earth. It is, perhaps obviously, the dwarves who primarily extract the umbor from the chunks of rock given to them, and they resell it for quite a profit. If it costs them a single piece of gold to import, they make ten more selling it back to the world, and a hundred more if it is a pure sample.   The seat of this business is Dach Borad, in the far, far north-east of our world, deep within the jagged, frozen peaks of the Barrier Mountain range (formerly called the Bazal-Nori Range). The dwarves of Borad have made an industry of refining the stuff -- famously building ventilation shafts into the side of the very mountain they call home to funnel the smoke from the mass of forges below. The exact process used for umbor extraction is a closely held secret, but it is complicated and profitable enough to warrant its own (heavily guarded) level of forges with access to the shafts.   Purchasers of umbor are found throughout the world, though only the Southern Draconic Empire regularly requests large shipments (likely at the behest of worshippers of Amug, who see it as quite a generous gift for their liege). Normally, umbor is bought and sold by individuals or the enclaves representing them, and so no nation orders it en-masse as with yllurian. After all, umbor technology is still somewhat specialized and unfit for mass production for, say, an army or navy (too expensive, that). Instead, individuals purchase amulets, bracelets, or other trinkets, and groups like the Purgers purchase large quantities of it for creating antimagical staves.