Exalted – Wonderworker’s Mantle (Artifact ***)

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A Wonderworker’s Mantle – sometimes known as a Girding of Autochthon – is intangible outside of spiritual domains such as Yu-Shan or divine sanctums. In such locations, or to the senses of essence-users, it appears at a glance to be a simple length of cloth. Close inspection will reveal it to be composed of countless tiny metallic spiders, their legs linked together in a network that resembles chainmail. When an attuned Mantle is in use, the spiders will form themselves into a pair of gloves – and the user will be surrounded by an impression of revolving gears, little levers and pistons, fine wires, glowing gems, and other mysterious mechanical bits, all ticking away busily at the interface between the user’s personal essence and the cosmos, making complex adjustments.

While a Mantle employs small amounts of several differing magical materials – moonsilver for adaptability, orichalcum for perfection, starsteel for inevitable success, and jade for elemental power, it isn’t oriented to any one of them. Despite this, there many variants of the Mantle, since each has only two lesser and two greater powers – while six lesser and four greater powers are known to exist.

Lesser Powers (Select Two):

• Essence Anchoring: While every mantle has one Hearthstone Socket, those Mantles with this feature have an additional two.
• Forge of Dreams: The user may Craft Gossamer with Occult (Class-A).
• Harmonic Resonance: The user may attune any single artifact as if he or she was naturally attuned to whatever magical material it is made of (Class-A).
• Ritual Enchantment: The user may roll Occult instead of Crafting for Artifact Creation rolls. This does not, however, bypass the need to have the appropriate Craft abilities, it simply lets you use magical manipulations instead of physical ones to do the work (Class-A).
• Spirit Forging: The user may craft both Ambrosia and Quintessence with Occult (Class-A).
• Threadcraft: The user may Craft Fate with Occult (Class-A).

Greater Powers (Select Two):

• Greater Harmonic Convergence: The user may attune to any magical material as if he or she had a natural affinity for it (Class-B).
• Mastery of Artifice: Reduces the target numbers of skill rolls made to design or create artifacts by two (Class B).
• Mastery of Engineering: The user is not subject to the usual 2d penalty for working with an inappropriate magical material (Class-B).
• Protocols of Implementation: The user gains (Essence) extra dice on all rolls calling for fine manipulation – most notably crafting, lockpicking, and surgery (Class-B).

Artifact Design: Power 4 (2x Class-A powers, 2x Class-B powers, and Class-B Self-Powering), Usefulness 4, Plot Impact 2, Script Immunity 2, Creation requires the use of Ambrosia, small quantities of Orichalcum, Moonsilver, Starsteel, and White, Green, Red, Black, and Blue Jade – and a Factory-Cathedral (-4). Ergo, it’s built as a two-dot artifact, but purchased as a three-dot artifact (since the user need not worry about those awkward components). Since it’s self-powered, it only has a one-mote attunement cost.

A Wonderworker’s Mantle is an unspectacular artifact; it makes a lot of things somewhat easier, but it’s fundamentally a tool; depending on the powers of the one you’re using you can save a few motes on attuning artifacts, get around requirements for some of the more esoteric (and very rarely used) craft skills, or gain a few bonuses when making artifacts. It’s useful and it’s multi-purpose, but it certainly isn’t particularly game-changing. That puts it solidly in the Artifact *** category in second edition as well as first.

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