Helspar

Helspar is a metal ore found near volcanoes or deep underground. It has a rusty orange hue and is warm to touch.

It has an inhereant heat which makes it a dangerous metal to mine. In large areas, like veins of ore, the heat is tremendous, similar to standing in a forge on a hot summer day. If pockets of gas from elsewhere in the mine come in contact with a vein of Helspar, it can ignite and bury the mine.

Raw Helspar ore is more dangerous than forged Helspar, because of it's crystal nature. The veins are exposed ignots of large six sided crystals. The crystaline nature makes it act as a radiator, broadcasting the heat in the most efficent way possible in nature.

Helspar is to soft to make a blade out of, unless it has been tempered. While tempering a blade of normal metal is an easy process of heating and then rapidly cooling a blade, tempering a Helspar blade requires much higher tempertures. The heat is so great that if it were plunged into water, it would explode into shrapnel. The most common way reaching the great tempurtures without magic has to use a magnesium bath. To quench the blade from these extreme temperatures, it is plunged into a forge at normal temperatures. Even after this risky and difficult forging, Helspar blades hold a poor edge, but rarely break and bend only as often as a normal blade.

The most common use of Helspar is garments and armour. Gloves and boot soles with Helspar worked into them prevent frostbite, and helmets with a Helspar circlet inside keep soilders warm on wintery nights.

Helspar can be 'cold forged' be simply beating it into the shape desired. The problem with designing anything with Helspar is that it's heat is detemined by how much is touching, so if a person was wearing Helspar gauntlets and shook hands with another person wearing Helspar gauntlets, the heat would double during the handshake, it would likely result in a light burn where the Helspar was touching thier skin. Due to this, most of the Helspar equipment is fashioned in the brigidane manner, with small plates woven into individual pockets of the material.

Magical Properties:

Helspar stays hot, and gets hotter the more of it touches. A six inch square against the skin would feel like sitting next to an average campfire. Shoe soles and bracers can keep persons from fearing frostbite. A mail suit would burn a man alive.

If more than thirty-six square inches of Helspar touches, it can make wood and other flamible objects smoke and catch fire after a bit. Twice that will make things catch fire on contact. Prision bars would burn the hands of anyone to touch them, even though they would be soft enough to bend if they were not hot.