@NJG Nope; Arthur is very healthy. Necromancy as such isn’t really a thing, though I suppose one might focus a study of dark magic on those sorts of spells.
@jeantown, oh, a pity. I would’ve thought that a high dark magic skill could be used for necromancy to help defend Camelot.
Anyway, if the MC has a high sword skill, what kind of material is the MC’s sword made of?
Even if she focused entirely on black magic, I think necromancy would be beyond Guen’s skills at this point in the story. It does sound like an interesting idea for later, though.
And skill only affects how well Guen can wield a sword, not the material. No matter her skill level, Guen’s sword is always made of wood. 
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@NJG As @OtherGrimm says, it’s too soon for Guen to be raising skeletons, but maybe someday. Her dark magic skills can, even so, be very useful in defending Camelot (actually, even more useful than I expected – I’m writing some of that right now).
And once again @OtherGrimm is correct that Guen’s sword skill level doesn’t have any relation to what her sword is made out of. She’ll be able to get some special swords (starting with Meliagaunt’s) at different times, but the skill and the sword are independent of each other.
@jeantown, whoops, I failed to write the sentence correctly. Sorry about that. Anyway, what I meant was, if the MC has a sword, what material is it made of? Since the MC is a queen it’s possible for a gold sword.
Why would you want a gold sword? Gold’s a soft metal, not very practical for weapons.
Her sword is probably iron, or maybe even steel. I suppose you could gold-plate it, but…why bother? The gold would just chip off when you used it.
I’m not saying you COULDN’T have a gold sword, I just don’t see the point of it.
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@OtherGrimm
For the same reason why some Kings had a set of golden armor?
Being rich enough to afford a golden sword is a big deal, it makes people respect you, I guess.
I’m not sure what kings actually had an armor made of solid gold. Gilded steel/iron? Sure. Solid gold? That sounds like something anyone rich enough to afford would have more ridiculous ways of displaying, like diamond tipped toothpicks.
@Elfwine
A history teacher once told me that there was a king named iforgothisname who used to wear a full set of gold armor to fight with friends. If they used dollars back in the middle ages it would have cost an absurd amount like a billion dollars or something.
Edit: Yep, insanely expensive.
@ballmot I wish I could look that up. Enough gold to make a suit of armor is a ridiculous amount of gold even by kingly standards.
By today’s prices, assuming gold armor weighs the same as something useful:
http://www.jmbullion.com/charts/gold-price/
$1207 x 16 (ounces in a pound) x 45 (a rough estimate of a suit of plate armor in pounds) = $869,040
And that’s just the worth of the gold per ounce, not a cent spent on the work of making it…
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@NJG I’m pretty sure a gold sword would just bend when you hit anything with it. Maybe a gold-inlaid sword? In any case, you can be sure that Guen has the highest-quality type of sword available in her Britain.
As for gold armor… @ballmot @Elfwine My physical-world LI and I had fun discussing this. PWLI pointed out that precious metals aren’t measured in the same way other materials are, so we spent some time learning about troy weight, though that doesn’t make a huge difference in Elfwine’s calclulations. But then it occurred to me that gold and steel might have a different density (or, to put it differently, 45 pounds of gold might not take up the same amount of space as 45 pounds of steel / if you were to make a standard-size suit of armor out of cotton balls, it wouldn’t weigh 45 pounds). From what we were able to figure out, gold is more than twice as dense as steel, so to make a gold suit of armor the same size as a 45-pound steel suit, you’d need more than 90 pounds of gold costing well over a million and a half dollars.
Neither of us really knows what we’re talking about, so we might be wrong, but if we’re correct, a gold sword would not only be unhelpfully bendy but also weigh twice as much as a steel sword.
I think maybe what Guen needs is an adamantium sword. That, or a lightsaber.
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Ninety pounds of gold just for something that wouldn’t even be practical (It is armor, it needs to at least be better than useless for that much weight). Yipp.
@jeantown Could a Dark Magic Guen create a lightsabre or at least a flaming sword?
Also, silver weapons and armor would certainly make sense as werewolves exist in Guen’s world!
Perhaps a gold-plated steel sword would make more sense if you just wanted to show-off, but it would still be unpractical anyway 
I assume that’s one of those things that were exaggerated (or fabricated) by contemporary or later writers to further the Kings reputation.
I seriously doubt anyone would be willing to spend that much money on a decorative piece of equipment (or have it heavily damaged in a “practice bout”).
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@Nasdaxow Could be. “Rich enough that everything was made of gold and/ore jewels” is a classic image even if never historical.
@Nasdaxow
To be honest, his armor was most likely made out of gold-plated steel/iron or something like 25% gold 75% another metal.
Can’t trust history teachers 
Of course that is all assuming that magic isn't involved.
It's quite possible that magic could make a gold sword that cuts through everything like a lightsaber.
Actually that would make for an interesting option for a high magic guen later- magic artificer guen.
Presuming that's a possibility of course, magic item creation.In my work i use plates made from silver and exactly the same size plates made from aluminium, and the difference in weight is huge! According to wikipedia, aluminium has a density of 2,7 g/cm3 while silver has 10,5 g/cm3 and it already is so much heavier (steel has around 8 g/cm3). And gold has a density of 19,5 g/cm3. It’s almost twice as heavy as silver, so with my experiences with silver, full gold armor would be veeery hard to even move.
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@jeantown I’ve some questions
- Could the MC get a metal sword and paint it gold then tell people that the MC has a golden sword?
- How are magic weapons created?
- Since Meliganut said that fae animals’ body parts can create spells remembered by history, why can’t the MC loot the fae wolf attacking Lancelot? Surely the body parts could be used when making the choice to defend Camelot, side with Ragerund, etc.
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