The Rocky State of Your Campaign
New minerals are being discovered and studied every year, even today. The industries surrounding rocks and minerals can be an interesting addition to any game, no matter how odd. Rather than just being a businessperson involved in mining gold or uranium, why not a prospector heading out to find more dietary minerals to put into vitamin supplements? Surely that person can get just as rich, with leading contacts in the medical world. Or maybe a scientist leads an expedition to new worlds for something as normal as talc, to make a cement substitute since limestone is no longer available, or traditional cement production is prohibited since it has a harmful impact on the environment?
Although most of these uses are modern-day discoveries, each product can be viewed as a possible anachronism, or even a result of another fantastic race having the capabilities and need for such a product. Each entry, in a way, is its own plot hook waiting to be born.
Modern-Day Commercial Uses
Fuel Minerals: Fossil source fuels, previously discussed.
Metal Sources: Metal sources. Many metals are extracted from other sources. Aluminum is often extracted from bauxite, for example
Construction: Mud, brick, concrete, plaster, glass, adobe, steel, aluminum, and stone are all popular in building everything from barns to skyscrapers.
Ceramics: Ceramics are generally solid products formed by heating and cooling. First used as clay to form containers, ceramics are used in structural products (bricks, pipes, flooring), refractory products (kiln linings, glass- and brick-making crucibles), wares (tableware, tiles, pottery), and technical materials. In this last category, tiles are used in the Space Shuttle program, gas burner nozzles, ballistic protection, nuclear fuel uranium oxide pellets, bio-medical implants, jet engine turbine blades, and missile nose cones.
Paints: Paints contain pigments, many of which are from natural sources, and even synthetic sources are usually modified from natural ones. Various clays, micas, calcium carbonates, silicas, and talcs are used in pigments. Other minerals are used to make paint opaque, and as fillers, binders, and other additives.
Electronics: Simply defined, electronics is the flow of electrons through non-metal conductors whereas electrical refers to the same process through metal conductors. Dozens of materials are used as semiconductors, including silica, germanium, and gallium arsenide.
Filtration: Claylike materials and porous solids are often used to aid filtration. There is also a solid sieve known as filter media which slows or traps solid particles and a bed of granular material on which the particles rest.
Detergents: Detergents often use minerals, mainly silica, but also bentonite or sepiolite. Also heavily used are borates, calcium carbonate, diatomite, feldspar, gypsum, kaolin, lime, talc, vermiculite, and wollastonite. Some are used as a bleaching system, and others for their adsorption qualities.
Paper: In traditional wood-pulp paper-making, minerals are used as coatings and as filler pigments. The four main minerals are calcium carbonate, kaolin clay, titanium dioxide, and talc. Minerals are less expensive than wood pulp and can extend the life of paper products. As a coating, the minerals improve ink absorption by the paper. With the past thirty years emphasizing a reduction on tree destruction, many have turned to mineral resources to produce paper, mainly from calcium carbonate. Although progress has been made, there are still inherent problems with making synthetic paper: expense, printing quality, and decomposition.
Dietary Minerals: Essentially mineral salts required by the human body, most are readily found in food and never need supplementation; however, a holistic movement starting in the 1970s gave birth to the billion-dollar health food industry and its emphasis on minerals and vitamins. The most popular mineral supplements include calcium, magnesium, chromium, selenium, zinc, and potassium, with new “discoveries” occurring every day.
Magnets: Any object that produces a magnetic field is a magnet; permanent magnets stay magnetized and include iron, nickel, cobalt, some rare earth minerals, and certain natural minerals like lodestone. Some materials are not permanently magnetized, like soft iron. Magnets are in high use today, mainly to record information, speakers and microphones, electric motors and generators, compasses, toys, and transport. The magnetic levitation train, a suspended vehicle over an electromagnetic current, travels at maximum speeds of 581 km per hour (361 mph). Magnets are also used as clasps and connectors for holding objects together.
The Minerals/Rocks/Elements
Aluminum: At one time aluminum rated as a precious metal; Napoleon III once served esteemed guests with aluminum silverware, while the regular guests had to make do with gold. At the time the Washington Monument received its capstone—the single largest piece of aluminum cast at that time—aluminum was more expensive than gold, silver, or platinum. Since that time in 1884, aluminum was processed in commercial properties to become what it is today.
Antimony: Used as a medicine and antiprotozoan, it was only later that it was found to increase lead’s hardness and was used in batteries, semiconductors, firearms and ammunition, and soldering.
Arsenic: Arsenic was mixed with vinegar and chalk and consumed by women of the Victorian Age to make their skin whiter, and was rubbed on the skin to smooth the complexion. Since then it has been used in wood preservation and as a medicine for cancer, but was also stockpiled in various forms as a weapon in wars.
Asbestos: In the 1800s, asbestos began seeing popular use as flame-retardant material. Now more than 100,000 people have died or will die from exposure. It is still used in brake linings for cars and aircraft and in pipes for water and sewer systems.
Barite: A heavy additive in oil well-drilling mud, also used in the paper and rubber industries and as a filler/extender in cloth, ink and plastic products. It is used in radiography (barium), as a scavenger alloy in vacuum tubes, a deoxidizer for copper, a lubricant in anode rotors for X-ray tubes, and is a common spark-plug alloy. It is also used to make a very expensive white pigment.
Beryllium: Nuclear applications, and the manufacture of light. Used to make rocket nozzles, space craft, missiles, aircraft disc brakes, precision instruments, x-rays, springs, electric contacts, and non-sparking tools.
Bismuth: Bismuth has been used in cosmetics and medicine, and recently has come to replace the more toxic lead in many modern-day applications.
Carbonatite: Carbonatites are the main source of rare earth elements currently.
Chromium: Although not recognized by most civilizations until the 18th century, the Chinese apparently coated their Bronze Age tools in chromium, and two thousand years later artifact weapons are being found from that era without any corrosion.
Cobalt: Helps make superalloys for jets engines, chemicals, permanent magnets, and cemented carbides.
Covellite: This is a rare copper sulfide mineral and was the first discovered to be a natural superconductor. It was first discovered between 1790 and 1829.
Cymophane: Variation of chrysoberyl also called cat’s eye. Although other types of stones can create the cat’s eye form, only this yellow stone is true cat’s eye. The Duke of Connaught gave a ring of cat’s eye as an engagement gift to his fiancé at the end of the 19th century and its value exploded, up to $8000 for a cut stone.
Diamond: Its hardness makes it a capable cutting tool, used in abrasives in cutting and grinding applications. Diamonds are embedded in large steel bits to drill through rock and also in the manufacture for drilling and cutting metal machine parts.
Diatomite: made from diatomaceous earth, filled with the fossils of millions of waterborne hard-shelled algae, this mineral was discovered by Alfred Nobel to be the perfect stable-providing substance for his dynamite back in 1867.
Galena: The natural form of lead sulfide, this mineral was found to be a semiconductor and was used as the crystal in making crystal radio sets that were a popular home hobby during the 1930s.
Garnet: Found in a rainbow of colors, including red, orange, yellow, pink, green, blue, purple, brown, black, and colorless, the rarest is the blue garnet discovered in the 1990s in Madagascar.
Gilsonite: Wire insulation, paints, varnishes, construction materials, asphalt, ink, oilwell drilling, and foundry casting.
Graphite: Although found in ancient history, modern-day applications include its use as a lubricant when “wet” lubricants can’t be used. It is also used in refractory applications when high heat is involved, such as the crucibles used for steel-making. It also makes brake linings and moulds in foundries.
Kaolinite: a layered silicate generally found in the form of clay, usually seen in areas of ancient tropical rainforests. Kaolinite clay is used in ceramics, medicine, coated paper, as a food additive, in toothpaste, a light-diffuser in incandescent lightbulbs, and cosmetics. It is the main component in porcelain and is added as a modifier to paint, rubber, and adhesives. It was the main ingredient in the anti-diarrhea medicine Kaopectate. In recent times a spray of kaolinite is being used on fruits and vegetables to deter insects, and as recent as 2008 the military created QuickClot Combat Gauze from kaolinite-derived infusions.
Kernite: hydrated sodium borate hydroxide, discovered in 1926 and since used to make borax.
Kyanite: A blue silicate mineral commonly mined for refractory and ceramic products, and for use in electric insulators and abrasives.
Lead: Lead is still widespread, easy to extract, and malleable, used as weights, bullets, and shot, in lead-acid batteries, and as a part of solder, pewter, fusible alloys, and radiation shields.
Lewisite: an organoarsenic compound, it was manufactured in the US and Japan as a chemical weapon acting as a blistering agent and lung irritant. Also the processed chemical is odorless, Lewisite is impure and yellow with the scent of geraniums. Although not used in World War I as intended, the “new G-34” was experimented with under the name “the Dew of Death.” Researchers remained interested in it due to its non-flammable nature and it was coded as “M-1” through the second World War, when it was changed to simply “L.” It was deemed obsolete in the US in the 1950s and neutralized, although as recent as 2006 stockpiles of lewisite have been awaiting disposal in China.
Magnesite: Magnesium carbonate, it is used as a slag former to protect the lining of steelmaking furnaces. It is a catalyst and filler for rubber production and fertilizer. It can be burned in the presence of charcoal to make periclase, an important product in refractory materials. It’s a binder in flooring and is used for cupellation (using heat to extract noble metals from base).
Magnetite: an iron oxide of the spinel group and an important source of iron ore. Naturally magnetic, crystals of magnetite are found in the brains of some bees, birds, and fish and it is thought to be used for navigation.
Mercury: There was a mercury fountain at the expo fair in Paris in 1937. It was once used for preserving wood, silvering mirrors, creating daguerreotyping, creating paints, herbicides, cleaning, and road-leveling devices. It is rumored to have been used by the Allies to sabotage German planes by applying a mercury paste to bare aluminum to make it rapidly corrode. It was used to make fishing lures (made illegal in more recent years) and was used in a highly toxic process of felt-hat making, called “carroting,” made illegal in 1941. For years it was used in thermometers, mining operations, amalgam fillings, in the production of chlorine and caustic soda, in medicine (Mercurochrome, vaccinations, and nasal sprays among others), mercury-vapor and fluorescent lamps, and to construct liquid-mirror telescopes. It still has uses, proposed to be a working fluid for cooling systems for spacecraft, mercury-vapor turbines, and a new type of atomic clock. Mercury and all its compounds are toxic.
Mica: Mica has been used for capacitors for radio frequency applications, insulators in high-voltage equipment, and separators for electrical conductors to improve circuit integrity. It is sometimes used instead of glass for panes on greenhouses, is found in mineral cosmetics and toothpastes, and can provide a pearlescent sheen to pigments for paint, plastic containers, and inks. Mica sheets can provide structure for heating wire in heating elements, able to withstand temperatures up to 900 degrees Celsius. Muscovite mica, once used to make windows in Russia, is specifically used as the common substrate for sample preparation for the atomic force microscope, able to view DNA molecules and such. Mariposite, a green form of mica, is used in architecture and for making jewelry.
Minium: Lead Tetroxide. Currently, this red pigment is used in the manufacture of glass, especially lead glass.
Moissonite: Only discovered in 1893, it is used today in nanoscale technology and as a semiconductor. It also sees use today as an alternative to diamonds having a refractive index higher than a diamond and double refraction.
Molybdenite: Alloyed with steel to improve hardness, strength, and resistance to abrasion and corrosion, especially for jet engines, oil refining, lubricants, and as pigmentation. As a pure metal, molybdenum is used as filament supports in lightbulbs because of its high melting point (4730 degrees F).
Monazite: a reddish-brown phosphate mineral containing rare earth metals.
Montmorillonite: a very soft phyllosilicate. The mineral is also known to organize lipids in the body, assembling RNA; this process may have started life on earth.
Natron: Naturally occurring mixture of sodium bicarbonate, it is a flux to solder metals together.
Nepheline Syanite: Used in the construction industry for its strength and weathering capabilities, either whole as a stone or crushed as a component of asphalt or concrete. It lowers the melting temperature of glass and ceramic, and is an alternative to feldspar.
Nickel: Another element, it has been used for thousands of years but was isolated in 1751. It is used in plating, coins, magnets, common utensils, and a catalyst for hydrogenation.
Niobium: A rare earth element used as a carbon stabilizer in stainless steel and niobium carbide is a cutting tool. Niobium-containing steel is used in turbines, and niobium-based alloys are used in reactors. Super alloys have military and aerospace applications.
Olivine: Gem quality is called peridot. It may be used in a cheaper process to sequester carbon dioxide by mineral reactions. It is also used for casting objects in aluminum by the aluminum foundry industry.
Opal: This mineraloid gel has a certain water content—anywhere from 3 to 20%--and come in a range of colors, the most rare being red against black, with white and greens the most common. Opal is one of the minerals that can replace fossils, making for appealing collector’s pieces. In late 2008, NASA announced it discovered opal deposits on Mars. In the Victorian Age established gem dealers spread rumors to the contrary to stop people from buying so many opals.
Orpiment: Monoclinic Arsenic Sulfide. It is presently used in the process of infrared-transmitting glass, oil cloth, linoleum, semiconductors, and photoconductors.
Osmium: an element discovered in 1803 at nearly the same time as platinum, it is alloyed with other metals and used in products with high amounts of wear, such as the tips of fountain pens, instrument pivots, electrical contacts, and phonograph needles until diamonds and sapphires replaced them. Osmium tetroxide has been used in fingerprint detection and for staining fatty tissue in slides. An alloy of platinum with 10% osmium is used in surgical implants like pacemakers and replacement pulmonary valves. Karly Barry Sharpless won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2001 for the Sharpless asymmetric dihydroxylation, which used osmate for the conversion of a double bond into a vicinal diode. It was tested for many possibilities, such as lighting, but was readily replaced by other metals.
Palladium: Discovered in 1803, it quickly found use alongside platinum in a number of areas; over have the world’s supply goes into catalytic converters, and the rest is divvied up among jewelry-making (since 1939), electronic equipment, dentistry, medicine, hydrogen purification, groundwater treatment, and chemical applications. It plays a key role in creating fuel cells. Palladium’s affinity for hydrogen gave it a key role in the Fleischmann-Pons experiment in 1989, also known as cold fusion.
Perlite: Amorphous volcanic glass. Not a real mineral, it has a high water content and can expand readily. Its low density and price allow it to be used in lightweight plaster and mortar, insulation, ceiling tiles, filter aids, hydroponic and horticulture mediums, explosives, and clay additives.
Platinum: Today it is used in catalytic converters, jewelry (the Crown of Elizabeth the Queen Mother is framed with platinum), electronics, chemical processes, electrodes, cancer drugs, oxygen sensors, spark plugs, and turbine engines. “Platinum” has come to be a sign of prestige, above “gold” but below “diamond.”
Pumice: solidified frothy lava composed of pyroclastic glass. Pumice is widely used to make lightweight concrete and insulative breeze blocks. As an abrasive it is found in polishes, erasers, cosmetic exfoliants, and to make stone-washed jeans. It is seen in some toothpastes and heavy-duty hand cleaners (Lava).
Pyrite: Iron sulfide. In the early 20th century it was the mineral detector in radio receivers, more readily available than galena. It was also used commercially in the production of sulfur dioxide (in the paper industry) and sulfuric acid. Despite being called fool’s gold, small amounts of gold are often associated with pyrite and can be extracted.
Pyrolusite: manganese dioxide and a significant source of manganese. Used extensively in the manufacture of alloys, as an oxidizing agent it is used in the preparation of chlorine and disinfectants and in decolorizing glass. It is a coloring agent producing violet, amber, and black colors to glass, pottery, and bricks, and is used in commercial calico printing and dying. Lastly it is used to make green and violet paint.
Quartz: The most abundant mineral in the continental crust (feldspar more common to earth as a whole). By 1900 it was discover quartz developed electrical potential under mechanical stress and it was used in phonograph pickups and as crystal oscillators, today it is seen in all sorts of oscillators, resonators, pressure gauges, and wave stabilizers. Capable of rotating the plane of polarization of light and its transparency in ultraviolet rays, it is also seen in heat lamps, prisms, and spectrographic lenses. It can also see use in glass, paints, abrasives, refractories, and precision instruments.
Rare Earth Elements: Rare earths are used as catalysts in oil refining, catalytic converters, glass-making, and as coloring agents. They are also used to make fiber optics, TV tubes, permanent magnets, high-strength alloys, and synthetic minerals for lasers.
Realgar: Arsenic sulfide mineral. Found in fireworks to make the color white, the poisonous mineral is still used in combination with potassium chlorate for some red explosives. It is used in manufacturing shot, prints, and calicos.
Rhodium: An element discovered in 1803 by the same man that discovered palladium, it is a member of the platinum ores and is used in catalytic converters, hardening alloys, electronics, electroplating for jewelry and optics, and as a top honor award.
Ruby: The famous “Red Stars” mounted on the Kremlin are in fact colored glass.
Ruthenium: An element also from the platinum family used in making catalytic converters and harder alloys. Ruthenium has found use in making superalloys for high-temperature machinery such a jet engine turbine blades.
Rutile: Titanium dioxide. They are used in sunscreens as their nanoparticles absorb UV radiation. They help make titanium and refractory ceramics. Rutile is also widely used in welding electrode coverings.
Sapphire: Although most often seen as a gemstone, it is used also in infrared optical components, watch crystals, high durability windows, and wafers for deposition of semiconductors.
Selenium: An element naturally occurring in a number of forms first discovered in 1817. Since then it has found use in rubber compounding, steel alloying, selenium rectifiers, laser printers and copiers, and glass manufacturing, chemicals, and pigments. Recent holistic health texts touting its use in nutrition have made it very popular in health food stores.
Silver: An element long valued as ornamentation, jewelry, utensils and tableware, and currency. Today it is used in electrical contacts and conductors, mirrors, catalysis of chemicals, photographic film, disinfectants, medicine, and dentistry. It is used in control rods in fission chain reactions for pressurized water nuclear reactors.
Smithsonite: Also called zinc spar, it is zinc carbonate and still used as an astringent, excipient in shampoo, as fireproofing filler, feed additive, as a pigment, in cosmetics and lotions, and in manufacturing porcelain, pottery, and rubber.
Soapstone: A rock rather than a mineral, it is a talc schist and very soft. The 18th century gravestones of the Georgia area were made of soapstone. More recently it is used by welders and fabricators as a marker and for casting objects as a mold. It has been used as an insulator.
Spodumene: a pyroxene mineral of lithium aluminum inosilicate. A source of lithium it comes as yellowish, purple, or lilac kunzite, yellowish- or emerald-green hiddenite, or prismatic crystals. It is an important source of lithium used in ceramics, mobile phones and automotive batteries, medicine, and as a fluxing agent.
Sulfur: Chemical element found in nature. It is used in fertilizers, gunpowder, matches, insecticides and fungicides, the vulcanization of rubber, and as a fixative for film. It is used to make rayon and cellophane, preserve fruits, and bleach paper.
Talc: Hydrated magnesium silicate; it forms soapstone and other compounded rocks. It powder form is used as a cosmetic, a lubricant, a filler in paper manufacture, astringent powders (baby powder), tailor’s chalk and metalworking chalk, a food additive, medicine, ceramics, and may be used in the future as a cement substitute.
Tellurium: one of the rarest elements it is primarily used in alloys and as a semiconductor. It is also seen in ceramics, in chalcogenide glasses, blasting caps, in media discs, phase change memory chips, thermoelectric devices, and cadmium telluride solar panels.
Tin: An element, it is a silvery malleable metal used in numerous alloys and one of the earliest metals known. Tin-plate cans were first manufactured in England in 1812. It was also one of the first superconductors researched.
Torbenite: a radioactive green phosphate and an ore for uranium.
Travertine: A sedimentary rock containing carbonate that was often used as a building material. It is also used for paving patios and garden paths. It is still often selected as a building material for wall cladding, flooring, and elsewhere.
Trona: trisodium hydrogendicarbonate dehydrate; it is an evaporate that is a major source of sodium carbonate in the United States. Trona has been mined elsewhere (Kenya) for upwards of 100 years, but not at the same scale.
Vanadinite: One of the major sources of vanadium, belonging to the apatite group of phosphates.
Vermiculite: a limited expansion clay with mica, it is used frequently in the latter centuries as fire proofing, soil conditioner, insulation, packing material, and blast mitigant, among others.
Wolframite: Iron manganese tungsten, it is highly valued as a source for tungsten. In WWII wolframite was a valuable asset as a munitions metal, including armor-piercing rounds.
Wollastonite: Calcium inosilicate mineral. Usually white, it is used for ceramics, friction products, metalmaking, paint filler, and in plastics.
Zeolites: microporous, aluminosilicate minerals, often seen as commercial absorbents, such as cat litter. Zeolites are also used in oxygen concentrator systems, water purification, catalysts, nuclear waste material removal, and agriculture.
Zincite: naturally occurring mineral of zinc oxide, used as a semiconductor crystal detector.
Zircon: Zirconium silicate. Zirconium is used for fusing platinum and in nuclear reactions.
Next Article: Spiritual and superstitious uses for minerals, rocks, and gems.
