Mithral
Shortly thereafter, Will Turner broke in to have a sword fight with Flynn Rider.
Special materials have a long history in fantasy. Ever since Uranus got the snip from Kronos, adamantine has been kicking ass and taking names. Tolkien gave us mithril (as distinct from D&D’s mithral), and orichalcum has been around since Atlantis sank beneath the waves. (Since then it’s been put to other uses.)
While all of these fictional materials have different properties and special attributes, they still have one thing in common: they exist to make special items. You want the original example? Look no further than the Aeneid. Virgil imagines a team of cyclopes laboring in the forges of Hephaestus. These monsters “busily burnished the aegis Athena wears in her angry moods—a fearsome thing with a surface of gold like scaly snake-skin, and the linked serpents and the Gorgon herself upon the goddess’s breast—a severed head rolling its eyes.” Or in the translation that is slightly cooler than Wikipedia’s:
The rest refresh the scaly snakes that fold
The shield of Pallas, and renew their gold.
Full on the crest the Gorgon’s head they place,
With eyes that roll in death, and with distorted face.
Now you tell me what’s cooler, that or a +1 heavy shield? My point is this: If you’re going to introduce a cool magic item, put a little work into making it a cool magic item. Give it a personality. Give it a history. Give it a pithy engraving on the hilt. Maybe something like, “Whoso flippeth eggs in this skillet is rightwise king of all breakfast.” I’m sure that would make Fighter happy anyway.
ADD SOME NSFW TO YOUR FANTASY! If you’ve ever been curious about that Handbook of Erotic Fantasy banner down at the bottom of the page, then you should check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Twice a month you’ll get to see what the Handbook cast get up to when the lights go out. Adults only, 18+ years of age, etc. etc.
Since Exalted runs on this, I once had a player deliberately mock it.
He bought at character creation a pair of Orichalcum Hearthstone Gauntlets. They were either from the tomb of his First Age Incarnation, part of the treasure trove of artifacts the Circle found on the lost-in-the-Wyld-until-we-found-it flying island that was our home and kicked off our campaign (we were Sky Pirates). Either way, the bracers had a misspelling in their Old Realm inscriptions. Set into one of the two beautiful bracers, amongst the carvings of sunrise and battles was the flowing script meant to say ‘For the Glory of the Unconquered Sun’.
What it actually said was ‘for the glowy of the Unconquered Sun’.
That’s wasn’t a misspelling. It was just written phonetically: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d5/30/b7/d530b71bfdf4987b5a5d7d84c96ff37f.jpg
Fun fact: In Plato’s Critias (one of approximately three ancient Greek sources mentioning orichalcum, and the only one to do so in any detail), orichalcum was just a reddish metal a bit less valuable than gold.
The Romans used the term to refer to a gold-colored copper alloy, possibly a form of brass (though bronze and a copper-gold alloy have been suggested)…and also to refer to chalcopyrite, basically fool’s gold with extra copper.
So having orichalcum be a perfectly mundane metal—while boring—would be perfectly valid.