Transmuting lead into gold

In the US Nephilim rules, only one way of producing gold via alchemy was published. In Major Arcana, the Emperor Initiate Formula “Lead to Gold” allows the alchemist to transmute lead into gold on a cubic foot basis once per week. The maximum cubic feet is equal to the athanor’s Earth-Ka.

For reference, a cubic foot of gold weighs 546.01 kg. As of this writing, 1 kg of gold is worth ~US$70,000. This would allow the Emperor Initiate to accumulate over US$2 billion per year per Earth-Ka point and easily break the game! (546 kg × $70,000 × 52 weeks = $1,987,440,000)

In the unpublished alchemy draft, the Formula “Ultimate Purification of Gold” allowed the alchemist to produce 1 kg of gold per month. This would allow the alchemist to accumulate ~US$840,000 yearly.

In Enlightened Magic, this was reduced to a much more reasonable 1 oz. gold per week. As of this writing, 1 oz. gold costs ~US$2000. So the alchemist could maintain a salary of ~US$104,000. Pretty good, but not game breaking.

The above calculations assume a perfect success rate, which is not going to be the case. To get an accurate amount, simply multiply the monetary values by the PC’s success rate to get the average salary.

"Purification of Gold" is available to all alchemists, rather than an Emperor Initiate Formula. To give The Emperor an edge, then I would specify that Emperor Initiates learn a special version of the formula that doubles the production to 2 oz. just as if they had rolled a Critical Success.

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