> I don't know of any tribe having a reputation for this, but my
> Gustbran-PC surely wants to know this...
One of the best-known mining towns in Dragon Pass is Tink, out in the dragonewt wilds, and hideout for Forang Farosh. They have access to what remains of a bronze god skeleton. Probably accessible only through tunnels, or the deposits would have been exploited by now.
I have no idea who manages this mining enterprise - an independant clan, a Lunar merchant (nowadays), a guild installed by Prince Sartar and Wilms?
Since Tink is within dragonewt hunting lands, no agriculture or herding has supplemented the mining activities.
Metal can be found as metal - godbones or fragments thereof, or semi-rotten remnants of battles in the Dragonkill War - or as ore. In Glorantha, metal tarnishes and rusts, so ores do exist. Real World ores require various degrees of treatments before you gain raw metal (which still has to be refined). Copper can be obtained by smelting Malachite or similar ores, whereas lead and iron require coal to form the elemental metal. IMO Glorantha works similar - copper and bronze can be produced from the ores without too much use of ore treatment, iron can't, which is why only the Mostali (and some TEB) know how to refine iron ore.
Once you have the raw metal (or alloy, if you mix appropriate ores before the smelting), backbreaking work to get rid of impurities on the anvil or by re-casting follows.
Theoretically it should be possible to cast bronze swords in moulds and then only hammer out the edges. Is that part of what the Machine City did?
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