Seven Days At Sea: Old Salt Candles, A System-Agnostic Magic Item

Old Salt Candles

Description:  Black candles made of a sticky tar-like substance, usually found in a container filled with seawater.  They are readily identifiable by alchemical means but radiate no magic unless lit, at which point they "burn" with a cool and smokeless flame that gives off a harsh, painfully bright white light and a strong aura of elemental and enchantment magic.

Powers:  These items cannot be lit unless they are currently damp with seawater.  Their cold white "flame" cannot start conventional fires (although it can light other Old Salt Candles) and cannot be quenched by any liquid or blown out by winds, no matter how strong.  They do not use oxygen like mundane flames and burn without smoke or dripping tallow, slowly diminishing in size over about the same burn time as a conventional wax candle.  They shed light over five times the normal area for a mundane flame, and can be seen from five times the normal distance.

An Old Salt Candle can only be extinguished by spending a full round snuffing out the "flame" with sand, soil, or simply a tight grip covering the wick - the "flame" being cool and harmless to the touch.  Regular fire will not melt this strange tallow, and they have neutral buoyancy in seawater.  They float in fresh water, which will slowly dissolve them over the course of several days.  

Possible Origins:  The rituals involved in crafting Old Salt Candles are modest hedge magic, but they do require unusual (albeit fairly common) ingredients.  Their wicks must be made of the braided hair of a sailing man, and their tallow must include the ground nail clippings, bones and/or teeth from one who's been to sea in the last fortnight.  Using rendered fat from the corpse of a mariner makes for even larger, brighter candles suitable for lighthouse lamps, although this resource is somewhat harder to come by. 

Complications:  These are a utility item found on many ships as a safety measure for foul weather, but their light sometimes attracts unfriendly denizens of the depths as well as opportunistic sea-reavers.  Because of this and their cost (about fifty times that of normal candles) they are generally burned only in emergencies where a standard flame cannot be kept alight.

Design Commentary:  Handy items for sailing men and not hard to come by near the coast, but adventurers might find them useful for exploring damp underground environs.  Carrying around a small keg of seawater to keep them moist for burning could be a bit of a nuisance, but it does offer an alternative to casting light spells.