> How much does a sheet of rune parchment/vellum/paper actually cost?
The core rules have no answer to that, CoM says that the production cost for 10 sheets is 5, 8 and 3 gp respectively, while the preparation of any paper like material should cost one gp per sheet. What do you think is a fair price? Imo, a one gp basis per sheet of rune parchment/... should be the absolute maximum. Would you add up the costs or neglect the preparation cost for specially crafted media only applying it to unsuited materials?
To create Parchment for inscription of runes is 5gp, Vellum 8gp and Paper 3gp. This does give you 10 sheets of each that you can then prepare (CoM pg 67). The appropriate media that a rune can be prepared on costs 1gp per sheet to prepare (Loot pg 59). So one sheet media that a rune could be inscribed on to, at materials cost price would be:
Paper 13sp per sheet
Parchment 15sp per sheet
Vellum 18sp per sheet
As a rough average for prices, I would then use the x4 mark up (CoM pg 67) to buy ready made media e.g. prepare paper 52sp per blank sheet.
As an example, a base cost Minor Healing with fixed option of reduce bleeding, written on vellum would be roughly 5gp per sheet. Scaled to include all three modifiers and a 10 foot range would be 45gp. This brings up another thread?
Concerning maximum ranks:
The absolute maximum number of in PPs a rune can be inscribed with is 30 as stated in the core rules (p. 130 under the Rune Mastery spell, scaling option # 3). What I look for is how many ranks in the Runes skill and the respective spells he wants to inscribe a character needs to have in order to be able to do so.
A character with the Runes skill and Rune Mastery spell may inscribe a spell of up to 30 PP as long as they have that many ranks and PP to cast the spell. If you can?t cast the spell with the amount of power you want to inscribe the rune with, then you can?t inscribe the rune at that level of power. The number of ranks the character has in the Runes skill doesn?t seem to matter in this respect.
What OB do attack spells other than elemental attacks spells have, when cast from a Battle Rune (+40 
)?
Battle runes are very specific. Are other runes handled in the same way? What about scaled spells? Other runes can hold scaled spells (using Rune Mastery), so what is the OB for these? Do scaling penalties (-5 per scaled pp) apply?
Any attack spell inscribed in a rune (elemental or otherwise) has an OB of +5 per power point spent to create it (Loot pg 59). Elemental runes have an additional +20 OB (Loot pg 60)
As to any opinion as asked for by Duskwalker in the initial post... I don't think Runes is an overpowered or underpowered skill. If a spell caster is able to sit at the camp site and make up an elemental bolt spell have a sleep then be back on board with full PP then use it at a minimal skill level it's all right. I might do a mock up like Bob the Ranger and post up the stat differences however just so people can see the math.
Oh yeah, my apologies for reviving an old post.
