Personally in absence of an official ruling I would treat them as at least Fine quality. As a base speed 3 weapon, there's no difference between Fine and Exceptional in terms of combat. As a specially crafted item I would not expect that it's possible to add runes to them.

With a sweep of his hat,

Paul

I had more or less assumed they would be Fine as well. Your comments re: runes is interesting. You may well be correct, but this would be a good point to have addressed officially. It would be a little odd to be able to put runes on a magic wand, staff, weapon or armour, but not on enchanted worn items that fall into those same categories.

This naturally leads into asking whether a player could put runes on any of the named weapons or armour (i.e. Cuirass of the Crusader) in the FiM, if one was obtained. Do these items have fewer rune slots as a result of their enchantments? Are the enchantments on these items entirely different than runes?

Just bumping the above questions

Unless otherwise noted... magical items are of Fine quality...

yes you can use any gauntlet as a weapon

Thanks for the clarification Pedro. Per Hat's question, can runes be applied?

Hello,

Unless an item specifically states that runes may be added to it, an item that already has a magical effect, like the Gauntlets of Force, may NOT have runes placed upon it.

Makes sense, thanks for the clarification.

I was going to add that putting a rune on an enchanted item destroys the original enchantment, but I thought that might just muddy the waters further.

For Spell runes (Forged in Magic, Vol. II, p.12), the description says that the spell is cast as if the bearer possessed a specified quality-based Passive value for Arcanum skill. Also, the spell uses "the bearer's Charisma as their primary casting attribute." Does the caster add his passive Charisma to the listed Arcanum passive value to get the net passive Arcanum value?

Maybe I should just wait and let the stat monkey speak, but I don't think so. The base (fine) version gives you a passive value of 18...equal to a base Tier 1 spell. The next bump is 21 which will cast most (all?) Tier 2 spells (or a tier 1 spell with an adaptation). Finally Legendary runes give a value of 23/24. Good for for a stocked Tier 3 spell. Adding passive charisma would advance everything by a tier (or more) and easily take the spell rune out of line with the comparable powers of other runes.