GHWiki Wrote:Ages ago (certainly before the Twin Cataclysms), the City of the Gods was the heart of a technocracy in what is now Blackmoor. The lords and ladies of the City used a combination of elemental magic and clockwork science to create automatons to perform all menial labor for them. Meanwhile, they devoted their time to art, philosophy, and war.

The original technology and magic of the City of the Gods seems to have been Baklunish in origin, based on secrets given to humans by the efreet.

The end of the age came when the city's automatons were struck down by a plague called "gear madness," or when the city's humanoid inhabitants transformed themselves into constructs themselves. Over the centuries, most of what remained of their civilization was covered by the encroaching Black Ice.

The City of the Gods was originally a fiefdom of some other land. The accessory College of Wizardry suggests that at some point before the City of the Gods was swallowed by the Ice, Blackmoor was claimed by the Baklunish Empire. By the early days of the Baklunish-Suloise Wars, the region now called Blackmoor was independent of the Baklunish and considered an ally of the Suel Imperium. During this period, the Suel emperor sent the people of Blackmoor an artifact known as the Unquenchable Scepter as a gift.

Occasionally, gears and other relics of this lost civilization will turn up in antiquities markets in various modern cities. These are eagerly sought by clockwork mages, gnomes, and dwarves, as well as groups like the Society of the Serpent.

Havard Wrote:The above seems to be based mainly on the Wolfgang Baur adventure.

Quote:By the way, what is the Unquenchable Scepter?
-Havard

ripvanwormer Wrote:

Havard Wrote:The above seems to be based mainly on the Wolfgang Baur adventure.

Yep. It's the only Greyhawk-specific version to receive any detail, though others may argue that the version that Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz played through with Arneson as DM is the "real" one.

Quote:By the way, what is the Unquenchable Scepter?
-Havard

It's one of four artifacts created by the ancient Suloise that bind the powers of the Elemental Princes of Evil. The Unquenchable Scepter is presumably connected to Imix, the wicked Prince of Fire. It was given as a gift by the emperor of the Suloise to the people of the City of the Gods culture and was last seen in the dungeons of Blackmoor Castle.

Since it's Suloise in origin, and probably not in the hands of the Baklunish at any point, it's very unlikely to have been associated with the Rain of Colorless Fire. Neither cataclysm extended that far north.

The Scepter was briefly mentioned in Dragon #294 in "Artifacts of Oerth" by Allan "Grodog" Grohe, but it hasn't been given any real detail. That article concentrated on another of the four elemental artifacts, the Chalice Everlasting, and mentioned the other three only in passing.