Item Seed: Staff of the Wudwo.

Staff of the Wudwo

Description: An incredibly ancient staff made from black oakwood.  Carbon dating indicates that the Staff of the Wudwo has to be at least six thousand years old.  If there were any decorations on it, they’ve long since been scoured away by time. The same is true for any kind of organized occult or mystical powers; something was done to the Staff of the Wudwo, but by now it’s all just a warm field of general magic.

Powers: somewhere between eight to fifteen thousand people have carried the Staff of the Wudwo throughout history; whoever currently holds the staff can talk to the — spirits? Shades? Ghosts? — of any of them.  The spirits are friendly and helpful, but limited to what they personally know. They also cheerfully but not maliciously refuse to answer any questions about the afterlife.

Keepers of the Staff of the Wudwo tend to be outdoorsy types of a certain type: scouts and hunters, but not pioneers or explorers.  They also live a remarkably long time, with many living into their hundreds. A Keeper usually gets passed the Staff when he or she is in their forties, typically when the previous Keeper feels his or her strength begin to fail.  Evil people can be given the Staff, but they either give it away quickly — or stop being quite so evil.  Or they die and somebody else loots the corpse. The Staff of the Wudwo is one of those mystical artifacts.

It also doesn’t have an agenda, which makes it one of those odd mystical artifacts.  Or else whatever agenda it once had ended up being scoured away, too.  The Staff seems content — it’s mildly sapient, but not very communicative — to be borne, and to help its Keeper to commune with all the other Keepers.  Anything else is up to the current Keeper.

And a Keeper can be a very helpful person to know.  The ability to commune with other Keepers throughout history can provide some very interesting answers to questions, provided the right ones are asked: and since most Keepers have had at least some involvement with magic, they can be tapped for information on lost spells, forgotten rituals, cryptic inscriptions, and so forth.  Of course, helping someone with their inquiries in such a fashion is at the very least a favor; and your typical Keeper usually has a favor to ask in return. But that’s almost a given, surely?