Rod of Seven Parts

ripvanwormer's picture

The Rod of Seven Parts was an artifact created by Vaati, the so-called 'Wind Dukes of Aaqa,' during their war with the entity known as the Queen of Chaos. Legends speak of a massive war between these entities of Law and the Queen of Chaos, sprawling across the Prime+Material and eventually swinging towards Chaos following the Queen's recruitment of a Tanar'ri known as Miska+the+Wolf+Spider to command her forces.

Facing defeat, the Wind Dukes created an artifact of Law which they used to kill or imprison Miska. Upon striking him however the artifact splintered into 7 pieces, each of a progressively longer length, and was scattered across the planes.

Upon finding a part of the rod, the artifact gives the holder information on how to find the next longest piece. Upon finding it, the pieces merge and grant cummulative abilities to the holder, but also a further and stronger compulsion to find the other parts and complete the staff.

The supposed history of the Wind Dukes and Queen of Chaos is problematic though in some ways since none of the supposedly massive conflict is ever mentioned in the histories of the fiends, not a single mention whatsoever of the Queen, Miska, the Wind Dukes, or their war. The Queen herself was not tanar'ri, and seems to have belonged to an obscure race known as the obyriths, and while a subspecies of tanar'ri served as the bulk of her army, she was not involved in any way with the Blood War. Because of this, she may simply have not been relevant to the Blood War historians among the fiends, so distant and irrelevant must her conflict have been (or it may be that the scope and scale of her conflict was dramatically smaller than claimed, and thus essentially not worthy of mention by the fiends in their own chronicles of history).

Sources: 
Dungeon Master's Guide (1st edition)
'Rod of 7 Parts' box set
Book of Artifacts
Arms and Equipment Guide
Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss
Age of Worms
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