Dwarven Tablet Hammer

Mechanics & Inner Workings

Though there were many variations on the tablet hammer, the most common both in their golden age and today consists of a 10x10 foot writing surface over which are suspended dozens of hammers and chisels held in mechanical arms. A dwarf using the machine will place the stone tablet he plans to write on in one corner, and use a series of holes in the surface and pegs kept near the tablet hammer to mark out spaces for as many copies as they planned to make of that tablet. They would place additional, identical stone tablets into each space and then use the master hammer and marker chisel to begin carving words into their primary tablet. The tablet hammer will use its many duplicate tools to replicate each hammer stroke onto the additional tablets.

Significance

From the moment the Great Library at Tafur was burned to the moment their empire collapsed, the dwarves had unequivocally the most extensive collection of the written word on Khthon. Their lead increased every day for the entirety of that time, even as the numbers of humans skyrocketed and surpassed that of dwarves. The tablet hammers are the cause of that disparity in physical lore. Their ability to produce incredible quantities of copies indistinguishable from the original means that for a long time it was said, only half jokingly, that every dwarven book is only written once.

Item type

Mechanical

Rarity

There was a time when there were more tablet hammers than dwarves in nearly every dwarven city. The number of dwarves has fallen by orders of magnitude since then, but the number of tablet hammers has fallen further still. Most dwarven settlements still maintain one or two, and great cities may retain numbers in the high hundreds or low thousands. For anyone who is not a dwarf or a gnome, the tablet hammers are seen so infrequently that they may well be taken as an artifact of legend, not a real machine, let alone one entirely mundane.

Weight

54,000 lb.s

Dimensions

10x10x20 ft.