Morogyad pieces

The Morogyad pieces are pieces of metal jewellery purported to have been made by the pseudohistorical wizard Morogyad, mostly during his mid-career sojourn in the city of Tyros. They are widely admired for the quality of the workmanship they display, and speculatively attributed with minor magical powers. Little has been (or apparently can be) done to test these powers, however. Thaumatological interest in these pieces arises chiefly because the techniques involved in their manufacture are, so far as contemporary jewellers can tell, essentially impossible, and the metals they are made of often unclassifiable.

Form

Most Morogyad pieces are broaches. Several bangles also exist, as do a number of combs and barrettes. Pendants and signet rings also exist displaying the characteristics of the Morogyad technique, though these are generally agreed to be repurposed pieces, made by hanging modified broaches or combs from chains; such jewellery was not common in Tyros at the time Morogyad is thought to have been living and working there.
The characteristic shape of a Morogyad piece is a quadrilateral, but with no right angles. Morogyad appears to have preferred trapeziums, parallelograms or, less commonly, rhombuses. These shapes are of simple, chunky manufacture, but bear often startlingly extensive, intricate cloisonne work, with plaited wires and staples stretched across the surface or threaded through the basic structure of the piece.
The surface of Morogyad pieces typically shows maritime imagery, typically ornate pictures of sea life - octopuses, rays and starfish are notably over-represented - established via chasing, and waves and water currents picked out in coloured wire. A few pieces depict the keels of ships at the top of the image. This imagery is noted by those who have seen it as startlingly lifelike. The best pieces are in fact wrought in such a way that the pictures seem to animate as the view of the piece is changed in relation to the light sources in which it is examined; anemones wriggle their tentacles, fish advance across the surface of the metal and waves crash against the hulls of ships. These animations, combined with the extreme delicacy of detail, are such that in some pieces it is supposedly possible to see octopuses blink their eyes.
As is usually the case with regard to jewellery the workmanship on the piece renders the question of the bullion value of its metal largely academic, but in the case of the Morogyad pieces this question is abidingly interesting. Most of the pieces are made of either brass or spangold (sometimes the latter is used to plate the former), but others are made of mysterious metals not otherwise known in the Eleven Cities. The metals are coloured black, green, blue or - more rarely - purple, with some pieces exhibiting mottling or the use of different colours to pick out specific features of the image on the broach. A broach known to be in the possession of the Dog of Tyros, for example, appears to be made of spangold, depicting a starfish suckered to a rock under a rippling sea; the starfish itself is spangold, the rock black, and the six layers of ripples around it alternately blue and green.
These unusual colours appear to be inherent to the metal the jewellery is made of. Imitators have sought to emulate this with enamelling, but the original pieces are not apparently not dyed or blued in any way; Morogyad appears to have been able to create new metals with entirely novel colours. Thaumatologists are interested in how he achieved this, though the prestige acquired from owning these artefacts means they are kept very securely by their owners and very, very rarely change hands; opportunities to analyse them are scarce indeed.

Distribution

The largest single trove of Morogyad pieces confirmed to exist belongs to the treasury of the Dog of Tyros. It amounts to three different broaches, a matching pair of hair combs, a large bangle and a pair of triangular earrings speculated to have been made by cutting one small rhomboid piece in half at some point in its history. The reigning Dog and his wife often wear one or another of these pieces at important occasions, notably the reception of foreign dignitaries.
Various wealthy families and trading houses in Tyros also own one or two such pieces each; these individual troves collectively account for perhaps half of all the known pieces. The Tyros Customhouse of the Commercial Guilds also owns at least three pieces, perhaps more. These pieces tend only to be worn at important social occasions, when the owner's prestige needs to be very clearly established. This has led commentators from outside Tyros to describe the social season of the city as "the constellation of starfish."
A goodly minority of the known Morogyad pieces are also held by wealthy and well-to-do people and institutions in the other insular cities, Dypholyos and Dyqamay. The Alchemist's Guild of Dypholyos, for example, is known to possess at least three signet rings exhibiting clear signs of having been made from repurposed Morogyad pieces, though slightly unusual ones (the pictorial content is of flames rather than water). Three impressive Morogyad pieces - a broach and a matching pair of bangles - are in the possession of the Jarwenyod family of Oluz and are typically worn at every possible opportunity while the Red Guard of Oluz handle security.
No overall catalogue of Morogyad pieces is known to exist but it is thought that as many as sixty or seventy of them exist worldwide.

Artistic context

It is generally thought that attempts to imitate the coloured and iridescent effects of the Morogyad pieces were a spur to the popularity of cloissone work and enamelling in the insular cities. Morogyad did not invent this tradition; these artistic techniques were already practised in these cities at around the time he is generally agreed to have been working in Tyros. The dominant theory is in fact that the Morogyad pieces represent his magically-empowered experiments at aping the artistic traditions of his adopted home. Those experiments do, however, seem to have inspired less gifted artisans to develop the techniques to higher degrees, producing a greater variety of work that fetched higher prices.
It would not be surprising for Morogyad to have ventured into this artistic field. He is after all reputed to have been the son of Zargyod, a deity who appears to have arisen in part as a tutelary god associated with ornamented metal medallions. Such medallions were part of the ritual garb of Zargyod's pre-Wesmodian clerisy and remain popular among senior members of the Commercial Guilds. Morogyad may well have been moved to create broaches in honour of his purported father. Arguing against this notion, however, is the fact that the medallions associated with Zargyod are always circular, at least in terms of their basic shape. Although most Morogyad pieces exhibit rounded corners and edges, they are always polygonal.

Thaumatological interest

The fact that a relatively well-documented historical wizard, purported to be a son of Zargyod, took to manufacturing broaches leads to broad speculation that these pieces are themselves magically significant, being protective amulets or good-luck charms of some sort. Study of this point revolves around two key avenues of inquiry; statistical examination of the fortunes of those known to own and wear Morogyad pieces, and analysis of the pieces themselves.
The statistical inquiry is so far largely vestigial, partly due to a paucity of contemporary suggestions it might be a valuable thing to do. Hephryan of Tyros spends much of his biography of Morogyad discussing this jewellery, going so far as to clearly describe the combs currently owned by the Dog of Tyros, but never describes it as anything more than a noble and ennobling artistic tradition. The notion that the Morogyad pieces might possess magical properties is briefly attested in only one pre-Wesmodian source, Typhan of Ramoros's History of Morogyad, where they are described as providing benefits to those who wore them in business dealings. The Pholyan thaumatologists Ryl Rayan Kol and Selph Taldume address this possibility in their book Footsteps of Morogyad, arguing to the contrary that any such effect might well be due to the fact that these jewels tend to be owned by wealthy and reputable individuals who would carry great clout into such negotiations. Kol and Taldume's book is in part a critique of the prominence of Morogyad and his ideas in modern thaumatology, however, advancing the notion that he may in fact be a composite historical character combining elements of two or more poorly-documented historical wizards. It may be that this manifesto has led them to be unduly dismissive of certain aspects of his attributed magic.
The Morogyad pieces are also of interest to thaumatologists in that it is essentially impossible to tell what they are actually made of. The pieces are clearly metal, occasionally ornamented with small gems, but although many are clearly based on brass or spangold most also contain components of unknown alloys about which no modern metallurgist or jeweller can provide anything but the broadest speculation. The implication is that Morogyad was able to either create alloys via unknown means - presumably magical - or perhaps force entirely novel materials into existence by sheer force of magical talent. The precise properties of these metals are unknown and, given the apparently magical origin, of great interest to researchers, as is the possibility that analysis of the pieces might allow skilled researchers to reverse-engineer such materials themselves. The Alchemist's Guild of Dypholyos is widely believed to be involved in this process or to have based their skills on what they have already learned from it. 
For anybody else to replicate that research - assuming this is what took place - would however require open access to the pieces themselves, and perhaps license to damage or take samples from them. Although it seems to be physically possible to damage these pieces - the earrings owned by the Dog of Tyros are worth recalling here - but the owners seldom allow access to them, and nobody has any record of any being sold.